Shannow said:
obediah: "I really need to get these breast implants removed. They are hurting my back, feel kinda funny and don't look as good as I expected them to."
pug987:"Yeah, and while you're at it, cut off your tits, fingers, strip off all skin that is tattooed, use a knife instead of a vibrator and acid instead of make-up."
And 2d is actually superior to 3d in many cases
Exactly, 2d is often superior to 3d and only recently there have been 3d games that I believe will last the test of time (if you play some of the older 3d ones they look teribble today, while 2d ones still look great, apart from the small resolution).
My point is that you can't expect things to go backwards. For good or bad, a modern day rpg without voiced dialogues would head for commercial failure. Even if you cut down a bit on the cost, modern day graphics demand a large budget and a game needs to sell a lot of copies to make profit. I believe in the saying "Chose your battles". I think it's much more important for modern rpgs to feature an interesting story and characters, choices and consequences, good gameplay and challenging combat. And it's not just voiceovers, I for example like very stat-heavy games, with lots of numbers and thick manuals. Still I wouldn't bash The Witcher or Mask of the Betrayer because they don't have these elements. They are good at what's important.
Now about the voiceovers in particular. Individual games like the Kotor games, Jade Empire, Witcher, etc. are designed for voiced dialogue and would be really awful if you had just text. Try plaing a NWN2 module without voices. Those 16:9 screens are just akward while the smaller window used for non-voiced dialogue in game is ugly and small. Now if we had the infinity engine games dialogue system (I was very dissapointed when they changed it in NWN1) things would be different. That was designed for text only dialogues and had a lot of space to support both large npc answers and large dialogue choice, as well as the option to scroll up and down to read what has been said in case you missed something or forgot.
As a game feature I think it's unfair to label voice acting in video games as worthless and a blight. It has been both a good and a bad thing, depending on the occasion and in many cases it's fundamental to complete the experience the game offers. Let's take things from the begining. Unless I'm mistaken adventures were the first games that featured voice acting. Unless the acting itself was terrible I don't think many people objected to it. It helped create the atmosphere and added some depth to the characters.
The real dilemma, I believe, lies in full voiced rpgs. Let's take the example of the Bioware games. What has voiceacting done for games like Kotor or NWN? It added some depth to the characters, helped create a more cinematic experience and made dialogues more vivid. On the downside it greately reduced the amount of text, simplified dialogue choices and npc responses and generally made dialogues feel more like a movie than a book. Bottomline? I think each can make his own mind but for me the answer is simple. Just compair the dialogues of Torment and Baldur's Gate to any fully voiced games.
On the other hand take the Gothic series. Imagine them without voice. Even with the bad voiceacting of various npcs and other problems I, for one, would certainly miss the irony in the main character's voice as he pronounces otherwise simple lines, giving them a whole bew meaning. I believe the games with all their immersion and choices and consequences wouldn't be the same without voiceacting.
And there are other game like for example VTM: Bloodlines where no voice acting, could break the immersion. Imagine a very life-like character that even has facial expressions and can move his lips but no voice comes out, just some text.
Personally, I like voice acting at games and wouldn't like to see it dissapear completely but I certainly wouldn't mind an old-school rpg with lots and lots of lines of written text and no voices. I'd like to see a greater variety in rpgs today: others with lots of dialogue options and choices and consequences like MotB, others with interesting premade characters and great story like the Witcher, others with tons of text and dialogues like Torment, even good diablo-clones or JRPGs. I think it's wrong to decide that you like certain things about rpgs and want to find them in every new game you play. Of course the problem is that there is no shortage of diablo clones or jrpgs but there is a shortage on rpgs aimed at more hardcore players. Still, that shouldn't serve as to narrow our minds and certainly we shouldn't bash a good game that we enjoy just because it doesn't feature all those things we would want it to.
