Fully Voiced NPCs

I really hope the game's NPCs will be fully voiced. Who is with me on this one?

 

I'm kinda torn on this. It would be very nice to see.. err hear but are some major challenges that can with this.

First, the actual voice acting. If HAS to be good. Nothing would ruin the benefit of having fully voiced NPCs than lousy voice acting. Can we say Elder Scrolls anyone? Now I'm a big ES fan and have been since Morrowind. I love how it's fully voice but every single time a line comes up that is poorly done I cringe. I think something like "why couldn't they have put more effort into this line? It really ruins the scene". Bad voice acting can really destroy your suspension of disbelief.

This leads to the 2nd problem. For a game like SotA with a huge world and no doubt hundreds of NPCs with thousands of lines.. it's almost impossible to avoid some measure of fatigue and thus bad voice acting. It's extremely impractical also to have a different voice actor per NPC.. so the same small group of actors.. much like in ES games, will be delivering lines for dozens of different NPCs each. If I didn't understand this it would be even harder for me to accept.

I have a pretty good ear and a decent memory. When the same guy voices every line spoken by any orc as well as a have dozen Nords on top of a couple other important NPCs I just have to bow my head and say "that's ok I understand. I appreciate your efforts."

It's a kind of a love/hate thing for me but honestly I don't feel like it's appropriate for SotA. Not because of the risk of bad voice acting, but because it would introduce a greater challenge. Adding new content.

If the commitment is made to fully voice every NPC.. then every time new dialogue is added to the game, that dialogue has to be voiced.. and that recorded audio has to be downloaded. It would be extremely stifling to have that limitation.

Honestly, I don't mind not having audio. The mind has a habit of filling in the blanks and imagination can take over here. Then again, I'm also pretty old school.. not quite as old school as RG but I can still remember text adventure games which I was too young to really be very good at.

 

I agree with you alot on your point! But we are in an age where games need voice acting! Long past are the days of reading walls of text, i want to listen and not read. THAT is was tears the player out of the suspension of disbelief. And I never had a problem with the voice acting in ES, but thats just me.

 

So when a character morns the loss of their husband who's just been killed an a near apathetic voice, that doesn't bother you at all?

I disgree though. Game development should never be dictated by what you can do with media. Only one thing makes a game truly great and that's game play. A lot of developers spend far too much time making a game pretty and sounding nice and not enough time making the game fun to play. Even voice acting is secondary.

It's the fact that voice acting could limit new dialogue being added that makes me think we won't be seeing it though. If I was on the team I'd be grinding my teeth on the issue going.. you know I'd really like to but.. no. I'd rather have complete freedom to patch in new content with new dialogue than to have to get a voice actor or worse.. a specific voice actor to act out new lines before it can be released.

Games need in this age is the same thing they've always needed. Great gameplay. Gameplay is king. Voice acting is nice but it only contributes to immersion. It's a supporting role in development only and offers gameplay nothing.

 

King's Quest V is a perfect example of a game that was ruined by voice acting. I had the original floppy version so I thought it was amazing. My friend got the CD version and he was subjected to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p30heMs8UU

If they're going to do voices, they need to be great.

 

For me rich, and more deep text > less text & voice acting (Skyrim).

 

I think it would cost just too much money to do. It takes so much more time and money just to do mediocre voice acting let alone superb. Also, there's the problem of the story changing and growing. If any changes need to be made to a storyline or some mistake was made, rerecording the dialogue costs just as much as doing it the first time.

Text is as simple as getting good writers to create a mass of content and then picking out which storylines you want to explore. The ideas get drafted into dialogue, its goes through multiple drafts and edits. It gets approved and its done. It can be implemented in less than a day if absolutely needed rather numerous days with voice acting.

 

Voice is good, without too much repetition and using same voice for different characters.

 

Far too expensive, and they'd have to constantly hire more and more voice actors as the game progresses. Plus, if you decide to change or alter an NPCs dialogue (maybe they said the wrong thing) you have to re-hire that voice actor just to come in and fix it.

There's nothing wrong with quips here and there but please, please don't waste money on voicing a million of words of dialogue.

 

A random voice actor that came in from the vast internet. There are plenty of voice actors who enjoy working on projects for free. It's where you look good sirs.

Of all my local hangouts, for the most professional to throw voices into the resource pool, might I suggest the "Voice Acting Alliance"?

 

This would be a pain to localize. Even if you got good talent in English. I know I've downloaded Japanese or other languages pack before because you'd rather listed to better actors - you can still read the text.

 

While voice acting is great, im with others.

Even if you got people to do it free such as.. Well us?

The time involved for team is more cost.

Give voice acting to certain major npc's sure.

Lord british, iolo, etc. and in cinematic scenes. But for the ordinary folk, skip it. Its filler and just takes time away from other, more important things. I almost always skip through voice acting for dialogue that is not major to the story.

 

I hate voice acting. Personally, I feel like it has really hurt the game industry. I loved RPGs as a kid. I'm a very fast reader and don't need to wait through someone sluggishly read through everything. As a big JRPG fan too, basically around Final Fantasy X in the PS2 era, annoying voice actors really hurt the games for me. When a character has an annoying squealing voice or mannerisms, I really start to hate them haha.

A few intro cutscenes or something would be fine, but I do not want to have to listen to a ton of voiced scenes where most people will be mashing through them anyways. Just take SWTOR for instance... yeah, a lot of people probably enjoyed the personalized voiced stories, but I guarantee thousands more probably mashed through them. It's a waste of money that could be spent elsewhere (like making the game more massively multiplayer for god's sake!) =)

 

To do voice acting right, they would need to pay top voice acting. Some games do it really well, some don't. IMHO it shouldn't be in Ultima. They tried it in U9 and it was a disaster. I don't know if EA didn't give them the budget for talent or what but that was some of the worst voice acting ever in games. (See Spoony's review of U9 for a laugh)