There's a big difference between an actor reading lines in a movie and a voice actor going through a laundry list of text in a wordy RPG. There's not that much spoken text that goes into a movie, and actors spend lots of time preparing delivery of every line, developing the character and his traits of speech, learning accents and quirks. They also discuss that with movie creative directors, consult experts, undergo coaching. There's so, so much that goes into every line of dialogue of a movie (we're talking decent quality movie of course). Movie's actors voice is probably the biggest part of acting as a profession, and that, often non-verbal, component that actor creates in this process is the key to delivery of the whole narrative.
Pretty much. An empty superficial demand with no real use.
You're right -- most actors are shit voice actors. As someone who listens to a lot of audio books -- being able to convey a range of emotions solely through voice is not as easy as you make it out to be.
I have no idea if most actors are shit voice actors. Can't be right or wrong about it since I never made any claims in this regard. Also I made no mention of how easy or hard it is to convey emotions with voice. I'm not talking aloud when reading text to myself, no voice is used in this process. And I can assure you I'm very convincing in conveying emotions to me in my own head.
and you can even shake his piss-soaked handJust have Ron Pearlman right out a few lines at the beginning of your game. Then add a voiced line for your talking heads, here and there. That's all the VO you need
You're welcome, Josh
Completely agree. I read very fast, I end up skipping most of the VO even when I'm not skipping through the dialogue (which I rarely do)
The Deadfire Post-Postmortem
Since the video of my Digital Dragons postmortem for Deadfire went up, I’ve seen a few questions and comments that I think are worth addressing. If you haven’t seen the video yet, you can find it here:
First, it’s worth saying that this talk was only supposed to be 45 minutes, with ~15 minutes left for questions. I overran the 45 minute mark, so please understand that I couldn’t address every criticism people leveled at the game. I tried to talk about the things that came up most frequently in player and reviewer feedback.
1) Do you think the open world nature of the game contributed to the story/plot/pacing feeling weak?
Yes. I made the choice to make the game more open and knew that would impact how tight the story and its pacing would feel. However, even with that choice being made, I still could have done a better job with structuring and pacing the critical path.
For a while, we had a hard limit on where the Defiant could go in the archipelago. The in-story justification was that the Defiant was damaged and needed expensive repairs that you needed to raise money for. It could only move in the shallows, which comprised about 1/5 of the total map, encompassing Maje Island, Neketaka, Fort Deadlight, the Woedica pyramid, and some other places. We removed that, but we weren’t really doing anything with that restriction, story-wise, other than preventing the player from sailing from Port Maje to Hasongo without stopping at Neketaka.
I don’t have hard data for this, but I haven’t seen much anecdotal evidence that many/any players actually make that skip on their first playthrough. I think whether we (for example) forced the player to funnel through Neketaka/the palace before going to Hasongo is less important to the pacing of the story than disconnection between the factions and Eothas.
Re-working those plot elements may have required explicitly gating the player in the same way that the trial at the end of Act 2 creates a high-drama gate before going to Act 3, but then we’re really going back to the core issue, which was two disconnected plotlines.
Maybe this seems like an evasion, but I’m trying to explain that the plot was not conceived as disconnected to support the game being more open. The game was actually more closed during development. We did gate the player until we realized that the plot didn’t demand it. One could say, “Then why didn’t you change it then?” Because I made a mistake. That’s why I cited the plotting and pacing, not the open nature of the game, as the bigger issue. If the story had demanded more restriction and the pacing felt solid because of it, maybe I would have erred on the side of more restrictions.
And while a weak story is almost purely a negative for players, the map being almost entirely open does have positive aspects, that being the freedom to explore. Was it worth the trade off?
It doesn’t seem like it, no.
2) Why wasn’t the Penetration system discussed?
Considering the broad nature of the postmortem, the Penetration system seemed like too fine a point to discuss in detail. The systems aren’t easy to talk about in less than a couple of minutes, and a couple of minutes would have pushed me past the time limit. Also, in the end, it seems like more players ultimately preferred Penetration to the previous DT system.
I’d like to step back to talk about something at a higher level, which is vertical progression in RPGs. Most RPGs/CRPGs focus on the vertical progression of numbers: damage, hit points, armor values, resistances, etc.
These numbers feed into formulae to produce a range of outcomes. The more inputs a number has and the wider the range of values on those inputs, the more quickly the formulae start to break down. This is why MMORPGs often abstract values and do arcane under-the-hood adjustments or go through periods of “squish” where all of the numbers get recalibrated/normalized (in the case of WoW, both).
Penetration was an attempt to retain the transparent vertical progression of armor and weapon values while constraining/normalizing the input > output of damage vs. armor. The Pillars 1 DT system is easier to understand on a basic level, but I maintain that’s still harder to make tactical choices based on it. This is based on observation of players using the system. The Pillars 2 Penetration system takes longer for players to figure out, but once they figure it out, they generally make better decisions in the system.
Is vertical progression important? That depends on the audience and the nature of the game as a whole. Horizontal progression (i.e., unlocking different actions/capabilities) can have much more of an impact, and I prefer games that emphasize horizontal over vertical progression. But I didn’t make Deadfire to my tastes, specifically, and Pillars 1 + the Infinity Engine games were dominated by the importance of vertical progression.
Personally, I would like to try an armor system where you have light/medium/heavy armor and attacks simply have light/medium/heavy penetration, there is no numerical progression in that relationship, and armor and weapons (including magical ones) gain extra/additional cool abilities instead of progressing on a numbers treadmill.
3) How was ship-to-ship combat, which is seemingly not that complicated, so expensive?
It was so expensive because it was an entirely custom system that re-used almost no assets from the rest of the game. Every sound you hear in ship-to-ship, every drawing of a ship you see at various distances/states of decay, every custom string listing actions and consequences, the cue system, every piece of user interface, was custom.
One of our system designers came up with this concept of ship-to-ship combat because he believed it would be resource-light. I cut it after two iterations because it was very obvious to me at that point that it was going to be arduously resource-heavy.
I honestly think that if we had made ship-to-ship combat a real-time with pause system more like combat in Pirates!, it would have ultimately been less expensive and much more fun for more players.
4) Wow, you really don’t get why the game sucks, do you?
A game can suck in myriad ways for different people. The ways I talked about are the ways that came up most frequently for players and reviewers. I mentioned that at the beginning of the talk, but it’s worth saying again here.
If you’d like me to address the way in which you thought the game sucked, just ask me a question here and I’ll try to answer it.
1) Do you think the open world nature of the game contributed to the story/plot/pacing feeling weak?
Yes. I made the choice to make the game more open and knew that would impact how tight the story and its pacing would feel. However, even with that choice being made, I still could have done a better job with structuring and pacing the critical path.
For a while, we had a hard limit on where the Defiant could go in the archipelago. The in-story justification was that the Defiant was damaged and needed expensive repairs that you needed to raise money for. It could only move in the shallows, which comprised about 1/5 of the total map, encompassing Maje Island, Neketaka, Fort Deadlight, the Woedica pyramid, and some other places. We removed that, but we weren’t really doing anything with that restriction, story-wise, other than preventing the player from sailing from Port Maje to Hasongo without stopping at Neketaka.
I don’t have hard data for this, but I haven’t seen much anecdotal evidence that many/any players actually make that skip on their first playthrough. I think whether we (for example) forced the player to funnel through Neketaka/the palace before going to Hasongo is less important to the pacing of the story than disconnection between the factions and Eothas.
Re-working those plot elements may have required explicitly gating the player in the same way that the trial at the end of Act 2 creates a high-drama gate before going to Act 3, but then we’re really going back to the core issue, which was two disconnected plotlines.
Maybe this seems like an evasion, but I’m trying to explain that the plot was not conceived as disconnected to support the game being more open. The game was actually more closed during development. We did gate the player until we realized that the plot didn’t demand it. One could say, “Then why didn’t you change it then?” Because I made a mistake. That’s why I cited the plotting and pacing, not the open nature of the game, as the bigger issue. If the story had demanded more restriction and the pacing felt solid because of it, maybe I would have erred on the side of more restrictions.
And while a weak story is almost purely a negative for players, the map being almost entirely open does have positive aspects, that being the freedom to explore. Was it worth the trade off?
It doesn’t seem like it, no.
2) Why wasn’t the Penetration system discussed?
Considering the broad nature of the postmortem, the Penetration system seemed like too fine a point to discuss in detail. The systems aren’t easy to talk about in less than a couple of minutes, and a couple of minutes would have pushed me past the time limit. Also, in the end, it seems like more players ultimately preferred Penetration to the previous DT system.
I’d like to step back to talk about something at a higher level, which is vertical progression in RPGs. Most RPGs/CRPGs focus on the vertical progression of numbers: damage, hit points, armor values, resistances, etc.
These numbers feed into formulae to produce a range of outcomes. The more inputs a number has and the wider the range of values on those inputs, the more quickly the formulae start to break down. This is why MMORPGs often abstract values and do arcane under-the-hood adjustments or go through periods of “squish” where all of the numbers get recalibrated/normalized (in the case of WoW, both).
Penetration was an attempt to retain the transparent vertical progression of armor and weapon values while constraining/normalizing the input > output of damage vs. armor. The Pillars 1 DT system is easier to understand on a basic level, but I maintain that’s still harder to make tactical choices based on it. This is based on observation of players using the system. The Pillars 2 Penetration system takes longer for players to figure out, but once they figure it out, they generally make better decisions in the system.
Is vertical progression important? That depends on the audience and the nature of the game as a whole. Horizontal progression (i.e., unlocking different actions/capabilities) can have much more of an impact, and I prefer games that emphasize horizontal over vertical progression. But I didn’t make Deadfire to my tastes, specifically, and Pillars 1 + the Infinity Engine games were dominated by the importance of vertical progression.
Personally, I would like to try an armor system where you have light/medium/heavy armor and attacks simply have light/medium/heavy penetration, there is no numerical progression in that relationship, and armor and weapons (including magical ones) gain extra/additional cool abilities instead of progressing on a numbers treadmill.
3) How was ship-to-ship combat, which is seemingly not that complicated, so expensive?
It was so expensive because it was an entirely custom system that re-used almost no assets from the rest of the game. Every sound you hear in ship-to-ship, every drawing of a ship you see at various distances/states of decay, every custom string listing actions and consequences, the cue system, every piece of user interface, was custom.
One of our system designers came up with this concept of ship-to-ship combat because he believed it would be resource-light. I cut it after two iterations because it was very obvious to me at that point that it was going to be arduously resource-heavy.
I honestly think that if we had made ship-to-ship combat a real-time with pause system more like combat in Pirates!, it would have ultimately been less expensive and much more fun for more players.
4) Wow, you really don’t get why the game sucks, do you?
A game can suck in myriad ways for different people. The ways I talked about are the ways that came up most frequently for players and reviewers. I mentioned that at the beginning of the talk, but it’s worth saying again here.
If you’d like me to address the way in which you thought the game sucked, just ask me a question here and I’ll try to answer it.
