Owlcat's next game is an AAA title that will need full voice acting to compete with BG3

[gurugeorge]

If Owlcat want more people to play their games, they would do much better to fix up whatever it is about how they make games that make them buggy shitfests on release, than to worry about voice-overs.

 

[Saark]

To be fair, they tried that for two games with middling success. If they try multiple things at once, maybe they'll actually succeed at one of them.

 

[just]

in few years ai voiceacting will be good enough
but i already arent reading their shit i certainly wont listen to it

 

[Roguey]

I don't see how it's a risk at all. Where's the list of AA-AAA failures that happened because they didn't have full voice acting? The expectations are entirely within their own heads.

The risk is in treading onto unknown territory, as no one has really done it before on a grand scale, especially smaller studios trying to barge into the AAA game, or unproven franchises. I agree that just because it's an industry standard, doesn't mean there's no alternative. I actually think that fully voicing a game is completely unnecessary.

But for many companies, the "evidence" exists in the form of games that aren't AA/AAA, where people, especially streamers and their viewers as well as redditors and other vocal minorities, which happen to be very important for marketing purposes, complain and even quit over the lack of voice acting. Like Rogue Trader. I personally doubt that the loss in sales is bigger than the cost of fully voicing games, but like you said yourself, the cost for fully voicing a game isn't obscenely high either and in a 50+ mil production, its a small chunk of it so companies just tend to allocate it instead of dealing with bad PR over "OMG NOT FULLY VOICED" by a bunch of retards.

Tears of the Kingdom had a core team of 300 people https://www.mobygames.com/game/2031...the-kingdom/credits/switch/?autoplatform=true

There's no unknown territory here. All this time Nintendo has been making 00s-style games with AAA team sizes and beating everyone else while doing it https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/software/index.html

 

[Baron Tahn]

Owlcat, we don't give a shit about voiceover. We care about writing, combat, exploration, that kind of thing. And bugs, specifically, we don't want them. And we don't really give a shit about your tacked-on minigames. Get it through your thick skulls.

This! But just to clarify on the writing part, less is sometimes more. The amount of terrible writing crammed into our eyeballs these days is atrocious. None of it, certainly not BG3, is any good. Not from Obsidian or Bioware either.

You (Owlcat) cant compete with 'good' writers and there isnt any need to. Just make some cool memorable party members with some good v/o banter and give us the other stuff Yosharion mentions.

I wonder if this whole 'writing' obsession came from Planescape: Torment sometimes. It wasnt good enough to spend 30 years going that direction thats for sure.

 

[Infinitron]

Yes, a bunch of people ITT are pretending that they weren't complaining about text loredumps five minutes ago.

 

[Irxy]

Solasta has full VO and spent a fraction of what Owlcat spent on WotR (I think).

Voicing the whole 3 pages long scenario is not much of an achievement, we're talking proper hundreds of thousands lines of text rpgs here.

 

[Stavrophore]

Owlcat, we don't give a shit about voiceover. We care about writing, combat, exploration, that kind of thing. And bugs, specifically, we don't want them. And we don't really give a shit about your tacked-on minigames. Get it through your thick skulls.

RPGs as genre you knew are over, get over it.

 

[Alienman]

If they are competing with BG3 they already lost, tbh.

Find it amusing how BG3 collectively crushed the confidence of so many other developers. Can't say I have seen that happen before - the resentment for their success.

 

[Irxy]

If I were in charge at Owlcat

I wish you were.

Owlcat are literally a bunch of westernised Slav hipsters with a buttplug up their arse. They are closer to Americans than Russians.

Hey, at least they are bringing the best

Spoiler

buttplugs

of both worlds to the rpg genre!

 

[luj1]

Find it amusing how BG3 collectively crushed the confidence of so many other developers.

Cause they don't know how to be original

 

[Irxy]

Find it amusing how BG3 collectively crushed the confidence of so many other developers.

Cause they don't know how to be original

There is nothing original in BG3.
The only thing it showed is that classic rpg gameplay works fine and sells fine with the modern presentation and budget, despite the widespread belief that action rpgs & open world are the only ways.
Just like Dark Souls showed a decade ago that hardcore sells. Wasn't AAA right away, but the existence of BG3 was also only made possible by the kickstarter-spawned resurgence of classic lower-tier rpgs.

What's the discussion is about anyway? It's kind of a no-brainer that games with better overall presentation (including grapgics, voices, cur-scenes etc.) will get more attention & better sales.
Doesn't mean that the core gameplay or story are not important.

 

[luj1]

Find it amusing how BG3 collectively crushed the confidence of so many other developers.

Cause they don't know how to be original

There is nothing original in BG3.

And who said there was? You really can't follow the conversation, can you? I sad THEY ('other developers') don't know how to be original, which is how you battle this cancer.

 

[La vie sexuelle]

BG3 is a game for the masses, it is only one bar lower than CoD or Battlefield. Or FIFA. Mainly queer zoomers, blue-haired millennials, and leftist Gen-Xers. Some Owlcat players play BG3, but it's a small percentage IMHO.

BG3 is mainstream, much like "Lord of the Rings" is in the realm of literature. It's the video game equivalent, boasting great interactivity and extensive character creation, allowing players to craft any kind of character they want to identify with. Alongside this, it features excellent tactical combat and memorable characters, regardless of personal preference. It's a highly sophisticated game of extreme quality, thanks to its extensive budget and large development team. Furthermore, it runs smoothly on various hardware setups, unlike Starfield or likely the upcoming Dragon's Dogma 2. Larian Studios got the formula right, and Owlcat Games could benefit from engaging with us more to better understand it.

You are very kind to compare BG3 to Lord of the Rings (personally I would compare this game to Interview with the Vampire, similar class and audience).

More than a game, Baldurs Gate 3 is an achievement of design and technology. Not because everything went well, but still, it in itself required a great deal of knowledge and work organization. And these are actually the things that a good game is based on (even if it can be silliy from time to time).

Many indie games are genius without money or knowledge, Cyberpunk 2077 is money without knowledge or genius. Baldur's Gate 3 is about knowledge and money.

Did Owlcat catch Western Brain Cancer completely? Does freedom really deprive people of the ability to basic logical thinking?

It's more like what's in the water supply that does it. At least that's what Mr. Jones says happened to your people. The chemicals in the water made the frogs gay.

Alex Jones did this photo in Bohemian Grove:

 

[Konjad]

RIP Owlcat, I never cared about you much.

 

[Gargaune]

Dumb, wasteful choice, most likely. Isometric RPGs don't inherently need full VO because their core perspective already implies a high level of abstraction. In games like (actual) Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale, the partial VO serves only as an occasional reminder of what a character sounds like, fleshing out their character, disposition and mannerisms, in the same way that a portrait gives the player a suggestion of what they'd look like rather than a play-by-play, and the player's imagination instinctively fills in the blanks.

Larian's BG3, however, went for a highly cinematic movie-game presentation in its cutscenes and dialogue, as is more common for high-budget Action-RPGs like The Witcher 3, so the full VO was absolutely required to match all those animated dramatics. But if you're not going for the same thing (and since you "can't invest 200 million bajillion dollars", I'm guessing Owlcat aren't), voicing all the dialogue is just throwing money out the window. Full VO added nothing to Deadfire and it would've added nothing to Kingmaker or Shadows of Amn or even the story-centric Planescape: Torment.

Bottom line - if you're telling your story in complex, dramatic scenes with cinematic frames, you need full VO; if you're telling your story in little text boxes with the camera hovering overhead, full VO's a complete waste of money.

 

[Decado]

If they are competing with BG3 they already lost, tbh.

Find it amusing how BG3 collectively crushed the confidence of so many other developers. Can't say I have seen that happen before - the resentment for their success.

I was thinking about this as well. It's like nobody has any confidence in their vision for anything they are making. They all think "Oh shit, now we have to compete with Baldur's Gate 3?!?!".

No, you don't. You can't. Nobody can, that's the point. BG3 was lightning in a bottle, like Helldivers 2, or World of Warcraft. Just keep making the game you were going to make, grind it out, and believe in it. Jesus Christ. Find your testicles.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

There is nothing original in BG3.
The only thing it showed is that classic rpg gameplay works fine and sells fine with the modern presentation and budget, despite the widespread belief that action rpgs & open world are the only ways.

BG3 is riding the momentum of something Larian has built since DoS I and II, riding on the new wave of table-top RPG shows (critical role and such), and riding them through Multiplayer features as well.

It's pretty much almost a decade of being the only mainstream multiplayer "Tabletop like RPG". DoS 2 exploded in popularity also with Streamers and such.

Whatever Larian does after DoS II is pretty much a guaranteed mainstream success. And essentially written for modern tabletop audience make BG III just tick all the right boxes, including using DnD 5e whose popularity exploded due to Critical Role.

If the same game of BG3 is released by any other dev (or game by Larian but not using DnD 5e) it will not reach half of BG III sales. It's the equivalent of Call of Duty for modern tabletop RPG folk.

Trying to replicate it's success is fundamentally futile because BGIII sales has nothing to do with its budget/production value/or even its quality as a video game

 

[S.H.O.D.A.N.]

So I definitely agree, that the shortened attention span wasn't the driving factor behind more cinematic games, but I think it contributed to it to some degree.

I don't think anyone's attention span was shortened. It's just that gaming in general shifted from a demographic comprised predominately of people who not only look to consume ideas, but also to create them, to a demographic of people who do no engage with ideas in any meaningful way.

We didn't change. We were simply supplanted by a much larger group of people who do not share our mental makeup.

 

[Irxy]

Bottom line - if you're telling your story in complex, dramatic scenes with cinematic frames, you need full VO; if you're telling your story in little text boxes with the camera hovering overhead, full VO's a complete waste of money.

Would agree with this in the past, yet say Disco Elysium gets half of its charm from voice acting imo.
Can't say that every isometric rpg would benefit from this, but some very much so. Come to think of it, if some text is not worth voicing it over, is it really worth reading?

 

[scytheavatar]

Larian
>Never bitches and moans about what other developers are doing
>Sticks to their guns doing their own things with their own IP for decades even when all they make is jank euroshit
>Finally has a breakthrough hit in D:OS
>Reinvests all that success into themselves, lands the BG3 deal with WotC, goes on to make an even bigger hit

Every other modern CRPG developer
>Bitches, whines, complains about not enough people buying their slop
>Only ever makes changes to their tired old game design formulas after fans already do their work for them with mods if ever
>Just copies what other CRPGs have done before them, never dares to come up with anything new
>Acts surprised when they meet little success in rehashing a genre that died out two decades ago

 

[Gargaune]

Come to think of it, if some text is not worth voicing it over, is it really worth reading?

Yes, absolutely. You might enjoy the performances in a game for their own craft, but you're not missing anything if they don't cover the whole text - you're provided a cue with partial VO to inform what that character sounds like and all that entails, and then your brain carries those impressions even if the rest of the text goes silent. Literature doesn't suffer in characterisation just because you don't have a full cast of professional actors reading it out to you and partial VO in an isometric cRPG, given its abstract nature is already heavily reliant on engaging the consumer's imagination, just adds a bit of extra flair and precision to the process, extending to full coverage doesn't net much more in the format.

 

[luj1]

It's like nobody has any confidence in their vision

This was true way before BG3 though.

 

[S.H.O.D.A.N.]

Come to think of it, if some text is not worth voicing it over, is it really worth reading?

You write differently depending on whether the text is supposed to be read or spoken. Acting isn't inherently superior to reading.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

Writing: bad
Characters: cringe
Combat: balancing nightmare
Minigames: awful
Bugs: Starship Troopers quantity

Analysis: Need to put more money into VO

When you put it like that it makes sense why the Owlcat founder thinks full VA is all they need to be a BG3 style success. All the Larian games before BG3 were buggy and unfinished messes with pretty poor combat and some of the worst cringe characters and bad writing out there. BG3 added fully mo-capped and voiced characters in the style of Critical (race theory) Role and bestiality on top of it.