Annie Mitsoda said:
ironyuri - aha, good catch RE: Gordon Freeman. Another holdout. And you have a good point regarding implementation, which is where I'm going to point out where RPGs are falling into the trend of "more active speakers" more often than others: the cutscenes of HL2 were built around the concept of the player moving through them fluidly - being able to interact with the environment, not as much the characters (beyond shooting bottles at their head with the gravity gun, that is). Since RPGs have choice and interaction at their forefront, and building character as a key part of that, a sort of expectation that we hear their chatter does tend to build. The pure cost of VOICING all those lines is formidable (especially with how vast dialogue trees used to be) but when you have 1) bigger budgets 2) a more mainstream audience and 3) more pared-down dialogue trees, you tend to see VO stand out a little more.
And I'd further suggest it has a role in Mass Effect because you've been GIVEN a role that's a little less flexible than in other titles (you're railroaded a little more in your choices), and because much of presentation of ME is so much like a movie that VO would seem conspicuously absent if it didn't exist. (and actually, Brian saw me posting and added that ME's viewpoint of 3rd person places more of an emphasis on the CHARACTER rather than you PLAYING a character - an identifying presence - to a degree that it can't get away without voice as much as a 1st person game can)
ironyuri said:
When dialogue is conducted in first person there is a tendency to voice the protagonist in your own voice in your own head, so no need for voice; you are the protagonist in the dialogue and therefore do not need to hear another voice to suspend disbelief. Enter Mass Effect and the 3rd person dialogue system in which you are taken out of the protagonist's head and enter "choose your own adventure" dialogue system which then plays out cinematics based on your choices; you are no longer the protagonist therefore s/he needs to be fully voiced for you to continue to suspend disbelief.
If I were to try and expand on what I said there, it basically depends on how developers want to construct the character development model in the RPG;
If you place the player inside the character as in first person RPGs then the character need not be fully voice acted, you just need to give the player dialogue lines to respond with as the player will more than likely read the dialogue from his/her character in their internal voice, an example of this is VtM:Bloodlines-
Regardless of gender/clan/1st/3rd person gameplay, all dialogue was conducted in first person with an unvoiced protagonist. You choose how what attitude to effect and thus the characterisation of the player-character. There was no need for voice acting for the PC because the player could necessarily determine the way he/she would sound based on internal voice.
If we look at 3D 3rd person RPG dialogue, I'll take KotOR as an example; we find an unvoiced protagonist using dialogue but displayed in 3rd person (I'll address isometric RPGS in a second, they're a different kettle of fish). In KotOR, you enter dialogue with NOPs as with the gameplay, in 3rd person; they speak and you are looking at them speak; then the camera shows the protagonist, not through his/her own eyes, but from outside. You are looking at your PC and deciding how they should respond, but when you choose the response they don't actually speak (for the most part they stand around looking awkward and nod every now and then while you prevaricate over which dialogue line to choose). Again it could be said the player decides how the PC is characterised, but because the player has been removed from inside the PCs head this prospect becomes more difficult as you don't actually see them speaking or effecting the attitude you imagine for them because you are looking at them from outside; the player is distanced from the PC and so you no longer experience the world through them. This makes suspension of disbelief a problem- enter full voice acting.
Mass Effect uses a system extremely similar to KotOR.... only with voice acting of the PC. 3rd person dialogue is conducted in much the same way you just decide the "mood" of the dialogue you want and because characterisation and voice/attitude have been pre-determined by the voice actor, you no longer control the characterisation beyond deciding the general mood of the conversations, you are thus further removed from shaping the character. So you go from first person dialogue where line between player/PC are blurred to 3rd person unvoiced where the player-PC divide is strengthened but there isn't a total break to 3rd person fully voiced wherein the player-PC divide is complete; you are now controlling a character who, whether you decide to use paragon or renegade lines will have a pre-determined characterisation.
Isometric rpgs do this differently because you are "looking over the shoulder" of your protagonist so there is a much greater player-PC divide and this shows in the emphasis in most of the older isometrics wherein player skill =/= character skill (cue Bloodlines twitch-based FPS combat wherein player skill = character skill with some PC skill limitations on recoil etc etc) and wherein you characterise the protagonist in dialogue by choices but shaping a character, roleplaying the character, ie: deciding how a character will respond to the world based on the character's abilities etc.
I'm sure I could make some concluding point, but I'm not sure where to go with this. So....
