Would overlooking voice acting be a big no-no today?

[ever]

If someone were to make a role playing game that does everything else really well, would voice acting add or detract from the experience for you?

The voice acting is of moderate to good quality, like in Knights of the Old Republic 2.

Would you miss the pre conversation mood setter descriptions such as "You see a ruggedly handsome man, wearing a gleaming suit of armor." that happen in text based systems?

Have you ever listened to an Audio Book? If so how would you feel about a game being entirely narrated by one person, or two if you must have gender distinction?

The best answers will have the layout:

A sentence explaining my attitude toward strength of audio production in a modern video game.
A paragraph explaining my thoughts on value added by voice acting.
A sentence or paragraph on the value added by mood setters.
A single word or short statement saying that I have or have not listened to audio books.
A sentence or a paragraph explaining what I think about the idea of one guy "narrating" the game.

 

[ever]

I'll start this out:

I think a lot of effort should be put into the audio of a game, I don't think that developers often overinvest their resources in this area.

As for voice acting I don't think its so necessary. I like how games in the late 1990s and early 2000s had voice hints, where one or two lines of dialogue were spoken, but the game let you imagine the rest. I find it easy to imagine voices as I have spent a lot of time reading fantasy novels.

Mood setters are very important, written descriptions do a lot in filling out detail missing from games with a set perspective such as top down or isometric. I also find that written descriptions can call my attention to certain things much better than the ground truth visual.

I have listened to audio books as a way to pass time when working menial jobs.

I would be very interested in one man narrating an entire game, although he would have to be one of those voice of god people, and I am not so sure it would work.

 

[RK47]

One liners are fine. Baldur's Gate didn't have fully voiced line and did not suffer much.

 

[octavius]

Personally I would see voice acting limited.
In games like Morrowind and Oblivion it is enough to voice act greetings, combat dialogue (grunts, taunts and such) and NPCs greeting or talking with each other. I really, really don't need every single thing NPCs tell me to be voice acted as I can actually read. And since the game world pauses when in dialogue mode anyway there is really no need to voice act all the dialogue for reasons of immersion.

Games like Morrowind and BG 2 got the voice acting right, IMO. It was not overdone, and most of the acting was actually pretty good.
Oblivion is a good example of how not to do it - quantity instead of quality.

 

[1eyedking]

No need for descriptions nowadays since you can actually make models super beautifully handsome and add bloom on armors

 

[RK47]

...reading artifact description alone without voice-over was really good in BG2 and IWD series.

Torment is really good at this, it makes you curious to check out item descriptions and read the lore. No matter how pointless it seems. At times it might even give a clue on how to use it, etc.

No VA, just solid writing.

Compare that to Mass Effect's Voiced Codex of the galaxy that is snooze-worthy, I think you can definitely tell when developers are actually successful in drawing their players in or not. I had no interest in checking them out. A casual glance, and close. That's it.

 

[Gord]

Is it necessary? No.

It can add to the atmosphere, if done right. But there are a couple of problems with it:
1. I read much faster than the voice-actor. Therefore I often have read through the text before the character has even finished his first sentence.
2. As it takes time and costs money, developers have reduced the amount of text (that's then being voice-acted) to the bare minimum, which has often hurt the quality of writing. I'd prefer a wall of well-written meaningful text over a few short, well voice-acted one-liners that however barely transfer the intention of the developers.

About the audio-books: I occasionally listen both to audio-books and audio-dramas (radio-plays?). Both have pros and cons.
In a game however I think it might feel strange to have one guy read every character.
I guess I prefer the Baldurs Gate and Morrowind approach.

 

[baronjohn]

Voice acting is a cancer that's killing video games.

Imagine if rpgcodex posts were voice acted.

 

[JarlFrank]

Quality over quantity. I loved the voice acting in PST and Arcanum, and most of the voice acting in BG2 and Bloodlines. Morrowind was also pretty good. Now, except for Bloodlines, none of the games I listed had full VA, just partial.

It's much better to only voice a few characters, or to spend your VA budget on professionals who actually have experience in the job and know how to do it instead of blowing it all on Patrick Steward or Liam Neeson or whatever celebrity is cool to use for VA right now.

 

[Captain Shrek]

Quality over quantity. I loved the voice acting in PST and Arcanum, and most of the voice acting in BG2 and Bloodlines. Morrowind was also pretty good. Now, except for Bloodlines, none of the games I listed had full VA, just partial.

It's much better to only voice a few characters, or to spend your VA budget on professionals who actually have experience in the job and know how to do it instead of blowing it all on Patrick Steward or Liam Neeson or whatever celebrity is cool to use for VA right now.

How do you feel about 5hitman not having David Bateson?

 

[Haba]

Priorities:
1. Great writing
2. Great music that creates the right atmosphere
3. Great voice acting

I've played quite a bit of visual novels lately. It is the writing that makes or breaks them, music that creates the atmosphere and voice acting that is more of a sign of "production quality". Truly good voice actors are extremely rare. In my opinion no VA is better than mediocre-poor VA. Most of the time I read the text and skip the VA since I read faster than the actor speaks, the only exception being truly memorable actors.

 

[JarlFrank]

I try to ignore all news about 5hitman and will torrent it once it comes out. This way I won't have to rage a lot all the time, and either the game will be okay or it will be shit and then I can release my rage all at once.

 

[1eyedking]

I've played quite a bit of visual novels lately.

LOLWUT

 

[Haba]

I've played quite a bit of visual novels lately.

LOLWUT

You know, PS:T, Fallout and the such...

No yes, played visual novels. I wouldn't go so far as to claim that they are adventure games even if they have a lot of gameplay elements.

 

[Turisas]

Can't wait until speech synthesis becomes advanced enough (ie. indiscernible from real human speech, with nuances etc. required for dramatic presentation) to remove the need for human VA's. Fully voiced dialogue currently has more cons than pros.

 

[Elwro]

I love audiobooks, especially those of the classics, read by good actors. I'd definitely check out an interactive fiction game with voiced narrative, although I guess with the budget of $0 these games usually have it'd be difficult to go above the quality of LibriVox or EscapePod (check it out!).

 

[Suchy]

Voice acting adds to the experience if done right.
If dialogue lines/choices are cut due to voice acting costs, then fuck VA.

 

[Exmit]

The best RPGs always had no voice acting in majority of the game. Some key characters might be voiced, but text > VA.

Having text only without VA makes you endulge more into the game instead of treating it like watching a movie.The game is more of a book, a story told which RPGs should be viewed as.

 

[ever]

Very informative replies so far everyone.

Good to see a few audio book aficiandos around, my personal favorite begins like this:

Random House Audio Presents, A Storm of Swords, Book Three of A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, read to you by Roy Dotrice.

Then they changed the narrator to some other dude for book four, and it ruined everything, so I read that one instead.

See what I was getting at with that question and the "would you miss descriptions" question was how people would feel about doing away with "cut scenes" ( or whatever you want to call what the camera does when dialgoues happen in like in Mass Effect, The Witcher and other modern role playing games for dialogue ) and instead have:

1. A series of hand drawn images.
2. Accompanied by a text description.
3. The text description and any dialogue and or dialogue choices therein read to you by a professional narrator.

Think

But narrated by a dude that sounds like this. Apologies to anyone who read the books without the voices who would probably incredibly pissed off by this.

Would this be too "old school"? Would it seem "cheap"? Do you think that maybe even more "nerdy" younger people might enjoy something like this?

 

[Data4]

Just going to comment about having a narrator. One of the things I liked about D&D Online was the Dungeon Master voice. I thought it was pretty cool and well done. Would work well in a SP RPG.

 

[ever]

Can't wait until speech synthesis becomes advanced enough (ie. indiscernible from real human speech, with nuances etc. required for dramatic presentation) to remove the need for human VA's. Fully voiced dialogue currently has more cons than pros.

This would be really awesome for a huge number of reasons. I don't know of any literature in the subject but in one of the places I used to work with we were helping blind people have access to some materials and used voice synthesis software to read out PDFs to them, and unless things have changed dramatically in the last few years I'd say that it's going to be a long wait.

 

[someone else]

Voicing is just extra cost that should be avoided. I skip them most of the time.

 

[ever]

Uh, I never really quite said it but I should have:

My original questions pertain to role playing games only.

In some genres like action flight combat simulations ( not arcarde, not full blown simulators either, think X-Wing series, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, Strike Commander, Crimson Skies, man what happened to this genre? It was great ) voice acting always adds to the game I find.

 

[Rance]

Can't wait until speech synthesis becomes advanced enough (ie. indiscernible from real human speech, with nuances etc. required for dramatic presentation) to remove the need for human VA's. Fully voiced dialogue currently has more cons than pros.

This would be really awesome for a huge number of reasons. I don't know of any literature in the subject but in one of the places I used to work with we were helping blind people have access to some materials and used voice synthesis software to read out PDFs to them, and unless things have changed dramatically in the last few years I'd say that it's going to be a long wait.

A long way to go still:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q46Osg9C4pA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoPzP-MwcLI

 

[Turisas]

Rance -

@ever:

TTS has become a long way in a relatively short amount of time - of course the emphasis so far has been on 'just' regular text repetition which wouldn't really work in a game (unless you were making a scifi game where npc's are androids).

Dunno what programs you were using in that workplace, but the some of the ones you have to pay for (as opposed to the terrible Microsoft Sam and others bundled with Windows :D) are pretty damn convincing already:

http://www.ivona.com