Poll: Should games have less voice acting.

kebab4you

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It depends on what kind of game you´re making, say a horror game, by nature a horror game does not need that much voice acting since it´s better of trying to spoke you with it´s environment.
On the other side, an First Person Perspective RPG where you interact directly with other characters I find it very immersion breaking when they don't speak with you.
 

The_Echo

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Troublesome Lagomorph said:
RPGs, yes. It would probably allow for more routes and choices, as they wouldn't have to record a response for every route or choice.
Not that choice needs to exist in any given game. Linear storytelling is just fine.

From my personal experience, it really, really depends on the game. For example, I think Cave Story would be awful with voice acting. And there's no way in hell I'd read all the way through Skyrim.
 

Seventh Actuality

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Voice acting probably represents an utterly minescule portion of a game's budget, and any extra resources wouldn't be sufficient to make a difference anywhere that really needed them.

In story-based games (BioWare RPGs, HL2 and suchlike) voice acting plays a huge part in bringing characters to life. In strictly action games, you need voice actors because the audience isn't going to want to be reading text at all. The number of games that are actually well-suited to being without voice actors is actually really narrow; think games like Limbo, minimalistic indie stuff or lower-budget, more cartoonish RPGs.

Imagine Skyrim without voice acting. A big, detailed, realistic world...populated by mutes. It wouldn't work, because every other facet of the game calls for voice acting, and the same is true for most modern games.
 

Bocaj2000

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Wow, this question is fucking stupid. I can't believe that this is actually a discussion. Adding something to a game is NEVER a detriment to it.
 

G-Force

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Zachary Amaranth said:
zauxz said:
Absolutely not. Good voice acting is vital to immersion.
I'm sorry, but there were immserive TEXT BASED games.

Don't be ridiculous. It's not vital. That's like saying colour film is vital to good storytelling.
I do think good voice acting can elevate a game experience. I really don't think Bastion would be as enjoyable without the narrator.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5FuG0H3x2k
 
Sep 14, 2009
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nahh, maybe they can cut down on it a tad but cutscenes are absolute garbage without voices mostly, so that ruins that...

plus voices do add immersion imo

not saying it is DETRIMENTAL to have it, but it's very nice.
 

omicron1

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I like the idea of having "foreign" voice acting - a la simlish - especially for fantasy/RPG titles. It would increase realism, decrease the drain on the budget, and increase the possible storyline creativity available.

Barring that, someone needs to create a good system to dynamically modify voices in real time - creating a host of different timbres and pitches from a single voice clip. Do this well enough, and one could save a lot of space, time, and money...
 

Professor James

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Bocaj2000 said:
Wow, this question is fucking stupid. I can't believe that this is actually a discussion. Adding something to a game is NEVER a detriment to it.
Many people would disagree with you. For one thing, some people hate things like QTEs and a lot of people disliked the boss battles in DE:HR. In addition, adding things cost time and resources.
 

BristolBerserker

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Soooooooooooo I have to choose between text based speech and Patrick Stewart taking me to a dream world of magic in Oblivion. I think i know which one I prefer.
 

Dr Pussymagnet

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Professor James said:
Bocaj2000 said:
Wow, this question is fucking stupid. I can't believe that this is actually a discussion. Adding something to a game is NEVER a detriment to it.
Many people would disagree with you. For one thing, some people hate things like QTEs and a lot of people disliked the boss battles in DE:HR. In addition, adding things cost time and resources.
What the hell kind of argument is that.

Maybe developers just shouldn't make games anymore, they cost time and resources.
 

WanderingFool

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Professor James said:
If games had less voice acting, that would mean more time and resources too spend on the game. I'm not saying every game shouldn't have voice acting. But do you think that some modern games shouldn't have voice acting so they can focus more on polishing and extending the game.
Thats crap. A game removing voice acting to add its resources to other parts of the game will not make that game better; it will probably not make it worse either, it just means there is no voice acting in that game.

There are games that need, I repeat NEED (!!!) voice acting, and some that can do without. As I see it, a game like NeverWinter Nights, which had lots of conversations and dialoge choices would be a ***** to VA all that, so alot of the special characters had voices so you could associate a tone and deaner with them. the rest was just text. With a game like Zelda (this is my personal opinion), it could use voice acting since there is little choice in dialoge option. Removing voice acting wont allow the developer to improve other aspects of the game, it just means there is more text... which in some games would be much worse.
 

anian

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Maybe resources to some degree, even though I don't think voice actors (that are not celebrities) are that expensive, but definetly not that much time since it's not actually connected that much to either gameplay, graphics and even connection to aniamtion is seldom (I guess motion capture would be the connection).

If anything, highly detailed graphics are to blame (not graphics in general though), concentration on them makes games mostly linear and restricted.

Voice acting maybe can be offputting if it's bad, but the immersion it gives is not really commaparable to just text, I mean when there's music but not speech, things just seem weird to me.
 
Dec 27, 2010
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It depends on what industry we're talking about. Triple-A devs have no excuse, but the indies can get away with it if the writings good.
 

RuralGamer

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Bad voice acting only brings down a game if the game itself is terrible/mediocre; see Men of War: Assault Squad, which has some of the most diabolical voice-acting I've seen for a while (hear the British announcer and cringe), yet it isn't that bad in context. Voice acting in the Stalker games was 90% terrible, but that didn't bring the games down for me. Ultimately its not how important one element is for me, its about how the elements balance and how the system is executed.
 

Seventh Actuality

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gmaverick019 said:
nahh, maybe they can cut down on it a tad but cutscenes are absolute garbage without voices mostly, so that ruins that...
But CUTSCENES ARE THE DEVIL, remember? Half Life 2 said so!
 

Gottesstrafe

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You mean we should forgo the added depth and immersion a good voice actor could bring to a character or game in favor of bland text screens? I suppose developers could also save plenty of time and resources for game development by harkening back to the Amiga and Commodore 64 days and do without story lines or dialogue altogether in favor of putting it in a little booklet that comes with the game? Every time an important plot point comes up the game could pause and redirect you to a page number you could look at in the booklet. Maybe they could also just skip all the time and effort placed in writing and producing musical scores for games and just do the entire thing as a short 8-bit tune instead? I'm sure if you were to compare the amount of time and money spent in studio expenses the soundtrack would take up far more than the voice acting. I mean, it's the new HD graphics in games nowadays that makes them fun and interesting to play right? You could forego a little immersion if it means that the coffee table your character sits at in the intro movie or chest high wall they duck behind in game looks so real you could touch it, right?
 

tippy2k2

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The only type of game that I think less voice acting works is RPG's. Seriously, think of any other genre and try to figure out how that would work...

Even RPG's, I would take a well done voice-actor over having to read everything. Would an epic RPG like Final Fantasy work as well as a text-based story? Voice acting is the same as any other asset to your game: Good will draw you in, bad will take you out.

I can't think of a single argument why you would want to remove voice acting from games. Your argument of "It's assets that could go into other parts" just doesn't make sense. Throwing more money into a different department is not necessarily going to make the game better.
 

The Wykydtron

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Sep 23, 2010
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It really depends on the game, i mean, imagine how difficult and most probably useless it would be to VA all the Ace Attorney games for example.

If you set out to make a text based game you don't VA it, imagine if you picked a shitty voice for the main character, that's what half of a potential fanbase lost? Plus the cost of hiring VAs etc etc

On the other hand imagine if Portal/Portal 2 didn't VA their characters and just shoved some subtitles out there. That would be a terrible idea, you can't just put [snark][/snark] in the subtitles to communicate GLaDOS' character

So yeah game by game basis kthx