Voice vs. Choice

[Miumaru]

This just comes right back to Morrowind vs Oblivion. As though the same series, the former allows the various choices, but no voice work (and books worth of text) and then Oblivion with alot less to say but certainly louder and a bit more restricted in options.

 

[Miumaru]

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.

Thats cause anytime you pass someone they hate or hit on you.

 

[RowdyRodimus]

Just taking the King Bob example, why not have the VA record three or four lines that don't really mention the quest, but still give the feeling that it is being referenced in regard to your character.
Instead of having the actor record "It's not often an elf would undertake a mission such as this and succeed by taking on all of the guards" and have them record something such as "It's not often one like yourself would undertake a mission such as this and succeed so brilliantly".

But honestly, I never listen to anything in a game, I always have music I like or talk radio on when I play and make sure subtitles are on in the game. So all the money they spend on music and voice actors is wasted on me.

 

[tzimize]

It has been said before, but the way to do it is like in Mass Effect. You choose a mood/personality response and get to discover the line as he speaks it. Plus voice acting adds a dimension of feeling/personality that you just dont get with text.

That said, not all games benefit from voice acting. Mass Effect would NOT have been as good without it. Final Fantasy 13 on the other hand(and probably all FF with voice acting) would benefit from NOT having voice acting.

 

[MNRA]

I always listen through the complete dialogue, and avoid reading it if possible. Frustration adds to my immersion.

 

[Knight Templar]

I take it you like how Baldur's Gate II: SoA handled voice?
I like fully voiced games, and I don't normaly skip what quest-important characters are saying, but I have noticed that on second playthroughs I skip what unimportant people say. So maybe your idea is a good one.

DA:O with bland and slow voice acting? Well, the dialog itself was so generic I didn't even want to put in the effort to read it.

What are you saying?

 

[AnnaIME]

Morrowind... of course it was fully voiced - wasn't it? All right, I know it wasn't, but neither are the novels I read, and I hear voices and sound effects there too.

Maybe it's a matter of literacy. I know someone who plays WoW without reading the quest information. He is a weak reader and he doesn't really speak English. He uses some sort of "helpful" arrows that point him where he needs to go. I could never play like that, I would be bored out of my mind.

 

[mjc0961]

That's so funny that you right this now. I've been playing Trauma Team for the Wii, and I find myself skipping to the next dialog bubble when I get done reading it instead of when the voice acting gets done playing.

Never really considered the effect this has on games, though... Nice job making me think.

 

[Unrulyhandbag]

some text was here.

and some here.[/b]

Thats the point, the beggars all talk in a over-the-top manner when they ask you "to spare a coin for an old beggah" and then if you give them a coin they will revert back to a more normal voice when they give you information (for the thieves guild quests), because its all just an act to get sympathy.

I'm going to call bollocks on that one on two grounds.
1. follow a beggar around for a few days in game, they sleep on the streets take scooma and do very little else. If they're acting it's a perfect act and they shouldn't be dropping it for me; I don't join the thieves guild on most plays through.

2. the rumour voice is the exact same sound bite used by EVERY SINGLE person of a given race and gender regardless of their normal manner of speech. I picked beggars because it was the most extreme example.

 

[DayDark]

I want good voice acting and multiple choices, how to implement both is really not my problem, but the one who does it will win.

 

[sleepykid]

I'd have to respectfully disagree. My preference for game developer priorities would definitely be immersion and good stories over player agency. I've got nothing against free will or anything, but I've almost never seen its implementation be a boon to the game overall. Call me cynical, but I think developer time is ill spent designing events and plot points to anticipate the myriad ways players can be sociopaths. Railroading doesn't have to be a swear word, ya know?

And poo poo to all the guys that just needed an introductory dialogue to imagine what all the text would sound like. Way to make jealous people like me who have no imagination, the very reason I play video games, dammit!

That being said, if people are really craving this branching path/give me a choice stuff, there is always D&D. Granted, not as easy to play as a video game, but a good DM could easily accommodate that sort of game play.

 

[Loge]

I agree in general with Shamus' point of view; most companyies wouldn't go out on limb to cut voice acting to a sensible amount, improve the quality of that voice acting, give some more money to marketing and add choicese (replayability) for their games.

That said I see the need for voice acting in mainstream games to accommodate the people who enjoy audible input most (same for graphics).

But isn't the gaming industry far enough to also accommodate jaded, elitist choice mongers who yearn for replayability and a way to play their character after a role they set themselves?

Me shamefully admitting to be of the last brand eagerly await Age of Decadence to be released. Wooooh, way more dialogue than PS:T. Cleverly combined skill checks for text box driven action in critical situations. Turn based tactical combat that acknowledges the fact that 6 vs 1 IS a dangerous fight no matter how die-hard your character is. Working and actually used faction system. (not only Faction A hates you and attacks on sight)

 

[namako]

Maybe it's because most of the games I played when I was smaller had no voices and I read quickly, but I find the actors in these games speak so slowly I often just skip over the dialogue if there's a subtitle option. Even in Mass Effect where I listened to most of it, I skipped over some of the lengthy voicing if it took more than three times as long for them to speak it as it took to read it. (Except Tali. Her voice was awesome.) It doesn't help that the writing in games is pretty poor, and often on the predictable side.
A bit of voice (or a weird noise a la Golden Sun) is enough to give me a hook for the sound of a protagonist.

Personal preferences aside, voice acting is much more accessible than text, particularly if the text scales poorly (which is becoming less of a problem).

 

[Saltiness]

I'd have to respectfully disagree. My preference for game developer priorities would definitely be immersion and good stories over player agency. I've got nothing against free will or anything, but I've almost never seen its implementation be a boon to the game overall. Call me cynical, but I think developer time is ill spent designing events and plot points to anticipate the myriad ways players can be sociopaths. Railroading doesn't have to be a swear word, ya know?

Biggest problem I usually see is that immersion and good story telling aren't related to voice acting, nor are they restricted to RPG's. Since we're using Bethsoft "story telling" (and I'll use the term loosely for what they refer to as their writing ability) as an example, you have a bajillion people all who have the same voice, often in the SAME town. The story as a whole, isn't anything to write home about either. Bethsofts problems however are more related "lets go spend xxx million dollars on -big name actor-" instead of "lets go spend xxx million dollars on more resonable voice actors so we have more then 4".

"But my emotional investment to characters!" I hear some of you cry! If you're getting emotionally invested to characters in a bioware or bethsoft game, then the risk of missing that detachment is the least of you worries.

Want solid voice acting and story telling? Go play World in Conflict. I don't care if you suck at RTS's (its not a very difficult game to play), just play it through in full jaded mode, and enjoy the story telling. It's as much a story about Bannern (an annoying brown nosing cocksucker) as a character as it is about the dirty Russian's blowing shit up.

Characters in a story should progress. That's the biggest crime with voice acting. They simply don't. We're talking more then Bioware 'x-amount-of-minutes/quests-passed-open more dialogue-and-help-with-characters-issue'. These characters don't change through a games story. They start out as "HERP DERP I AM EMO COMMANDER" and end as "HERP DERP I AM EMO COMMANDER BTW THANKS FOR BLAH BLAH BLAH". Fallout didn't do this, Fallout 2 or 3 didn't do it either. Planescape had a swing at it. As did Mask of the Betrayer.

 

[Emenhil]

Basically said the same thing on these very boards a while back ( [link]http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.162341-Is-Bioware-losing-its-magic?page=1[/link] )

So yeah, needless to say, I wholeheartedly agree. Voice acting isn't worth it.

 

[DoW Lowen]

But if you take away the voice acting, where will Steve Blum go?

 

[FloodOne]

It has been said before, but the way to do it is like in Mass Effect. You choose a mood/personality response and get to discover the line as he speaks it. Plus voice acting adds a dimension of feeling/personality that you just dont get with text.

That said, not all games benefit from voice acting. Mass Effect would NOT have been as good without it. Final Fantasy 13 on the other hand(and probably all FF with voice acting) would benefit from NOT having voice acting.

If a Final Fantasy game were to be released without VA, the entire gaming community and all the publications would cry foul.

And the VA in those games aren't bad, it's the unusual dialogue and the constan t sighing that brings down the quality of work.

 

[Lawyer105]

To be honest, I don't think it's really the voice acting that's causing it. Sure, that'll be a factor. But I think that the main problem is the expectations people are putting on games.

We expect good graphics. We expect seamless and exciting gameplay. We expect awesome combat or deep, intriguing story-lines - or BOTH! We expect a complete lack of CTD's and various other failures.

And to top it all off? We expect that our choices will matter.

In a game like Mass Effect, they do an amazing job of giving you the ILLUSION of choice. SPOILER ALERT: You can save the Coucil or let 'em die. You can kill Wrex or talk him down. You can let the Blue Suns leader get away, or let the refinery blow up.But ultimately, you still end up visiting the three key story planets, doing exactly the same thing there, and finally saving the universe from the big evil nasty.

Similar thing in KotOR1/2. SPOILER ALERT: Regardless of whether you go Light or Dark, you'll still end up doing exactly the same thing. Charging up to the final boss and attempting to whoop up on him. Either Light) because the BIG EVIL NASTY(TM) needs to be stopped, or Dark) because you don't want the BIG EVIL NASTY(TM) to rule the universe before you can take it over. But at the end of the day, you're still whooping up on the big evil nasty.

The problem with real choice is that it branches. Never mind the multiple voice-acting required. It's the infinite branches that are a problem. Let's assume that each choice only has two possible outcomes (and we'd all whine if that was the case). After choice 1, there are two possibilities that need to be taken into account. After just 10 choices, there is a potential 1024 possibilities - some of which will be interrelated!

Using the example in the OP - If we sneak in, there isn't war. If we slaughter everything, there is war. If there is war, Kingy might give us a war-related mission. If there isn't war, he won't, he might give us some other mission. So now they have to program TWO missions - and only 50% of people will play each one. That may rise on second/third play-throughs, but I doubt it would get much higher than 65%. A few more decisions down the line, and you're into a situation where less than 10% of the gamers playing your game will ever see that mission. The cost/benefit is simply too low.

Currently, it simply isn't feasible to program for that sort of flexibility. You almost need an AI to act as GamesMaster within the scope of the world before that sort of thing becomes possible.

Until such time, we're going to be railroaded into fairly linear choices - no matter how good the illusion they disguise them with is.

 

[JEBWrench]

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 mentioned Arcanum already. Really, Shamus is just grasping at straws this time. Using a handful of very specific examples, while ignoring the ones that blatantly go against his argument.

(Arcanum, Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, etc.)

It's not Voice Acting that make the choices in Fallout 3, Dragon Age, Oblivion, and others meaningless. It's laziness of the developers.