Full voiceovers ruin text-heavy RPGs for me

[Nifft Batuff]

 

[luj1]

How rusty sees reality:




He needs total VO to tie it all together

 

[Dodo1610]

I still don't understand this opinion, the advantage of voice acting is that you don't need to read the text and just listen casually. In games that lack full voice acting, I always start skimming over dialogue instead of really taking it in about it. I don't know how many times I had no idea what I was supposed to do because I didn't read carefully enough. Of course, the biggest advantage is the added atmosphere so the world feels more alive.

 

[V_K]

I always start skimming over dialogue instead of really taking it

Which typically just means it's too long and badly written.

 

[J_C]

I still don't understand this opinion, the advantage of voice acting is that you don't need to read the text and just listen casually. In games that lack full voice acting, I always start skimming over dialogue instead of really taking it in about it. I don't know how many times I had no idea what I was supposed to do because I didn't read carefully enough. Of course, the biggest advantage is the added atmosphere so the world feels more alive.

It's pretty straightforward. There is a 100 hour RPG which has a loooot of dialogue. Now how much from this is actually engaging, interesting dialogue? 10%? The rest is just exposisoin, chit-chating with the nth NPC etc. Now imagine that you have to listen to this not particularly engaging dialogue for dozens of hours. I'd rather read it, which I can do much faster, and I can probably remember it much better. And if they have a few voiced lines like in the IE games, I still get the feel of the character and the atmosphere. Best of both worlds.

 

[Drakortha]

How rusty sees reality:




He needs total VO to tie it all together

VO by Liam Neesan?

 

[Shaewaroz]

BG2 did it perfectly. BG2 did everything perfectly.

 

[Lurker47]

Fuck voice-acting. All my niggas hate voice-acting.

 

[Drakortha]

BG2 did it perfectly. It did everything perfectly.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Yes, I also yell at people IRL for talking to me instead of bringing up a text box or subtitles with an option to quickly advance the dialogue.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Yes, I also yell at people IRL for talking to me instead of bringing up a text box or subtitles with an option to quickly advance the dialogue.

If have text boxes you can also read them using VO with nice and joyful voices.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Yes, I also yell at people IRL for talking to me instead of bringing up a text box or subtitles with an option to quickly advance the dialogue.

If have text boxes you can also read them using VO with nice and joyful voices.

I prefer to read while listening to good muzak, thank you.

 

[Mark.L.Joy]

I do my own VA.

 

[Verylittlefishes]

Ekera! Ekera ekera? Ekera, friend.

 

[Kainan]

Only Fallout had good use of VA, it always added something unique. BG was good but kind of bizarre at times.

 

[Naraya]

The worst thing is when there is a VO with a text box, and text advances together with the VO. I hate it with a passion because I feel the pressure to read the text fast enough to keep up with the VO (which often can't be muted so I can't properly focus on reading the text when hearing the VO). Ugh.

 

[Yosharian]

As I was churning over my huge backlog, finally I got to Pillars of Eternity 2. I was curious about the game, since it got such a mixed reception. And I have to tell you the truth, I uninstalled if after 2 hours of playing. But not for the reason many Codexers would think.

The graphics were awesome, I very much liked the music, and I have to be honest, I even liked the gameplay changes compared to the first game.

But there is one thing which ruined the game for me. Full voicovers. They are just annoying. Not because of their quality, they were typical fantasy voiceovers (not particularly good or bad), but there is so much text in this game, that listening all those lines fully voiced just bored me to death. It is so much faster to read them.

Now you might say that I could just skip the voiced dialogue when I finished reading the line. That's true, but maybe because english is not my native language, it is distracting for me to read while listening some other spoken dialogue.

I remember retards gamers being all over fully voiced RPGs, but I just don't get it. It's OK with cinematic, first person or third person RPGs, but these oldschool, text heavy RPGs suffer a lot IMO. There is just too much text, that listening them all fully voiced is getting boring really fast. Now Divinity OS2 and Wasteland 3 are still in my backlog, but I'm already dreading to play them. I want to play them, but there is a chance that their full VO will ruin them for me.

I always was on the opinion that the IE games did it best. Voice the more important lines, or just the first sentence of a character and let the player read the rest. It's sad that game developers force the VO for games which are not suited for it.

So devs, if your game is text heavy, just don't use full VO, please don't. If you want VO, use an editor who cuts the text to a managable length.

Anyone else experienced similar thing?

I don't mind voice-acting but I do tend to read text very quickly so I skip over a lot of it. My issues with VO are not its existence, but rather when it is bad. Xoti has terrible VO for example, and I also hate the narrator's VO in this game. Thankfully there is a mod to remove the narrator's VO, and Xoti can be ignored in favour of companions with good VO, like Serafen.

I don't really think this is a good reason to abandon Deadfire, but the game has some other significant flaws so I'm not going to try to persuade you to give the game another try. I do think it's a rather small thing to abandon a game over, though.

BG2 already did VO the correct way for a text-heavy game, which is to have VO for the first line or two of dialogue and then the rest is text-only. That way you get an idea for how the character sounds, but you can read the rest of the dialogue at your own pace. Best solution, IMO.

 

[Dillrodimus Prime]

Was actually just thinking there is probably a topic about this somewhere. Agree wholeheartedly with OP. It's super distracting and can get to be a real source of annoyance if I want to actually pay attention to the text rather than skim through it. I don't mind shows with subtitles, even in English, I think it's because I can parse the short amount of text onscreen quickly enough to avoid being pulled out halfway through. Anything longer than a sentence and I start getting distracted by hearing shit I was just thinking 5 seconds ago or whatever.

Complaining about this is literally retarded when you can just turn off the voiced audio. For me, I heavily prefer games to be fully voiced, minus the player-character, it's more engrossing and less tiring than having to read pages upon pages of dialog when I'm just trying to play a fucking game. It's way more immersive as well; I mean, you don't read conversations when you chat with someone in real life, you hear them.

Except it's not retarded to complain about, because from our perspective it's a massive resource drain for something that adds little or nothing to the end product.

I still don't understand this opinion, the advantage of voice acting is that you don't need to read the text and just listen casually. In games that lack full voice acting, I always start skimming over dialogue instead of really taking it in about it. I don't know how many times I had no idea what I was supposed to do because I didn't read carefully enough. Of course, the biggest advantage is the added atmosphere so the world feels more alive.

I always kind of wondered if anybody actually waited around for (random npc voice actor) to voice (random filler line #692) rather than reading and clicking through.... huh.

I'm just going to pull a random number out of my ass and say maybe 15% of any given RPG you're interacting with NPC's. In a 40 hour game, you're talking... 6 HOURS of listening to mediocre voice actors recite likely mediocre writing. How anyone can stand to sit through the equivalent of maybe 4 full length feature films of this for each video game they play is kind of baffling to me. Would definitely prefer if BG or FO style VO characterization was the norm but sadly I don't see it as likely

 

[Drowed]

Yes, I also yell at people IRL for talking to me instead of bringing up a text box or subtitles with an option to quickly advance the dialogue.

Guilty, although I yell in my mind. It's amazing how, in my life, 90% of the dialogues are filler. People take 5 minutes to describe something that could be said in 30 seconds, it's infuriating. When they launch LIFE 2.0, I sincerely hope they take away the option of forced voice acting and allow me to skip dialogues, it would be a monumental improvement.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Yes, I also yell at people IRL for talking to me instead of bringing up a text box or subtitles with an option to quickly advance the dialogue.

Guilty, although I yell in my mind. It's amazing how, in my life, 90% of the dialogues are filler. People take 5 minutes to describe something that could be said in 30 seconds, it's infuriating. When they launch LIFE 2.0, I sincerely hope they take away the option of forced voice acting and allow me to skip dialogues, it would be a monumental improvement.

Would you prefer ADHD, hearing loss or good old autism?

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Bunch of old men yelling at clouds, the thread

Full VO is fine so long the quality is acceptable. Now the fact that not every game that do full VO has acceptable quality is its own problem, but there is nothing inherently wrong with full VO.

 

[J_C]

Bunch of old men yelling at clouds, the thread

Full VO is fine so long the quality is acceptable. Now the fact that not every game that do full VO has acceptable quality is its own problem, but there is nothing inherently wrong with full VO.

Do you have a positive example of text heavy RPGs having full VO?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Bunch of old men yelling at clouds, the thread

Full VO is fine so long the quality is acceptable. Now the fact that not every game that do full VO has acceptable quality is its own problem, but there is nothing inherently wrong with full VO.

Do you have a positive example of text heavy RPGs having full VO?

Do you have a positive example of a text heavy RPG?

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Yes, I also yell at people IRL for talking to me instead of bringing up a text box or subtitles with an option to quickly advance the dialogue.

Guilty, although I yell in my mind. It's amazing how, in my life, 90% of the dialogues are filler. People take 5 minutes to describe something that could be said in 30 seconds, it's infuriating. When they launch LIFE 2.0, I sincerely hope they take away the option of forced voice acting and allow me to skip dialogues, it would be a monumental improvement.

This is the curse of becoming older and more experienced... Often I would like people to answer to my inquires directly with a single word: yes or no, I don't need anything else because I already know it.

When I read books or news, often I skip entire paragraphs to speed up reading. 99/100 times no relevant information is lost and, even if it is, I can reconstruct what happened just by interpolating. It is much faster to recunstruct mentally what I skipped than to read it.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Bunch of old men yelling at clouds, the thread

Full VO is fine so long the quality is acceptable. Now the fact that not every game that do full VO has acceptable quality is its own problem, but there is nothing inherently wrong with full VO.

Do you have a positive example of text heavy RPGs having full VO?

You know what? PoE2 is fine, VO wise. It is acceptable, in the context of the VO. It is just the writing on itself is not good. But that's not the problem with the VO, it is the problem with the game writing.

That the long texts are not captivating, and this boring to be heard is not problem of full VO, it is the problem with the game writing. Removing full VO from PoE 2 will not make it any better on the narrative department. I would argue reading lines of lines of trite dialogue is more painful than listening to them being delivered through VO.

And if you just want to skip and then you can skip them regardless the VO is there or not.