The Gamer's Quarter

[dhex]

we'll just assume the answer is no.

this is probably ridiculous but - especially in rpg land - voice acting is, in general, counterproductive. having the same character say the same thing over and over again out loud is far more intrusive than a text box and really slams it home that "you're doing the same damn thing over and over again."

i figure it's hard enough for most movies to find actors who can at least competently capture the mood and thrust of their characters, and they have a robust casting agency system working for them. with games it's a fucking miracle that anything sounds right in the first place.

with shooters, the weight is far less heavy - not that it can't be spectacularly fucked up in unintentionally hilarious ways (i.e. x files guy in area 51, which is a narcoleptictastic example). but by and large you have far fewer lines, which means far fewer impressions of "jeeze that guy is just plain nasal breathing in that microphone, i hope they disinfected it afterwards ewww" or "did they even bother trying?"

but with rpgs, particularly oblivion - when you have so many npcs, and all of them are talking, you end up with these huge, wide-ranging environments populated by 12 people (or 6 if you're bethesda). it's jarring. it's annoying. and it's ultimately deeply counterproductive because you're just punching your audience with any sequences where you have to ask several questions, or if you have to go past an encounter with a certain character any number of times. after a while, it would seem less painful to either let it drop or perhaps only have the sound trigger on the first encounter.

voice acting - of any kind - is difficult. it's hard to cast for, time consuming and ultimately almost as big an impact on the player as your graphical presentations. this is all the more reason to either get it right or get out of the way.

to put in a rare upside, i'll say that i was blown away by the first few games i played that had crowd noises in public spaces. and i still love the effect. ambient sound design has gotten tremendously good in recent years, especially with cheap spatial processing and whatnot making things match the environment, plus all that 5.1 mixing for folks into that, etc.

but voice acting remains stuck in hanna-barbara land. perhaps it's time to send it back to the hanna-barbarians.
_________________

[Swimmy]

JRPGs have gotten in the habit of excluding voice acting for cutscenes. A lot of it has gotten good. (It seems to help to get British people, maybe because then stupid Americans can't tell how bad the acting really is.) Final Fantasy XII is much, much more tolerable than FFX.

But even in games with decent voice acting there are sometimes jarring things. In Siren, for instance, all of the characters are distinctly Japanese, yet they all carry heavy British accents. Which is even more hilarious given that the names aren't properly Westernized: Lisa is kept as Risa, etc. So you get Japanese/British dudes saying about Mina, "I was looking for MEE-NER as well" and it's hilariously awkward.

I have an affection for some classically bad voice acting. "Get. . . that. . . scum. MAKE. . . him. . . pay."
_________________

"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[Scratchmonkey]

Well, part of the reason that FFXII is by far the best FF in terms of voice-acting and one of the best overall is because the script is actually pretty good*. It takes really good acting to sell bad dialogue; whereas it takes pretty bad acting to kill a good script.

As dhex points out, sandbox games have a huge problem in this regard because the developer doesn't really have control over when voice-acting gets triggered, so you either have to spend a lot of time working on a reactive and heavily randomized voice acting heuristic to keep things from becoming incredibly stale or you wind up having a game where the voice-acting serves only to break any sort of immersion that you'd built up. Given that videogames are almost always crunched/rushed and that almost nobody pays any attention/money towards making sure that voice acting is actually good, it's no surprise that things almost always wind up being cruddy.

What I'd expect to see more of is use of text-to-speech engines. We've gotten to the point where they're actually somewhat decent and using them would enable the developers to dynamically generate dialogue instead of re-using the same clips over and over and over again.

* - In videogame terms.

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

Instead of voice acting I'd like to see a game where every character is deaf and they have to rely on sign language to communicate. Though if your character or an NPC has no hands they're shit out of luck. Maybe there could be a quest to procure signal flags and twine and someone to tie them onto your arms. I'm not sure on how many developers would take the time to implement it though, it would take much more work than just having someone walk in off the street and read some lines into a recorder but it would at least be interesting.
_________________

[helicopterp]

[D-A-I-S]

even though I kind of regret putting dais fantasy into a topic of dhex realism:

a while back, on the selectbutton axe, I vaguely fantasized about making a sandbox RPG that overcame the voice acting problem via a cheap gimmick: remove dialogue altogether.

Instead, make a pool of about 30-50 key phrases and concepts, translate those into recognizable images and words, and then use those to replace dialogue. Throw your entire VA budget into character animation, throw in a bunch of generic grunts, groans, screams and specialty images, and you're good to go!

Theoretical situation: You are in the central guard post for a city, conversing with the captain of the guard. As you discuss [BOUNTY POSTER FOR WANTED CRIMINAL], in runs a frantic man, spouting word balloons!

Man: [MULTIPLE SHAKING PICTURES OF ORCS, FLASHING RED] (+gesturing)
Captain: [BOLD INTERROBANG] (+standing up)
Man: [MULTIPLE PICTURES OF ORCS], [MULTIPLE PICTURES OF GUARDS], [SHAKING PICTURE OF CROSSED SWORDS, FLASHING RED], [SHAKING ARROW POINTING NORTH, FLASHING RED] (+gesturing)
CAPTAIN: okay you can imagine how he calls guards and tells them to follow him, right?

That sounds really stupid when put out that way, but modeled in-game, that could be a dynamic event that takes maybe ten seconds of time and communicates several thousands words of information without anybody reaching to turn down the volume.

You build up a whole dialogue system like that, and players won't complain about constantly hearing about mudcrabs. Instead, they'll have satisfaction: when someone approaches with [PICTURE OF MUDCRAB][QUESTION MARK], the player can select [PERSON BEING PUNCHED IN FACE], [PERSON BEING KICKED IN STOMACH], and [PLAYER GETTING KEY TO CITY]. The extra animation budget then kicks in when the civilian pisses themselves and begins to sob and beg for mercy.

It's still a gimmick, but you could probably milk it out into the mechanic of a whole family of games, and it's a good stopgap until the Japanese come up with a voice synthesizer that people don't immediately fetishize.

[Scratchmonkey]

Wasn't there a space-based PC RPG that kind of worked this way, in that language was represented entirely by icons and you had to select which icons to use in order to interact with people?

I want to think that it involved voxels as well.

[D-A-I-S]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Blood_%28video_game%29
http://www.mobygames.com/game/captain-blood

[Scratchmonkey]

Outcast is what I was thinking of, yes.

[Cycle]

I have a copy of Outcast I bought years ago that I should probably play sometime.
_________________

[Redeye]

[ApM]

Reminds me of Siboot.