Voice Overs

Impressive. That worked very nicely!

 

Can you try again with Bobh Dearg? Always wondered how that's meant to sound

 

The AI speech is very nice really, if I was told it's a real person speaking, I would totally believe.

But as already mentioned, there's no nuances and acting.. making for a "Discovery Channel documentary on trees" kind of style which may not be fitting for the game's setting.

 

Wow, that is actually quite impressive! It really does help to bring the game world to life. The NPCs currently feel like mannequins with a few animations. Voice acting will help to give them real personality. SOTA is really no different than any other product a company would bring to market. You first have to make sure your product measures up to other products. In a world of smartphones, you won't get rich selling flip phones. AI voice overs is a way to help SOTA favorably compare to the competition. Even with a commercial license, it would be worth the few grand. A lack of voice overs reinforces the belief that SOTA is in beta and that maybe it won't ever get voice overs because it is in maintenance mode. Here is THE perfect solution to that.

 

I wouldn't say that it's a good solution, let alone perfect.

I think one could make the case, that, on an objective technological level, it's an improvement, but that's not how it'd be received. If I got an Audible audio book, and it turns out to be a bunch of text-to-speech (as opposed to being actually voice-acted), I'd probably ask for a refund. Text-to-speech is heavily associated with off-putting cheap janky videos or games, or Tik-tok videos with bad voice overs. Often, it is used as a pre-voice-acting deevlopment phase during game development.

So I agree, it'd help make the game not feel like it's in beta anymore. It'd make it feel like it was pre-alpha.

Having text-and-cinematic presentation doesn't necessarily have to feel cheap. What makes VO or text-and-cinematic approaches feel cheap, is there's little effort put into them.



What's largely missing from the existing quests and dialog is.... any kind of polish or presentation consideration in any way, shape or form. You just stand there staring at some NPC and hyperlinked text comes and goes from a small box, and occasionally some generic emote happens where the NPC inexplicably waiving their arms around. The camera doesn't move. There's no attempts at using sound to convey any mood or ambience.

It's no secret that I've been a critic of the game development for awhile, so I have to stick to the facts. But I guarantee you, in a Cassandra-esque way, that if they pull the trigger on this, I will be grabbing some popcorn.

• The media, if they pay any attention at all, will be hyperROFLing.
  
• It'd get obnoxious, fast.
• People will ask for an option to opt-out, and most will mute it before too long.
  
• And there'll be an opportunity cost, as the time and effort could have gone into something more effective.

 

You are saying that no voice over is better than AI generated voice overs or community generated voice overs? You would rather not have them at all, unless they are AAA quality? That seems unreasonable considering you won't ever get the professionally voice-acted voice-overs that you want. The game doesn't have the budget for that. So it is best to think of creative ways to enhance the game. The clip that craftymethod provided sounded very good to me. Of course you would change the voice for different characters. And it wouldn't always have to be the entire dialogue. It could just be the first sentence or two. Or something generic along the lines of "Hey, over here!". If Catnip worked closely with a provider to make sure the sound is as good as it can be, I could see SOTA claiming to be the first game to be completely voiced by AI. It would at least generate interest and curiosity. Forget NFTs, I think AI is the future of gaming. Voice overs, quests, digital art and 3D assets, etc. I would start leveraging AI.

 

Personally, yes. I've played games where the voicing sounds generic and sounds like it was recorded in a lunch box and it's bad. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of reading either, but bad voicing just pulls you right out of the game. Sometimes not having something is better than having it halfway done. Just my opinion on it though.

 

If the spirit of the game is a sandbox, then I believe all options should be available and considered.

Aside from the DayZ localised element of live player speech (which would bring a new layer to sound design not to the detriment (can always mute!)

As for the written content, we are going to lift text anyway and paste them into audio generators, it would just be nice to have a quick copy to clipboard button or conservationalist owners to have the ability to select a preferred voice pack or upload their own performance soemhow.

Text to speech if its a bit generic should be left to toggle by those who refuse to take advantage of it, but I believe a button to push text to audio would really be interesting, especially for anyone who wants to read books and books worth of content while they are out in RL doing other things even just ducking away to the kitchen to wash the dishes. etc.

Audio design is a major layer of the multimedia experience so what a great place to turn to for impactful development of the product as mentioned above, in a way that would truly bring the Novian world to life in an incredibly impactful and positive way.

We should go see if there is talk on the Inky forums etc about the coming usage of such tech in inky scripts, it would be quite interesting to see if there is already talk about implementing specific voices into peoples scripts.

Perhaps these discussions will force the developers to reexamine why the audible sound design of at least player > player interaction was dismissed so this talk can only be productive IMO.

Also, there is a useability aspect people might not consider... especially those not profficiant at reading large bodies of text on screens, or even those with waning eyesight!. Regardless of the voicepack of AI, if its reasonable enough listening to something a few times is far easier at least for me than reading it 3 times. I do read, but when it comes to following lore and character and place names I find the spoken word far more memorable.

Good discussions.

Also, the audio file I posted may have sounded a little out of place because almost every word was created by AI.

I chose to compose via AI to showcase the power of the new tech. My second attempt which I ran out of trial time with was from a player event and I was a little sad i forgot to save it before I was unable to generate the audio preview

 

Yes, unambiguously. That's the problem of the uncanny valley. Being on one side is ok. Being on the other is better. But what you don't want to make the leap unless you're confident you can land on the other side. This isn't a linear progression, where incrementally at every step, the game is simply better than it was.

Here's a visual aide:

It's not unreasonable.

The reason Zelda64 work is because it's well done. The reason why AAA voice-acted games work is because they're well done. The point is, as you say, they don't have the budget or time to do it well. Instead, they'd end up with a half-assed janky solution.

I provided a hint at this too, but the way. But whatever solution it is, needs to be well done, else it will leave the game in a worse state. The game is rife with abandoned half-complete uninspired solutions or attempts.

And now we're describing a jank, half-assed uninspired solution.

Maybe in the future, but utilizing bleeding-edge technology is an antipattern for a reason.

 

I agree with oplek here...
People seem to think "adding is always better than not adding".
You can and will worsen a product's quality if you don't consider thoroughly every increment. If it's unfeasible to reach the required level of quality, maybe you'll solve the problem by just not implementing anything.

 

Everyone, but certainly not Barugon, seems to be against the voice-overs. I guess the people have spoken. I would like to say that everyone is assuming the voice-overs would turn out awful, even before trying. AI voice-overs was one option, with community provided voice-overs as another option. This is the sort of thing a QA or DEV server was made for. Try it out in a few places, see if Catnip can work the kinks out, and then make a broader decision.

I can see some of the issues Catnip faces. Catnip is already battling negativity from the media at large and they certainly wouldn't want their current players turning negative too. It leaves Catnip in the position of not wanting to try new things, for fear that they won't get it perfect the first time and anger players. We could apply the same logic to any aspect of the game. Don't mess with the economy because we might make it worse. Don't try to improve PvP because you might make it worse. Don't work on the quest lines, because you might make them worse. I agree no voice-overs would be better than bad voice-overs, but the sample I heard earlier in this thread was pretty good to me.

 

Dito. Voice-overs spoken by good voice actors would be great. Voice spoken by an AI or players who read the text like my cars navigation device without any change of tone or speed or pronounciation would be worse than no voice-overs.

 

I fixed it.