I've been expressin' my 'pinion round these parts longr'n you've been spittin'. You wanna draw down? Then you draw down boy!DaOysterboy said:
Voice vs. Choice
- Thread starter Shamus Young
- Start date
I can see the merit of the point being made. I like voice acting but I also like being given a choice in RPG's; afterall, that is a significant portion of what's implied by the genre title. I also can agree that as time has progressed, RPGs have gotten, in a word, simpler. Fallout is an excellent example. In the race to the end of the first game you could arrive at one of any of more than a hundred thousand endings. Fallout 2 raised the bar higher if I'm not mistaken. Fallout 3 reduced it dramatically to only a few thousand possible outcomes. What the games gained in world immersion, they lost in depth of choice.
I cannot however say for certain that this correlation is, in fact, the cause of this trend. It seems as reasonable as anything else. Personally, I wouldn't mind doing more reading in games. I don't think I would have lost much in Dragon Age Origins if all non-party voice acting was removed.
I cannot however say for certain that this correlation is, in fact, the cause of this trend. It seems as reasonable as anything else. Personally, I wouldn't mind doing more reading in games. I don't think I would have lost much in Dragon Age Origins if all non-party voice acting was removed.
Granted, I didn't really like the same voice saying "hello outlander" every time I turned a corner, but my point being that I think voice acting "*gasp* he's that wanted criminal, the watch are always chasing after" every time I try to see if anyone knows anything UNIQUE about the Grey Fox was immersion breaking for me. I'll get strung up for saying this probably, but I thought as far as background noise goes, you can still get away with the Baldur's Gate method of a looping "chatter" track with a few pre-programmed lines that come at random for variety. Incidentally, BG had some absolute GEMS hidden if you were listening closely. *Drunken slur* "In fact I've been with your wife, you remember that?"Ravek said:
Okay, I'm sort of with you on how the constraints of voice acting might limit gameplay, but the contention that most of us just read the dialog and jam on the skip button? Who the hell are you observing?!
Whenever anyone does that ever I get the sudden urge to violently smack them - the only reason you skip things is if you
That's it, doing it for any other reason is heresy. Heresy I say!
Whenever anyone does that ever I get the sudden urge to violently smack them - the only reason you skip things is if you
- A) Have heard them before and this is a repeating line in the flowchart of conversations.
or
B) The line is in some non-language like in Kotor or Jade Empire, where you're reading the sub-titles anyways because they're speaking gibberish.
That's it, doing it for any other reason is heresy. Heresy I say!
Yes and no - I've heard the voice acting in every Bethsada game since Morrowind, but I haven't heard all the voice acting as I haven't actually ever gotten around to finishing Fallout 3 or Oblivion. I know why you're bringing it up, but I don't skip that either, even though there's like 4 voice actors doing all the voices - I listed the only valid exceptions for skipping voiced dialog already. All else is heretical, thus speaketh Gildan.Flying Dagger said:
Interesting theory, Shamus. That probably goes a long way to explain it. Videogames' drive to techinically excel can sometimes hamper its drive to become better on its own merits. I was recently thinking of how Scott McCloud's theory of creative, um, creation applies to videogames, and I realized most games focus too much on the 'surface', allowing it to wither the rest of the game. It's mostly about graphics, but voice acting is also something else that adds needless extra work (as you said, once a character speaks once, you'll hear his voice for the rest of the game).
Interesting article. I guess it depends on the game because, for me at least, I don't think RPG's like Mass Effect would be even half as enjoyable were it not for the phenomenal voice acting. Sure, it limits choice but the immersion levels skyrocket and it really feels like I'm part of a living universe. Sure, there are a few poorly delivered lines here and there, but I honestly don't think characters like Tali would have been nearly as appealing were it not for the incredible acting.
That's just my personal preference though; voice acting adds immersion.
That's just my personal preference though; voice acting adds immersion.
We don't take kindly to your kind 'round these parts.slkdjfh said:
Anyway, Shamus, I quite agree. I hear Baldur's Gate whisper it's sirens song from the shelf even now.
you just heap piles of bile and hate on the game, morrowind was better in every buggering way than oblivion... except foliage. Cyrodil was very generic very samey and not very well populated. How many major cities are in oblivion? 5? 6? including the one that gets destroyed. morrowind had tel mora, sadrith mora, gnisis, balmora, ald ruhn, vicec, ebonheart, and thats without the two exspansion packs. the world was big and had everything from ash deserts to rolling feilds to moutainous valleys to swampy rainforest. to quote a great reveiwer "oblivion might as take place in the same fucking meadow."
Choices were very mixed and complex and the characters still had room for great depth. And the voice acting in morrowind was short and help the little people greet you, while main characters had lines of dialog that were very well done. and one thing i like alot about text screens that they can't do anymore without. you could have long complex conversations and if they refered to something that you talked about before you could go back and read it and make an informed choice. you can't scroll backwards in fallout and oblivion you hear/read it once and hope it sticks, so characters come off alot shallower because you need to remember everything the character said.
i don't maybe i'm just a old man.
Choices were very mixed and complex and the characters still had room for great depth. And the voice acting in morrowind was short and help the little people greet you, while main characters had lines of dialog that were very well done. and one thing i like alot about text screens that they can't do anymore without. you could have long complex conversations and if they refered to something that you talked about before you could go back and read it and make an informed choice. you can't scroll backwards in fallout and oblivion you hear/read it once and hope it sticks, so characters come off alot shallower because you need to remember everything the character said.
i don't maybe i'm just a old man.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. You have to either jump Three-Dog's link in the main quest chain, or do it for him. That's it. You can't intimidate him or bribe him or hack a terminal for the same information or anything, it's all-or-nothing. And the information he gives isn't even that accurate or necessary! At least with Moriarty, you could steal the information from him or pay for it. And it feels like Bethesda put in the alternative "weapons cache" reward as an afterthought, so that there'd still be a reason for Three-Dogs dialog, since it's possible to find the weapons cache without him altogether.Centrophy said:
Come to think of it, if you've already played through the game once and know where your dad is, you can skip the main quest chain almost entirely. On my first playthrough, I found Valut 112 by accident, which made everything that leads up to it nonsensical. That's not the same thing as offering quest choices, it just means that you can jump in whenever if you just so happen to stumble across a relevant location.
If RPGs are going to have player-driven stories, then we should see more of what Shamus was talking about with his King Bob example: There is a problem in the world, you're an agent who can solve it, you decide how to solve it based on your character build, the world is forever altered based on how you solved it. Looking at Fallout 3, NOTHING changes. It's a gigantic railroad that you can hop on and off of at leisure. One way or another, the story will always bottleneck at the same points: the dish is replaced. Why can you threaten to destroy it and leverage the information out of Three Dog that way? Nope. If you're a speechy type character, you can get an extra reward, but, other than that, it's all the same.
I find myself skipping most voice acting in games because of "Bethesda Syndrome" as I like to call it. 4 voice actors for 6 billion people, sigh.
I have to agree about Morrowind, up until you mentioned that I always remembered it as fully voiced. But sure enough I start it up and get text. Interesting.
I have to agree about Morrowind, up until you mentioned that I always remembered it as fully voiced. But sure enough I start it up and get text. Interesting.
No mention of Arcanum... I mean, Planescape: Torment I liked more but when it comes to choice in an RPG the only games that really gets close to Arcanum are the first two Fallouts...
I think Noveria in the first Mass Effect is the best counterexample of this. There are so many ways to approach the various segments of that mission that even after 6-7 playthroughs I'm finding new nuggets of content. I can think of over six ways to get a garage pass and five to get through Peak 15.
In Dragon Age, Redcliffe is another good example, if you're a mage, as you choose how to handle the matter of the Earl's possessed son.
The thing about older RPGs is that they sometimes offered lots of varied options, but didn't present them to you very well. Fallout in particular; it was so hard to tell what you were allowed to do and not do, or even what exactly your skills did ('Repair' turned out to be better for hacking computers than 'Science'). The older game mechanics weren't well suited to inferring your intentions. Sometimes you could parley with your enemies and sometimes you couldn't. Sometimes a simple mistake could result in sending you to fight the final boss at level three. More interesting routes through the game were obscure and impossible to find unless you already knew to look for them ('Come back here with doohickey X. We give you no clues to its location and you won't encounter it as part of any quest.'). In more recent Bioware RPGs, the brilliance is in the clarity of the actions and consequences.
In Dragon Age, Redcliffe is another good example, if you're a mage, as you choose how to handle the matter of the Earl's possessed son.
The thing about older RPGs is that they sometimes offered lots of varied options, but didn't present them to you very well. Fallout in particular; it was so hard to tell what you were allowed to do and not do, or even what exactly your skills did ('Repair' turned out to be better for hacking computers than 'Science'). The older game mechanics weren't well suited to inferring your intentions. Sometimes you could parley with your enemies and sometimes you couldn't. Sometimes a simple mistake could result in sending you to fight the final boss at level three. More interesting routes through the game were obscure and impossible to find unless you already knew to look for them ('Come back here with doohickey X. We give you no clues to its location and you won't encounter it as part of any quest.'). In more recent Bioware RPGs, the brilliance is in the clarity of the actions and consequences.