Game News Pillars of Eternity II gets full voice acting

[CyberWhale]

Imagine being a professional company with hundreds of thousands of customers and making important announcements to those customers via a self-shotd video by a college fratboy who makes faces and wears a flatcap indoors.

I wonder how Feargus feels about the fact that his team seems to be avoiding the Fig platform he helped create and they increasingly prefer to do everything via social media and forum posts.

There's no denying it, crowdfunding updates have become second string for this game. Wonder if that's a trend.

This is pretty disgusting TBH. Not only is it disrespectful towards all the backers, but it is also unorganized and hard to follow (and becomes increasingly so as time passes).
The only worse thing than that is Sawyer discussing RPG mechanics and Obsidian games on SomethingAwful and Tumblr instead of Codex and official Obsidian forums.

 

[abnaxus]

Wow, Laura Bailey is voicing Palevagina.

 

[Infinitron]

Wow, Laura Bailey is voicing Palevagina.

Nope, same voice actress as before:

 

[Hobo Elf]

This is what you guys paid for on fig. Hope it was worth it!

 

[Suicidal]

Sawyer should have voice acted Pallegina himself.

 

[thesheeep]

If having everything voiced means fewer uninteresting walls of text, then I'm all for it.
Imagine what we would have been spared if Numanuma had been fully voiced.

 

[Junmarko]

Here have some useless voice acting, instead of the Infinity Engine gameplay that you would like. Cause fuck you, that is why.

Have we been teleported back two years? The game is due in a month and they just announced that a "desirable" target has been met. Why are people complaining?

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

remember P:E barely ahd a n editing pass for its lore vomit. now they take additional time to suck casual (and publisher) cock and introduce completely unnecessary voice acting.

Why not bring proper vancian casting back? Cause Sawyer is a sjw ekwality cuck. Thats why.

 

[CyberWhale]

Yes, because having no VO would do just that, introduce Vancian Casting and change gameplay to be more like in old IE titles.

 

[Shin]

Not a big fan of PoE, but their speech/text ratio was pretty okay as far as I played it. Meaning that maybe 2% of the text was voiced, which is more than enough. Let the important characters/companions have some voiced dialogue to give them some depth, and that's it.

 

[ortucis]

Imagine being a professional company with hundreds of thousands of customers and making important announcements to those customers via a self-shotd video by a college fratboy who makes faces and wears a flatcap indoors.

I wonder how Feargus feels about the fact that his team seems to be avoiding the Fig platform he helped create and they increasingly prefer to do everything via social media and forum posts.

There's no denying it, crowdfunding updates have become second string for this game. Wonder if that's a trend.

This is pretty disgusting TBH. Not only is it disrespectful towards all the backers, but it is also unorganized and hard to follow (and becomes increasingly so as time passes).
The only worse thing than that is Sawyer discussing RPG mechanics and Obsidian games on SomethingAwful and Tumblr instead of Codex and official Obsidian forums.

Why would they discuss their games here? On Codex, there is no filter and we can call their games shit to their faces. Developers who are scared of that, will never risk it. That's why they prefer shit like Reddit where they can just pay Reddit to "manage" the replies in a thread.

 

[Flou]

I have a feeling that nowadays RPG devs include full voice acting so that the games would be more suitable for Twitch streams. Twitch is a great source of visibility and advertising and nobody wants to stream a game where you have to read a ton of text out loud even if that person enjoys RPGs.

It is definately one of the reasons.

I can't even imagine a streamer playing Torment with the endless conversations that you have to read. Pillars wasn't as bad, but it is still quite heavy on non-voiced dialogue.

They had to create Pillars 1 with a very limited budget and they didn't have much funds to put into the game. Now they have a bigger budget and can actually react to what is happening around them.
People are have been asking for more VO since Fig started, Larian fully voiced their game which naturally reflects on to Deadfire as well.

Gaming media will compare Deadfire to DOS2, there's no doubt about it. Both are crowdfunded sequels in the same genre. If one game has fully voiced dialogue and the other one's doesn't, it will show in the reviews. So, as much as Codex wants to act like this is the end of the world, it's also a quite necessary for Obsidian to have fully voiced conversations in the game.

Deadfire isn't a small project made by 20-30 people. Hence the expectations for the production values have gone up as well.

 

[Nekot-The-Brave]

But why?

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Company: We're making shit game after shit game, buggy, disappointing, catering to console popamole. We're really bad at this "making crpgs" stuff.

Codex: We stand by you like a good beaten wife. We never learn. We even have jew ai admin dedicated to sucking your dick 24/7.

Same company: Our next shit game has full voice acting.

Codex: This cannot stand! REEEEEEEEEEE

 

[Junmarko]

remember P:E barely ahd a n editing pass for its lore vomit.

...the in-house lore they wrote from scratch? Not the same as picking up an I.P over a decade old. The DnD settings are classic, but it's not worth the risk. There's always a creative dispute once the game outshines the tabletop.

 

[Stainless Veteran]

Company: We're making shit game after shit game, buggy, disappointing, catering to console popamole. We're really bad at this "making crpgs" stuff.

Codex: We stand by you like a good beaten wife. We never learn. We even have jew ai admin dedicated to sucking your dick 24/7.

Same company: Our next shit game has full voice acting.

Codex: This cannot stand! REEEEEEEEEEE

Off-topic: for six years I misread your nick as Zloj Laminat, and today I actually read it right for the first time. What does it mean? Bandit Bonebreaker or something?

 

[Tim the Bore]

God dammit Obsidian, I'm trying to believe in PoE 2, but you're making it harder with every passing day.
I mean, it's obvious why they're doing it, but it doesn't make it any better. Ideally, only some of the dialogues should be voiced - just enough to give me an idea how this character supposed to sound and then occasionally reinforced that idea. But hearing them all the time - while you trying to read - is just fucking annoying. How come that Baldur's Gate got it right - and understood why it should be that way - and almost no one else?

A question for someone who knows this stuff: how hard would be to program an option that would allow the player to hear only some of the voices, and not all of them? In specific places?

 

[Roguey]

Here have some useless voice acting, instead of the Infinity Engine gameplay that you would like. Cause fuck you, that is why.

Deadfire hasn't been marketed as an IE successor. It's the DA2 to PoE's DA:O.

 

[Bohrain]

It's the DA2 to PoE's DA:O.

I couldn't think of a worse insult to a sequel.

 

[Roguey]

I couldn't think of a worse insult to sequel.

I could also argue that Tyranny was DA2 and Deadfire is DAI, the synthesis of the two.

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

Way to waste a ton of resources. ;/

 

[Thonius]

We need fully voiced RPG codex. That will increase RPG codes reach.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

There is a bunch of armchair guessing and secondhand talk going around here.

It was not established that VO is such a deal-breaker even for games like D:OS2. The fact that gamers are used to this feature does not imply that it’s as important as, let’s say, graphics.

Even if game journalists complained about the lack of VO, it wouldn’t affect sales if players don’t care about this feature, because game journalists cannot change players’ perception. Game journalists said that T:ToN was the best thing since sliced bread, but the reception was cold as ice.

It is already known that PoE2 will not be full-voiced, and even if was it, the list of unfavourable comparisons with D:OS2 are endless.

Frankly, if it is all about mimicking what it looks like the next best thing based on guessing, just make a full-fledged MMO and be done with it.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

Company: We're making shit game after shit game, buggy, disappointing, catering to console popamole. We're really bad at this "making crpgs" stuff.

Codex: We stand by you like a good beaten wife. We never learn. We even have jew ai admin dedicated to sucking your dick 24/7.

Same company: Our next shit game has full voice acting.

Codex: This cannot stand! REEEEEEEEEEE

Looks can be deceiving. Most players here are socially motivated to engage in whatever everyone else is doing, including the haters. They will either back or buy the games they trash.

 

[aweigh]

Frankly speaking the PoE games (franchise, whatever) is one instance where limiting the word count would actually help the game's writing.

And you all know this.

F:NV had full VO and it had a million times better writing and dialog.