Voice acting in computer role-playing games

[sea]

Fully voiced. Just don't hire AAA actors that cost 100's of thousands of dollars, hire a bunch of war veterans and college actors to do the voices of the characters you so choose, for dirt cheap.

This. Let's recall that the rules of quantity and quality go both ways. Written dialogue is not inherently better than voiced dialogue, and if I don't notice that a game's dialogue has suffered because of the voice acting, then there's no reason to not have voice acting. Tons of bad writing is just as bad, or worse. It's wasting budgets on celebrities, casting people based on star credit and not ability, and a push towards non-interactive cinematics over gameplay that are hurting videogames, not simply voice acting.

Voice acting has benefits that far in excess outweigh any downsides, in my opinion. Much as a picture says a thousand words, you can communicate tons of personality through a character's voice. It helps create a better sense of mood and drama, allows for more natural exchanges between characters, it lets you say more with less, it allows you to give out exposition and plot during actual gameplay rather than pausing for dialogue pop-ups, and it gives a degree of life to the game that would otherwise be lacking.

Usually I'm tolerant of the lack of voice acting in indie, low-budget and older games simply because I know it's beyond their means and often because the writing is good enough to hold up without it, but... I mean, yeah, if I could have RPGs with good voice acting and good writing, I'd take that every time. If you need to have tons of text in your game, it's best kept optional. I like my interactive novels as much as the next guy but that simply can't be the rule or the norm.

People like to point to Fallout as an example of voice acting done right, and I agree... but I also think it would have been way better if they were able to get voice actors and talking heads for every character as well. You might say that the minor characters are less important and so it's a benefit players can just skim their dialogue and get right through things, but that only draws attention to the fact that you have boring content in your game. If the player feels the need to skip something because it's "just another NPC asking me to do an errand", then you've done something wrong.

 

[Crooked Bee]

No voice acting for me please. I don't listen to it anyway.

 

[Fatty]

None. I prefer to read the lines of text much faster than the actors can perform them. Although as others pointed out, MW and BG did a decent job mixing in voices and text.

 

[Infinitron]

You might say that the minor characters are less important and so it's a benefit players can just skim their dialogue and get right through things, but that only draws attention to the fact that you have boring content in your game. If the player feels the need to skip something because it's "just another NPC asking me to do an errand", then you've done something wrong.

Don't agree with this attitude at all. Not every person you meet has to be related to some MAJESTIC plotline that gets you all hyped and excited that you want to listen to him talk about it.
Sometimes you just want to fight monsters, help people and bake bread. The success of casual games is a testament to this fact.

 

[G.O.D]

Partial. Voice the most important or special characters.
Or certain characters you want to represent in a particular way, and leave the rest to the imagination of the player.
I often see that as one of the strong points of Fallout 1 & 2.
With fully voiced F:NV, for example, there is no room for interpretation.

EDIT:

So basicly, like sea also mentioned, now that i read it.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

People like to point to Fallout as an example of voice acting done right, and I agree... but I also think it would have been way better if they were able to get voice actors and talking heads for every character as well. You might say that the minor characters are less important and so it's a benefit players can just skim their dialogue and get right through things, but that only draws attention to the fact that you have boring content in your game. If the player feels the need to skip something because it's "just another NPC asking me to do an errand", then you've done something wrong.

Except that it would result in shitty quality of faces and shitty voice acting with not enough actors. Fallout's talking heads are good because they were designed to be interesting and characteristic. It's something that wouldn't scale up to hundreds of characters.

 

[Satan]

People like to point to Fallout as an example of voice acting done right, and I agree... but I also think it would have been way better if they were able to get voice actors and talking heads for every character as well. You might say that the minor characters are less important and so it's a benefit players can just skim their dialogue and get right through things, but that only draws attention to the fact that you have boring content in your game. If the player feels the need to skip something because it's "just another NPC asking me to do an errand", then you've done something wrong.

Except that it would result in shitty quality of faces and shitty voice acting with not enough actors. Fallout's talking heads are good because they were designed to be interesting and characteristic. It's something that wouldn't scale up to hundreds of characters.

why? many games managed to do it, why not fallout?

 

[20 Eyes]

I'm fine with fully voiced as long as the developer hires a great goddamn cast and makes sure that they have a great goddamn director. Like Bloodlines. Quantity and quality.

It's like graphics, more and better is theoretically ideal but because of real world contingencies it is stultifying

I'm with these two.

I'm with these three, in a best case scenario. Voice acting can add a lot. Just think about all the memorable lines from JA2. I don't think that game would've been the same with mute characters, even though some of the acting wasn't great (Ira's "a driven bitch" line). The limitations introduced by professional voice acting suck, just talk to a dozen NCR NPCs in New Vegas for a taste of that.

What I'd really like would be for games to scale back the graphics and voice acting, and focus more on what the writers and programmers can do when they're less constrained by limited artistic resources. But obviously the industry is going on the complete opposite direction, so what do I know...

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

People like to point to Fallout as an example of voice acting done right, and I agree... but I also think it would have been way better if they were able to get voice actors and talking heads for every character as well. You might say that the minor characters are less important and so it's a benefit players can just skim their dialogue and get right through things, but that only draws attention to the fact that you have boring content in your game. If the player feels the need to skip something because it's "just another NPC asking me to do an errand", then you've done something wrong.

Except that it would result in shitty quality of faces and shitty voice acting with not enough actors. Fallout's talking heads are good because they were designed to be interesting and characteristic. It's something that wouldn't scale up to hundreds of characters.

why? many games managed to do it, why not fallout?

Which games?

 

[Azalin]

I agree that a good voice actor can help a lot with a chracter's personality and the whole mood of the game so full voice for me if it's possible.Of course it would be nice if the main character has a voice too in that case,talking with dozens of fully voiced characters while your characters sits there silent is kinda stupid.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Voice acting is fine for a few rare bits. Major plot points, that sort of thing. It shouldn't be used on the majority of dialogue for two reasons:

Loss of quality. (No matter how much money you throw at it, there's only so much talent available. And realistically, the budget is a concern too.)
Tediousness. When I'm reading some fairly trivial dialogue but it's also voice acted, I don't want to wait for the actor to finish speaking to read ahead, but by the same token, cutting them off mid sentence sounds really bad, and turns even decent voice acting into a pain in the ass. I usually try to cut them off at some point that would be at least somewhat natural to avoid raging.

 

[deus101]

Fallout 2 text describing how a ghoul is hammering at my gun while scratching his head and giggling is TONS more preferable then having it done in full cinematics.

With full VO and cinematics you risk producing shitty exposition which I CANT avoid!


Now True, Bloodlines did things extremely well....but i can't forget how cinematic and voiced dialouge made me squirm in DA.


Not to mention its resources and money that can be spent elsewhere or saved, there need to be less AAA budget games.

 

[PorkaMorka]

I don't really see the point of full voice acting. I can read text a lot faster than anyone can speak his lines.

Are people really willing to slow down the game in order to listen to the dialog instead of reading?

I always want to get through the dialog as quickly as possible, without skipping it. Even reading it really fast, you still end up spending a LOT of time in RPGs just reading low quality dialog.

Partial voice acting in the form of catchphrases and rare bits of dialog is definitely something that can work well, but I voted for no voice acting as I feel that for most studios it would be a waste of money and detrimental to the game; foreigners and indies shouldn't bother trying to do voice acting and I don't play mainstream American/Canadian games anymore.

For example, the voice acting in JA2 was fun, but they shouldn't have bothered putting voice acting in Silent Storm.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Partial is the best system. You get the necessary immershun for important moments of the story, but the game won't be limited by the need to add voice acting for every piece of shit NPC you come across.

I could do without the random YAAHs and URGHs during combat, though. Shit gets annoying, fast. I tried to play the Zelda: Link to the Past port for the GBA, and Link now yells every time you attack. Did anyone playtest that?

 

[Renegen]

Fully voiced. Just don't hire AAA actors that cost 100's of thousands of dollars, hire a bunch of war veterans and college actors to do the voices of the characters you so choose, for dirt cheap.

This. Let's recall that the rules of quantity and quality go both ways. Written dialogue is not inherently better than voiced dialogue, and if I don't notice that a game's dialogue has suffered because of the voice acting, then there's no reason to not have voice acting. Tons of bad writing is just as bad, or worse. It's wasting budgets on celebrities, casting people based on star credit and not ability, and a push towards non-interactive cinematics over gameplay that are hurting videogames, not simply voice acting.

The issue is harder than you set it to be. A lot of games, especially now that 3D is everywhere, have to become cinematic just simply because real life authenticity is boring. Simple thing like merchants greeting you, when was the last time a corner store employee greeted you? In RL, people just stare blankly at you until you say something intelligent. In VGs, every encounter is epic and somehow every character you meet lays on the combat tips or story exposition. This goes into everything, from how they walk, how they talk, how they act, how they dress.

What you're advocating is the epic king with his epic speech in his epic throne to sound like an overworked sissy developer, and people should cheer for that! It breaks the precious IMMERSION!!1! that every game tries so hard to establish. Even hardcore RPGs(the few that would qualify of that today..) have to do that because VGs have gone so far from real life that to go back would be a rude awakening.

Let's also not forget that video game characters are one dimensional, and must convey the most about their personality in the shortest amount of time, and voice acting is part of that. That's why tough warriors in video games have a manly voice, having a Mike Tyson voice would not work.

Do I love developers not blowing millions on voice acting? of course. Do I hate that developers are trying to use voice acting and cutscenes as their main pillars in their "epic cRPG", duh. Deus Ex had amateur voice acting, for the most part it worked. But people to this day make fun of its voice acting and many are even turned off by it. It's a hard middleground to have.

 

[laclongquan]

As recent years have shown, full voice acting only gets in the way of modding and adds to the budget and difficulty of making games considerably without adding that much. Are you really that interested in hearing Random Peasant # 23 speak?

PS: T, again, did this best - save the money on getting C- level actors reading thousands of lines in the same bored drone and hire the likes Tony Fucking Jay to do one or two voices instead. Every voiced NPC in that game was memorable and the lines delivered amazingly in most cases.

This nigga said it! I still remember how Ravel's voice sound. Or Fall From Grace "Annah, were you raised in the Hive?" Annah's "Mind your own business, succubus!"

IF you have the budget, partial voiced acting to get full quality. Otherwise, just text.

 

[sea]

The issue is harder than you set it to be. A lot of games, especially now that 3D is everywhere, have to become cinematic just simply because real life authenticity is boring. Simple thing like merchants greeting you, when was the last time a corner store employee greeted you? In RL, people just stare blankly at you until you say something intelligent. In VGs, every encounter is epic and somehow every character you meet lays on the combat tips or story exposition. This goes into everything, from how they walk, how they talk, how they act, how they dress.

Depends on where you live. In smaller rural societies, you can expect people to be courteous and friendly because the greater reliance upon individuals and communal nature of existence ensures that people get to know one another better, and social custom follows this. In urban societies, people are packed in closer with one another, and can't possibly know the majority of people they come into contact with, or even a fraction, and so social custom tends to put greater emphasis on tight-knit personal relationships with a few people, and wider networks of professional contacts. Anything more is pretty much impossible for anyone to sustain.

Usually this is reflected in RPGs: people in small towns are talkative, friendly and helpful, and in cities, you can expect to see more rude people; usually if someone's being nice, they want something, whether that's your money or something else. Sometimes it's reflected in the dialogue itself, other times in design of quests and characters. Is it always 100% accurate to what you'd get in the real world? Nope, although I'd expect a band of heavily-armed heroes to draw at least some attention. Verisimilitude and internal consistency are far more important than vain pleas to "realism." Most games are fantasy, and so I'm willing to suspend a little disbelief as far as social custom is concerned.

What you're advocating is the epic king with his epic speech in his epic throne to sound like an overworked sissy developer, and people should cheer for that! It breaks the precious IMMERSION!!1! that every game tries so hard to establish. Even hardcore RPGs(the few that would qualify of that today..) have to do that because VGs have gone so far from real life that to go back would be a rude awakening.

Where am I advocating "epic" things exactly? Where exactly does voice acting factor into this equation? Your argument does not in any way follow from my premises.

Let's also not forget that video game characters are one dimensional, and must convey the most about their personality in the shortest amount of time, and voice acting is part of that. That's why tough warriors in video games have a manly voice, having a Mike Tyson voice would not work.

I'm not really sure what you're getting at here. Are you saying that's a good or bad thing, or just pointing it out?

Do I love developers not blowing millions on voice acting? of course. Do I hate that developers are trying to use voice acting and cutscenes as their main pillars in their "epic cRPG", duh. Deus Ex had amateur voice acting, for the most part it worked. But people to this day make fun of its voice acting and many are even turned off by it. It's a hard middleground to have.

Deus Ex has shit voice acting outside of the main cast. Background characters in Paris and Hong Kong (about 60% of the game) are downright embarrassing at best and offensive at worst. Nobody makes fun of JC's voice (aside from a couple cheesy lines), or most of the other main characters' voices, and that's great, but there's a lot more to the game than those characters and the inconsistency is simply extremely jarring. Compare to Human Revolution, where voice acting is pretty competent overall, but not especially stunning either - it gets the job done and you don't notice problems because you don't have those extremes in quality and tone.

As recent years have shown, full voice acting only gets in the way of modding and adds to the budget and difficulty of making games considerably without adding that much. Are you really that interested in hearing Random Peasant # 23 speak?

Much like I said above, if Random Peasant #23 doesn't have anything interesting, relevant or important to say, why the fuck are you wasting time writing dialogue for her? Not all character interactions have to be amazing and memorable and "epic" as some have taken my words to mean, but they should at least be worthwhile in some way or other. Give me one character that can reveal something about the game world or story over ten who don't any day. Being able to consolidate important information (exposition, mostly) is extremely important. Stuff like idle chatter is well and good with me, especially when it serves a narrative function, but if I initiate dialogue with an NPC and there's little more than "top of the morning" or "I have a huge boil on my arse" then I fail to see the point.

I still maintain: if your game has quests where NPCs are asking you to do boring shit like killing rats, or delivering goods, your issues aren't with voice acting. Good voice work will not save boring dialogue, and dialogue is usually boring because the subject matter is boring. If a game is boring, then that is a problem and needs to be resolved, end of story. Is it realistic for most games? No, but that's no reason to not try.

 

[Carrion]

Voice acting is fine for a few rare bits. Major plot points, that sort of thing. It shouldn't be used on the majority of dialogue for two reasons:

Loss of quality. (No matter how much money you throw at it, there's only so much talent available. And realistically, the budget is a concern too.)
Tediousness. When I'm reading some fairly trivial dialogue but it's also voice acted, I don't want to wait for the actor to finish speaking to read ahead, but by the same token, cutting them off mid sentence sounds really bad, and turns even decent voice acting into a pain in the ass. I usually try to cut them off at some point that would be at least somewhat natural to avoid raging.

This, pretty much. I usually don't skip any lines unless I've already heard them, and as a result even some relatively short conversations can seem really long. Walls of text in PS:T are fine, but five lines in Skyrim feel like an eternity. It's not just about the quality of writing either, althought that probably has something to do with it as well.

I must say that text works much better in (old) isometric games than it does in (new) first-person games, though. Morrowind and some other games are fine the way they are, but I don't know if modern facial animations and silent characters would make a very good combination. Maybe I'm just used to hearing every NPC talk nowadays.

Much as a picture says a thousand words, you can communicate tons of personality through a character's voice. It helps create a better sense of mood and drama, allows for more natural exchanges between characters, it lets you say more with less, it allows you to give out exposition and plot during actual gameplay rather than pausing for dialogue pop-ups, and it gives a degree of life to the game that would otherwise be lacking.

I agree, although extremely few games actually manage to do anything like this due to bad direction, bad acting and so on. But it also works the other way around. Even a good voice actor may make a character seem like a schizophrenic when you go through a branching dialogue tree picking options that evoke different moods in the character. You can't eliminate that kind of stuff completely without making the dialogue more limited or streamlined, but plain text lets you fill in those gaps in your mind. Also, a great deal of the personality of the character comes from the initial impression, and having a few voiced lines is great for that. However, when we're talking about dozens of hundreds of lines of dialogue, full voice acting often starts to take away from the personality of the characters instead of adding something to it. The inconsistencies are harder to ignore and the voice actor's interpretation of the character may clash with the player's, essentially separating the voice from the character. It's an uncanny valley effect of sorts.

I also disagree about the talking heads of Fallout. It's mostly just a way to tell the player that a character is especially important. I prefer subtle methods like that to having quest arrows and compasses and stuff like that which partially result from every character having a face and a voice and being equally important and unique so that you don't remember who is who anymore.

A good voice actor won't save bad writing, but a bad voice actor can sure as hell ruin good writing.

 

[mondblut]

At best, I ignore voice acting. At worst, they don't let me to.

 

[treave]

If you have a large budget, I don't mind a fully voiced world. Just so that it doesn't take attention from something else like, say, gameplay. It's alright for generic peasants to sound like one another, it's not like I'm going to talk to them much. However, instead of having some background NPC repeat the same old lines over and over (e.g. Patrolling the Mojave) experiment with using ambient sound to convey life. Chickens clucking, power lines humming, conversations consisting of murmurs and grunts that you can't distinctly hear because it's in the background, and so on and so forth.

If you don't have the budget, only voice the major characters. And by budget, this not only includes casting, but also getting a good script and a good director so that the scenes work well.

If you don't even have the budget to provide decent voices for the major characters, drop it and maybe put that money towards bug testing instead.

 

[MetalCraze]

Voice overs and good design are not mutually exclusive.

 

[RRRrrr]

Voice overs and good design are not mutually exclusive.

Actually, AAA titles and good design are sort of mutually exclusive these days.

 

[MetalCraze]

Since when voice overs = A-A-Ass games?

 

[Weierstraß]

Partial, if done well is the best. If done wrong the switch between voiced and non-voiced moments can make the game feel incoherent. I prefer having a greeting or the first line read rather than the distinction between "important" and "non-important" scenes.

While budget is certainly one reason not to use voice acting the thing I see as the biggest loss is that it closes the door on much more dynamic dialog. The most obvious being that no one ever is able to say your name, unless you do a Bioware and give the player a fixed name. I'm tired of having titles thrown at me just to have people able to talk about me.

 

[Renegen]

Where am I advocating "epic" things exactly? Where exactly does voice acting factor into this equation? Your argument does not in any way follow from my premises.

It's too bad that you took the stance that video games are closer to realism that I suggested and that you based your arguments on it. It really discredits your position. From the tactics that people use in battle, to the way people walk in slow motion, to everyone mysteriously asking for help when you're near, or important conversations in the open and not over a beer the following evening, to enemies taunting you before every fight, to the one dimensional characters (that you failed to support), to conversations and relationships being accelerated, to the romances even: there is no fantasy world that's trying to be emulated, they are all techniques used to tell a story.
Even something as accepted as combat is actually there to make the whole experience epic. You may call it gameplay, but expanding on combat to make it last so long, for people to need so many sword blows before they go down creates exactly an "epic" combat narrative that you remember and tell others. The majority of fights in a "realistic" game would be more underhanded, unfair, and very fast. When a king bestows on you a quest, it necessarily becomes epic, because every other part of the gameplay already is.

As mentioned in my first post, VGs are so far removed from reality that we don't even notice. We've grown used to the conventions of storytelling, and there's no going back. You've grown so used to them you can't even deconstruct them it seems.

And I used the word cinematic because the same techniques exist in the movie industry. It's too bad you didn't agree to the point because it creates a really big dent in your persona of "video game design connoisseur". It was an easy point to both agree on, (I was trying to move the conversation to a more interesting place), except you preferred to disagree with me, maybe because you like to argue. I've had enough of paragraph-by-paragraph replies in my youth, so keep at it without me.