Thread: DEV REQUEST: Complete voice acting in 4.0 and beyond

If they keep it to only MSQ and maybe a few important sidequests, I don't mind. But don't make every single unimportant NPC voiced. Most of the time in open world games, they are all voiced by the same man or woman and it gets irritating after a while. (Maybe its because I'm replaying Dragon's Dogma on PC at the moment and almost all the NPCs sound alike. Meh.)

I wish the games industry would stop trying to voice everything...

I mean, it's a great way to add to immersion, but the cost is usually pretty ridiculous... When I look at something like Fallout 4 or Final Fantasy XIII, I can't help but wonder if there would be a better game if every line didn't have to be voiced... Bethesda in particular, seems to have gone for a "Voicing all this costs a lot, lets write less dialog", and that says nothing about the modding scene... Plenty of mods are great, but I'll be damned if the amateur voice work (or utter lack of) doesn't end up killing them for me, even the well done amateur voice overs fans create are fairly jarring alongside the original ones. Then you've got other mods, can I make a mod that significantly changes the main quest? Lets say I want to tell Preston to get lost, can't do that unless I have just text dialog, a bad impression, or hire Jon Gentry (plus the MCs two voice actors) myself...

Really wish the budget put aside for getting voice actors could instead be spent on making a better game, it's a nice thing to have, but the cost quickly spirals if you support multiple languages... That's not to say silence is any better, pre-voice acting games did a fairly good job of giving sound to dialog without voicing everything. Nintendo actually does this fairly well (and when they actually do voice work we get Other M, I rest my case...), Wind Waker and Twilight Princess come to mind, neither voiced their cutscenes, what they did was effectively the same as how we pick our characters voices in character creation here. Heck, Midna had an utterly gibberish language that didn't need to facilitate a Japanese/English/German/French dub, same for Gravity Rush/Daze. That works a lot better IMO, probably why the developers opted to give the dragons their own language in Heavensward.

Originally Posted by Nalien

I wish the games industry would stop trying to voice everything...

I mean, it's a great way to add to immersion, but the cost is usually pretty ridiculous... When I look at something like Fallout 4 or Final Fantasy XIII, I can't help but wonder if there would be a better game if every line didn't have to be voiced... Bethesda in particular, seems to have gone for a "Voicing all this costs a lot, lets write less dialog", and that says nothing about the modding scene... Plenty of mods are great, but I'll be damned if the amateur voice work (or utter lack of) doesn't end up killing them for me, even the well done amateur voice overs fans create are fairly jarring alongside the original ones. Then you've got other mods, can I make a mod that significantly changes the main quest? Lets say I want to tell Preston to get lost, can't do that unless I have just text dialog, a bad impression, or hire Jon Gentry (plus the MCs two voice actors) myself...

Really wish the budget put aside for getting voice actors could instead be spent on making a better game, it's a nice thing to have, but the cost quickly spirals if you support multiple languages... That's not to say silence is any better, pre-voice acting games did a fairly good job of giving sound to dialog without voicing everything. Nintendo actually does this fairly well (and when they actually do voice work we get Other M, I rest my case...), Wind Waker and Twilight Princess come to mind, neither voiced their cutscenes, what they did was effectively the same as how we pick our characters voices in character creation here. Heck, Midna had an utterly gibberish language that didn't need to facilitate a Japanese/English/German/French dub, same for Gravity Rush/Daze. That works a lot better IMO, probably why the developers opted to give the dragons their own language in Heavensward.

Since the problem with FFXIII is that the different team didn't have a good communication, I don't think it would have changed much.

Both ESO and SWTOR have fully voiced NPCs, but both games have budgets that were massively inflated for that purpose, and have trouble adding new story content due to requiring additional voice acting. They wouldn't be able to simply drop in new side quests each patch, without going to the trouble of hiring and directing more voice talent.

Then you have the issue of "is this actor still available?", "can we still use a character from 3 years ago?", "is it acceptable to hire a new voice actor for this character?". With ESO, it is teased that a character voiced by John Cleese will have a larger role in the future, but I don't see the game having a large enough budget expansion to validate hiring John Cleese to do more voice work. If they hadn't gone with voice acting, that character could tap dance his way through every story beat with no extra budget required.

Think of how we can revisit locations like Revenant's Toll or Camp Dragonhead, and various npcs will all comment on our current position in the story. Would they still be able to put those touches into the script if everything had a voice?

And yeah, there are four languages they'd have to do, so multiply these problems by four.

I never see the game being fully voiced, if only because they couldn't possibly account for all the various player names. Unless literally NOBODY ever says our name again... and I think that'd bother me even more than a lack of voices.

Originally Posted by Urthdigger

I never see the game being fully voiced, if only because they couldn't possibly account for all the various player names. Unless literally NOBODY ever says our name again... and I think that'd bother me even more than a lack of voices.

In Visual Novels that let you change the hero or heroine's name, they'll often have a slight pause in dialogue where your name would be in the sentance. Not a perfect solution, but it sounds okay as long as the timing is good.