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

[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

We were using some DAISY software but hell if I know which one. We just called it "daisy".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAISY_Digital_Talking_Book

In fact till I went to look it up just then I thought only the one existed.

 

[Gord]

I guess that even if you develop a software that's able to produce natural sounding speech from text, you still have to employ some guy who's going to tell the software about the meaning and mood of every sentence.
Unless someone makes a software able to understand what the text is about. Pretty much sci-fi I'd say.

Btw. as VtM:B has been brought up, I think it is about the rpg with the best done voice-acting I've played so far (for rpgs with full VO that is).
They managed to get enough information across, and dialogue seldom felt contrived.

 

[SCO]

Voice acting can make a good game worse - dreamweb for instance, or a good game better (bloodlines)

 

[ever]

I guess that even if you develop a software that's able to produce natural sounding speech from text, you still have to employ some guy who's going to tell the software about the meaning and mood of every sentence.
Unless someone makes a software able to understand what the text is about. Pretty much sci-fi I'd say.

Btw. as VtM:B has been brought up, I think it is about the rpg with the best done voice-acting I've played so far (for rpgs with full VO that is).
They managed to get enough information across, and dialogue seldom felt contrived.

I think what you mention there is the easy part. I'm imagining something like LaTex but for tone instead of equations and indentation. The people doing the writing can also do the tagging.

I think Bloodlines has good voice acting because it was appropriate for everyone to have an American accent in that game.

 

[SCO]

I guess that even if you develop a software that's able to produce natural sounding speech from text, you still have to employ some guy who's going to tell the software about the meaning and mood of every sentence.
Unless someone makes a software able to understand what the text is about. Pretty much sci-fi I'd say.

Those are called "writers" - the bloodlines dialog writers even did that (for the actors).

BTW: http://mary.dfki.de:59125/

 

[ever]

The thing is though the great advantage of synthesizeable text, and the only real reason its awesome is that then you can procedurally generate dialogue and have it voiced. So for that you would need procedurally generated coherent tone too. Pretty damn difficult problem if you ask me.

I agree with the guy above that the whole thing is Sci-Fi . Especially when you pair the current state of voice synthesis with the current state of chat bots and then add procedural tone tagging to that. It's going to be a long time before they pass the Turing test unless every character in the game is an actually android as someone suggested.

 

[SCO]

Nonsense - the great advantage is you not paying a actor, bring costs down.


Another, possible great advantage is if it is ever possible to "copy" a actors voice, so mods are consistent with a voiced game - voice shaping for the lazy - though i guess the copyright police and actors guild would go down on that.

 

[Mystary!]

I loathe fully voiced games like Mass Effect and Dragon age, in part due to the poor quality of the writiing but also because I read alot faster so it's feels like it just drags on and on.

Baldur's Gate had the best type of voice acting, only a few key characters with voice and companion dialogue only had the first sentence voiced to get a feel for the character.

Special mention goes to Dungeons and Dragon Online that has a narrator describing parts of a quest, or if a particualar dungeon is damp or smells a certain way. Graphics can only tell you so much. Would like to see more of this.

 

[ever]

Nonsense - the great advantage is you not paying a actor, bring costs down.


Another, possible great advantage is if it is ever possible to "copy" a actors voice, so mods are consistent with a voiced game - voice shaping for the lazy - though i guess the copyright police and actors guild would go down on that.

Voice actor costs aren't that high. Lipsyncing costs on the other hand...

Also good point on the creating additional content thing.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Generally, my ideal is as in Fallout. No voice for most of characters. Well made talking heads and good voice acting for special characters.

Modern video games don't run on my computer, so I don't know.

I think that a *good* voice actor is a good highlight of an important character - it makes them more memorable - for example the Lieutenant or Killian or Gizmo. On the other hand, it hinders patching and modding.

They added a lot to my enjoyment of Fallout.

I've listened to some audio books at work. Libervox-only, though.

Too much time wasted as I read much faster than narrators speak.

 

[Turisas]

Voice actor costs aren't that high.

But they aren't free, either, and even a small cost may be too much for an indie dev. And then there's of course the fact that cheap VA's are often fucking terrible as well - we've all played those lower-budget games with ear-rape voice acting.

 

[Suchy]

What do you guys think about narrative voice acting?
I mean, the whole dialogue tree is written like a book, with descriptions, etc., and it's read by a single voice actor, the same way as audio books. Think of Betrayal at Krondor dialogues being read by one actor.
I don't think this has ever been done, but might work? Also low costs for walls of text.

 

[ever]

Voice actor costs aren't that high.

But they aren't free, either, and even a small cost may be too much for an indie dev. And then there's of course the fact that cheap VA's are often fucking terrible as well - we've all played those lower-budget games with ear-rape voice acting.

I've played mods with the apt described voice acting. I'm thinking of some Civilization 4 realism mod ( that was developed by a bunch of left wing wackos by the by ) and Europa Barbarorum.

But then I think of the Ultima V fan remake Lazarus, and that had great voice acting. It's a matter of pooling a few hundred dollars to hire a studio, cause the quality difference is mainly in the background noise insulation / recording equipment.

 

[Mastermind]

Mandatory voice overs ruined Oblivion. Instead of catering to monocles who can read the dialogue was dumbed down to cater to the Fallout/BG2 retards (was gonna toss torment in there too but torment has too much text to deserve that despite using the same shitty dialogue system)

 

[TNO]

I think you need to go full VA or very selectively. A half-and-half system like in NWN2 ensures the worst immershun breaking. So it's Bioware or Fallout style.

As noted, the three big problems are 1) People read faster than actors can talk, 2) The writing often sucks, 3) The VA can suck. Generally, solve the latter two and the former isn't such a big deal: when the dialog (in ME2, say) is good, I let it run, when it was telling me a fetch quest or was generally risible, I clicked through.

On the bright side, good VA makes good writing shine. Also, fully voiced worlds to preserve verisimilitude, which is important if you're in full 3D already.

Sadly, the only really good example of full VA is VtmB. KOTOR2 comes close as my memory of both the writing and voice actors are good. Bioware has the monies to hire a good voice team, but not enough good writing for them to deliver (I can't remember much bad VA in ME or ME2, and that I can was when they were trying to carry awful dialogue). Scattered VA is easier to do well, and BG/BG2/PST spring to mind.

 

[ever]

What is this? Why was this moved to general gaming?

I made the thread in general role playing game discussion for a purpose: The questions discussed pertain only to games in that genre.

I don't care about voice overs in other types of games for now, and even said as much in one of my previous posts.

Move the thread back, please.

Also I think TNO is right on the reading speed vs reading aloud speed thing. I too clicked through dialogues of lesser import in Knights of the Old Republic. In fact, the only times I really didn't just click through were the sort of "twist" moments or when something unexpected was said and I had to stop and think for a second about the significance. So saying "well I read faster" I don't think that means much.

 

[Gord]

I've played mods with the apt described voice acting. I'm thinking of some Civilization 4 realism mod ( that was developed by a bunch of left wing wackos by the by ) and Europa Barbarorum.

But then I think of the Ultima V fan remake Lazarus, and that had great voice acting. It's a matter of pooling a few hundred dollars to hire a studio, cause the quality difference is mainly in the background noise insulation / recording equipment.

There's also the Oblivion total conversion Nehrim.
About 90% of VO has been done by professional voice actors and is of pretty good quality.
So given some talented people, good connections and the right equipment it can be done pretty cheap it seems, although this is probably more of an exception.

Btw. I second moving this thread back to GRPGD as the discussion so far has been almost exclusively about rpgs.

 

[IlkuWarrior]

I think there is a minimum effective dose for VA, and that it is different from game to game.

For example, in Blizzard's RTS games, Warcraft and Starcraft, the bit of spoken dialogue that the units have give them a huge amount of character that they otherwise would not be communicated and adds greatly to the setting.

An RPG would require a bit more; unimportant NPCs would have a sentence or two voiced, similar to the unites above; more important ones more, maybe the first sentence of each dialogue, to "set the tone", and then every time they have a change of mood or emotion, where a *he gets angry* just doesn't communicate as much as hearing the character yell at you. Or hearing a well preformed laugh, and so on.

Just think how much would "Endure. In enduring, grow strong" effect you if it was just text without the awesome VA.

So, VA has it's place, but it should be used with thought, designed into the game, tailored to each character, dialogue and situation, rather than just thrown in randomly or for having "FULLY VOICED!!!!1" on the box.

 

[deuxhero]

Funny this topic should come up when I'm playing Baten Kaitos... Protip: Don't make your voice acting have a cardboard tube filter (BK at least allows you to remove it by turning on surround sound)

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.

Eh, I like some of the humans we have right now, such tech should wait till they are retired.

 

[Surf Solar]

Mandatory voice overs ruined Oblivion. Instead of catering to monocles who can read the dialogue was dumbed down to cater to the Fallout/BG2 retards (was gonna toss torment in there too but torment has too much text to deserve that despite using the same shitty dialogue system)

How exactly were Morrowinds Greeting Oneliners or spoken text of important fellows different to Fallouts only important NPC-voiced? Yet another completely inane post.


As for the topic, it depends whom you ask, or rather what your target audience is. If you want to go full "AAA", you'll face shitstorms for not having "full immersive" Voice Over. Others don't really care, or rather want quality over quantity. I personally would do it like Fallout did. Hiring few, but fucking good actors for important NPC. I liked the way they did that in Torment with TNOs trademark voices and lines, but that only works for pre-defined characters (like TNO was) IMO, not "your character can be what you want". If we're thinking AAA again, Voice Acting doesn't only make a game worse if the actual acting is bad, no, it limits the writers aswell, ala "What the fuck were you thinking writing such a verbose dialogue? There goes your salary for next month, we have to pay our actors for fucks sake". Voiceacting also pushes the fact that the writing may suck directly in your face, when not only inane text is displayed, but the npc guy utters silly stuff aswell.

When it comes to software emulating speech I have yet to see a program which does not sound unfitting and shitty like a robot. If you want to do some "robot" NPC - then that's the way to go, for any serious voice acting it's a joke.

 

[Overweight Manatee]

The important thing is that any voice acting you use be good. This includes having your voice actors reading well written dialog, else shit dialog = shit VO. Nothing is more annoying than a bad VO. Not that you need VOs, just don't screw it up if you do use them.

 

[Gord]

Mandatory voice overs ruined Oblivion. Instead of catering to monocles who can read the dialogue was dumbed down to cater to the Fallout/BG2 retards (was gonna toss torment in there too but torment has too much text to deserve that despite using the same shitty dialogue system)

How exactly were Morrowinds Greeting Oneliners or spoken text of important fellows different to Fallouts only important NPC-voiced? Yet another completely inane post.

I think what he wants to say in the uncomparable Mastermind way is that the problem with full VO may lead to results like we have seen in Oblivion (or e.g. Fallout 3).
If every sentence has to be voiced, developers tend to write less dialogue (most probably due to cost), which often makes the dialogue feel contrived.
There's only so much you can convey in terms of emotion, motivation and information if you restrict yourself to a few one-liners.

There are games that get it right (see Bloodlines), but a lot of them don't.

 

[deus101]

What do you guys think about narrative voice acting?
I mean, the whole dialogue tree is written like a book, with descriptions, etc., and it's read by a single voice actor, the same way as audio books. Think of Betrayal at Krondor dialogues being read by one actor.
I don't think this has ever been done, but might work? Also low costs for walls of text.

Have major Charles Emmerson-Winchester the third as a narrator and you can do no wrong.