Game News Pillars of Eternity II gets full voice acting

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

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.

And it also had less writing because game writing wasn't viewed as a profession for hacks back then.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

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.

You could, but Tyranny was better than Pillars in many ways (didn’t you say it was the best CRPG in years?), and it’s hard to believe Deadfire won’t be better than its predecessor, too. If you’re just talking about combat, it seems like they’re DA:O, more DA:O, and yet more DA:O still.

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.

100% agree. Fully voiced dialogue is a great business/marketing decision. When Obsidian announced their deal with the full cast of Critical Role, Versus Evil got flooded with so many preorders that their website went down. This will easily pay for itself and then some. Plus, I bet at least one of the devs is trying to sleep with Laura Bailey.

That said, I suspect the people who care about this either have little experience with CRPGs or they have some literacy issues. Trying to read text and listen to a voiceover at the same time is incredibly discordant; if you’re fluent in the language it’s very hard not to read much faster than the voice acting. And without fallout style talking heads, there’s little incentive to look at the screen without reading. It doesn’t make the game worse, but it’s a feature that hardly any of us care about, which doesn’t send the best message about their priorities.

On the plus side, I get the sense Obsidian felt compelled to do this and they also regard it as kind of dumb, hence the very low key announcement. They made a huge deal about Critical Role a week ago, then they announced this via tweet.

Maybe Josh & co are a little embarrassed.

aweigh with Tyranny style hyperlinks for lore dumps, I’m betting that Deadfire will go much lighter on the exposition.

 

[aweigh]

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

aweigh with Tyranny style hyperlinks for lore dumps, I’m betting that Deadfire will go much lighter on the exposition.

Hyperlinks to preserve walls of text that players don't want to read. That's absurd.

 

[rohand]

Incline...

Spoiler

...d to lament the rampant money waste

 

[aweigh]

We need a "Bad writing!" tag. ^

 

[l3loodAngel]

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.

You get what you deserve. Market should have made a statement after the first blowout. Now eat his shit with fork and don't forget to say thanks.

 

[bminorkey]

That said, I suspect the people who care about this either have little experience with CRPGs or they have some literacy issues. Trying to read text and listen to a voiceover at the same time is incredibly discordant; if you’re fluent in the language it’s very hard not to read much faster than the voice acting. And without fallout style talking heads, there’s little incentive to look at the screen without reading. It doesn’t make the game worse, but it’s a feature that hardly any of us care about, which doesn’t send the best message about their priorities.

you can disable voice acting like you could in poe1. get the stick out of your ass. i enjoy voice acting in my crpgs and i loved the voice acting in ds2.

 

[Terra]

Potentially limits modding (assuming it gets off the ground) since any new quests etc will stick out like a sore thumb, but so long as my protagonist stays silent I'm not particularly fussed either way.

 

[eXalted]

I like voice overs but I never have the patience to listen to the end if I have already read the current text block.

 

[Roguey]

Potentially limits modding (assuming it gets off the ground) since any new quests etc will stick out like a sore thumb, but so long as my protagonist stays silent I'm not particularly fussed either way.

This kind of modding was never going to happen with Pillars.

 

[set]

I didn't back PoE2.
I barely beat PoE1 vanilla:

The writing was purpley and most of the characters -- aside from Durance honestly -- were either unimpactful, dull, or boring. The story itself didn't make me feel one way or another. The narrative reactivity was about as poor as Wasteland 2's.
The combat was slow AND unrewarding. I honestly had more fun last year replaying BG1. There was also entirely WAY too much pointless combat. The combat was also pretty imbalanced. And I loved BG2. I loved how insanely long and combat heavy it was. And how pointless fighters are.

The news that this game will be fully voiced is a blessing and a curse:

We all know they budgeted for this. And voice acting is expensive.
We all know they told their writers to cut the word count for this (because voiced lines = money).
We all know VERY FEW RPGs have ever been enhanced significantly by their voice acting. Off the top of my head, I can say I only have positive feelings about Deus Ex and VTMB. Some jRPGs get pass for the hilarity of their bad voice acting.

But, the positive is that actual pepole will be forced to read the dialogue present in the game OUT LOUD. So maybe the writing won't be quite as cringey and bloated this time around. Honestly, would you rather read a profound Haiku or some Dante's Inferno? Me personally, I prefer Haiku.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

We all know they told their writers to cut the word count for this (because voiced lines = money).

No, because it is not full VO, just like in the first game.

 

[aweigh]

This youtube comment on a Tower of Time video seems especially relevant:

Should have had voiced narratives. This is the only reason I didn't get Divinity Original Sin. But after they added the audio update, I bought it ASAP

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Ooof... why? Is there really a single person in their audience who cannot read multiple times faster than a person can speak?

I'm assuming I'll be able to mute all voices, but... man. What a complete and total fucking waste of resources.

 

[Big Wrangle]

I guess they tried to avoid the "too much reading" complaint by... giving you them an audiobook?

 

[Glaucon]

maybe they'll have a separate voice narrate all the prose between dialogue

have you not played the white march? they already showed that they have improved on the dialogue/prose ratio. while in poe there was a lot of prose, and often in between sentences. in the expansion they toned down the amount and changed the rhythm. if at all, prose is now either at the start or the end of a dialogue node, but never (can't really remember) jammed in interrupting the narration. hopefully this is also true for poe2.

I remember it being an issue in White March, but its been awhile

 

[eXalted]

We all know they told their writers to cut the word count for this

This is a good thing. They really went too far with the "This Kickstarter game is for oldfags so we will put A LOT of pointless text in there. They will love that.".

I remember it being an issue in White March, but its been awhile

They really cut that in there.

 

[cherry blossom]

If this is really a late-development decision, then it is a cold feature, meaning it barely has any bearing on the rest of the game's design and most likely none at all. Perhaps they had the idea all along but waited until late development to see if they could pull it, time-wise and budget-wise. So it is a sound business decision and all the bitching here is utterly pointless bickering.

Now if the entire design depth (lol!) was scaled back from the beginning in anticipation of such late decisions, maybe that would be another story but what depth of quality would you really expect from Obsidian? Mechanics & features wise, they have always been pretty stale and boring. They worked best when improving upon pre-existing frameworks by adding interesting themes and better quest design and writing but they have a specific formula with PoE series now which, by design, isn't built to benefit all that well from their strengths. So spending resources on VO is irrelevant to the quality of the game. So is bitching about it.

 

[aweigh]

 

[frajaq]

lol

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Maybe Josh & co are a little embarrassed.

Better hope they are

 

[Shadenuat]

This is good news since it means less exposition and loredumps, and more of important dialogue only.

Unless they're ok with voicing all the loredumps too of course.

Strange to say that. Hasn't been that long since I actually wanted more text. But now I realise some writers shouldn't be allowed freedom because they have too little to say to begin with. And it's better to keep them in irons and occasionally pick with white hot rod to get to the actual point of what they're writing about. If your story is banal (even if it's good and serviceable), you don't need much text.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

 

[Trashos]

WTF with the cuck face at the end.