Why is the Main Character in Fallout 4 Voiced?

[Kolyarut]

Completely disagree that this was a misstep. I can see how it would be a problem if you were trying to play "let's pretend it's me in a sci-fi world", but I've watched my character's personality establish itself with nudges in varying directions and I haven't liked a protagonist more since Saints Row. Helps that Courtenay Taylor absolutely nails it, for the performance - I know she's been in stuff before but I hope this springboards her to being the next gamer-household name voice actor like Nolan North or Jennifer Hale. For the first time in a Bethesda game, I actually like the dialogue scenes more than the exploration (and I like the exploration a whole bunch).

I can't see it happening again for Elder Scrolls 6, though, what with having to record male/female argonian/khajit/nord/dunmer voices for every line of dialogue (most of the others you could probably roll together, kind of?).

 

[Mister K]

We've got Bethesda's considerable prior oeuvre as evidence to the contrary. There is simply no evidence that any money freed up from voice acting would therefore go into more dialog options. Indeed, I do not expect that having a huge number of available dialog options is something they even desire, as it entails significant costs to player experience in its own way (read read read).

Look, there's no cure for bad writing except better writing and extensive editing.

Granted, Bethesda always sucked when it came to writing, but in their previous Fallout game (3rd for us, 1st for them) you had WAAAY more dialogue options to choose from. I mean, I once chased away a guy who tried to mug me because thanks to high Perception I was able to spot that his gun is not loaded (or something). I convinced a computer-USA President to self-destruct thanks to my high Inteligence. I managed to convice a kid to tell me where the bad guys are because I was "big, tough guy" (Strength check). There were many more which I've forgotten. I am not even counting dozens upon dozens of dialogue choices avaliable to ALL characters.

It seems, however, that in Fallout 4 the only stat that matters for story-wise roleplay is Charisma, while all dialogue options lead to either exposition or one, single outcome of a conversation.

 

[Souplex]

And to be frank, no one seemed to have an issue with the voiced protagonist of the Saints Row games, which is also billed as a 'blank slate' character in an open-world game. (Although perhaps the main difference there is that you actually get to choose your voice.)

I had a problem with Saints Row IV when they changed female voice 3 from Slavic to French.

 

[Zontar]

I'd take 6-8 text options then 4 voiced ones using the BioWare model that even BioWare fanboys openly despise.

 

[Kenjitsuka]

Shamus, do you think it'll be easy to make a mod to NOT play any of those dialogue audio files?
To keep at least from hearing the lines being said so different from your own inner voice for your protagonist?

But SERIOUSLY about the issue from the second page; what the FFFF?!!!!!!!!!!!
Charisma is 100% useless or what? :O

 

[zombiejoe]

Shamus, do you think it'll be easy to make a mod to NOT play any of those dialogue audio files?
To keep at least from hearing the lines being said so different from your own inner voice for your protagonist?

But SERIOUSLY about the issue from the second page; what the FFFF?!!!!!!!!!!!
Charisma is 100% useless or what? :O

Nah, Charisma is still pretty useful. Not all encounters are as dumbly handled as that.

 

[Nimcha]

Completely disagree. There is no excuse for a silent protagonist anymore in AAA games really. Finally characters can have actual conversations instead of interactions with service number computer labyrinths. I love the other Fallout games but going back to it now and being a completely mute character takes away a lot from the immersion. I like to actually roleplay and not just insert myself into the character.

 

[Darkness665]

Thanks for the heads up. I might look into a mod that blanks the audio of the main character. Unless the female is voiced by Jennifer Hale and then I am duty bound to listen to her.

And since you explain so many things in gaming; Why can't/won't they allow individual voices to be muted? The head thug in Gears of War being the one I wanted to choke off the most.

 

[happyninja42]

I disagree that that protagonist forces the fight in the scene you are talking about. The villain says quite plainly before you even get to the room that you have 1 last chance to leave alive, and you keep going. He talks to you just because he feels compelled to talk to you. But, as even the villain says "We both know how this was going to end no matter what."

That's not the words of someone who is willing to talk his way out of the situation, that's someone who is simply having a "villain monologue" moment before killing the hero. It's pretty typical villain schtick.

 

[StatusNil]

I can't really get into specifics about Fallout 4, since I haven't played it (haven't got around to Fallout 2 yet). But I have to say the author makes an extremely valid general point about the pitfalls of trying to serve incompatible goals at the same time, in this case these being free-form role playing and "cinematic" presentation. I hope major studios are paying attention to this clear and easy-to-grasp argument.

Overall, Experienced Points is definitely one of my favorite columns on The Escapist. That's all, I just wanted to say something positive for a change.

 

[Mylinkay Asdara]

The voices in my head are always better.

I prefer my character - if it's going to be *mine* and isn't already a pre-designed personality - to be silent with more options for things to say. That said, I like pre-designed characters to have voices and good voice acting for the emotions of what they say.

In either case - better writing is absolutely a needed thing in all the games I've played lately. Not just dialog, but overall.

I do hate not being told exactly what choice I'm making to say too - voiced or unvoiced. The "general short idea" is almost never what I'd imagined it was when it comes out of the character's mouth.

 

[immortalfrieza]

Completely disagree. There is no excuse for a silent protagonist anymore in AAA games really. Finally characters can have actual conversations instead of interactions with service number computer labyrinths. I love the other Fallout games but going back to it now and being a completely mute character takes away a lot from the immersion. I like to actually roleplay and not just insert myself into the character.

Exactly. I like the voice acting and the options and find it far far more immersive than those silent protagonists of previous games, but even if I didn't I'd just install the inevitable mod that removes the protagonist voices in a few weeks and use the one that's already come out for the extended options. People that want a completely mute character and verbose dialog choices will get both before long, but if Fallout 4 did not have voiced protagonists those people would be the ONLY ones satisfied instead of literally EVERYONE. Having voiced protagonists gives more options for the player to tailor the game to their tastes with mods than not having them, it's that simple.

The writing would still be the same regardless of if there were voiced protagonists or not, and if not it's a ridiculous and baseless assumption to believe that they would have spent the time and money involved anywhere else in the development of Fallout 4. The addition of voiced protagonists was an attempt by Bethesda to address the fact that a lot of people think their writing is terrible (it's not, people just miss the point of their open world games) by attempting to add emotional resonance to it, and this is the thanks they get?

 

[kenu12345]

Completely disagree. There is no excuse for a silent protagonist anymore in AAA games really. Finally characters can have actual conversations instead of interactions with service number computer labyrinths. I love the other Fallout games but going back to it now and being a completely mute character takes away a lot from the immersion. I like to actually roleplay and not just insert myself into the character.

Exactly. I like the voice acting and the options and find it far far more immersive than those silent protagonists of previous games, but even if I didn't I'd just install the inevitable mod that removes the protagonist voices in a few weeks and use the one that's already come out for the extended options. People that want a completely mute character and verbose dialog choices will get both before long, but if Fallout 4 did not have voiced protagonists those people would be the ONLY ones satisfied instead of literally EVERYONE. Having voiced protagonists gives more options for the player to tailor the game to their tastes with mods than not having them, it's that simple.

The writing would still be the same regardless of if there were voiced protagonists or not, and if not it's a ridiculous and baseless assumption to believe that they would have spent the time and money involved anywhere else in the development of Fallout 4. The addition of voiced protagonists was an attempt by Bethesda to address the fact that a lot of people think their writing is terrible (it's not, people just miss the point of their open world games) by attempting to add emotional resonance to it, and this is the thanks they get?

Its done very poorly. Fact of the matter is this game is displaying a lack of choice and removes much of the options to tailor one of a characters. Voice actors get paid per line. That being said, they probably could have made this work if they just made the character more of a defined character, but they tried a middle ground that just made it bland

Not to mention, this really resticts things like quest mods since you can not voice the main character unless you are the person who was paid to do it. At least not to a good degree

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

The voices in my head are always better.

This is my view too. I make certain exceptions for games like Mass Effect where it feels like we got handed a character and we're just making their choices (and face), but if you're telling me I get to make my own character I want as much control over it as possible. Giving it a predefined voice robs me of lots of that control.

My go to example of where this came back to bite me is this in Guild Wars 2. I spent a good hour making my character. I decided to make a Sylvari, a plant-like race. I was kind of impressed with how much detail they go into, you get to choose your character's personality and give them a sort of totem that reflects their background. After finishing this time consuming process I start up the game and get dropped into a cutscene.

Only to discover that my character speaks in a cocky, british accent. There was nothing particularly with the voice, it just wasn't at all what I imagined my character's voice to be. All my preconceptions of what my character was like were shattered and replaced with the new personality.

This necessarily happens no matter what the voice is. You can mitigate it slightly by having several voices to choose from, but voices carry a lot of personality in them, and if you want to give your player any pretense that they have some control over the personality, you shouldn't stick them with one stock voice.

Another way to mitigate it is to have the actor deliver each option very differently. Although I find that tends to put all of the responses into a category like the "Kind" response, the "Sarcastic" response, and so on. Often the distinctiveness makes it very hard to switch between the different choices because the options sound like they're coming out of the mouth of different people all together. Not only that, but you tend to loose the nuance to responses, and choosing a response tends to be: Is my character funny? If so, I choose the funny response every time.

 

[Michael Dunkerton]

The reason people are okay with no voice acting, and many prefer it, is because they want to use their *imagination* to flesh out their main character. You cannot do that while the main character is spouting dialogue and imprinting his own personality onto your avatar. It's just wanting something different from a game--it'd be like saying "There is no excuse for the lack of a linear narrative in AAA games". People play Bethesda games to tell their own story. If you want a story told to you I really just feel like other games do it better.

 

[Overhead]

That's why.

 

[Fdzzaigl]

Not a very convincing argument, I'm afraid. The mind-numbingly stupid dialog wouldn't become magically smarter just because it wasn't voiced.

Agreed.

However, that being the case also begs the question why they felt the need to invest in a voiced protagonist and make it harder for modders to make their own modules consistent in the future (as they will likely be unable to enlist the original voice actor).

It could have been an interesting addition in my opinion. But it wasn't due to the lack of depth in player responses.

 

[Valiance]

Another excellent read, Shamus. There's a lot of things I like about FO4, but some of the cringe-worthy dialogue is so bad, I almost wish the game had no voice acting (not just main protag). The writing is fairly bad yet passable, but sometimes the voice acting sounds so incredibly awkward and nowhere near believable that it might as well not even have been voiced.

No disrespect to the voice actors, it's just very hard to have conversations feel natural with the crazy dialog system and the typical Bethesda glitchy jittery characters constantly moving just so they aren't standing completely still (since that was a complaint from the previous games, so the only answer is to make them move TOO much, right?)

Anyway, it's still an excellent game, but I really wasn't looking forward to a voiced protagonist very much, let alone only one voice possible per gender.

It doesn't irk me as much as it does some other individuals, but it certainly isn't something I feel the game needed.

Captcha: wake up call (yes, really!)

 

[Mylinkay Asdara]

I make certain exceptions for games like Mass Effect where it feels like we got handed a character and we're just making their choices (and face), but if you're telling me I get to make my own character I want as much control over it as possible. Giving it a predefined voice robs me of lots of that control.

Agreed. Shepard is a character we're given that we have some input on what the character will be like (picking the backstory, making choice with them, etc) within certain bounds that keep that character what the writers intended that character to be - or versions of that.

There was nothing particularly with the voice, it just wasn't at all what I imagined my character's voice to be. All my preconceptions of what my character was like were shattered and replaced with the new personality.

This necessarily happens no matter what the voice is. You can mitigate it slightly by having several voices to choose from, but voices carry a lot of personality in them, and if you want to give your player any pretense that they have some control over the personality, you shouldn't stick them with one stock voice.

I agree again; in fact, it makes it hard for me to do multiple play throughs with a character that only has one voice, because the sound of the voice becomes tied to my memories of that personality she or he was and not who I'm trying to make this time.


Oh, and on a side note, since Mass Effect was mentioned - I find it really weird that Garrus's voice is like, everywhere, in Fallout 4. To a ridiculous degree. Even though I love his voice it's just gotten weird after so many many times hearing it from different people.