Is voice acting holding back NPCs?

Matmulder

Matmulder

Matmulder

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While reading this Baldurs Gate retrospective it reminded me of an article I read about a month back, regarding voice acting holding back NPCs.

The point of the article was reinforced while I was playing some Mass Effect 2 DLC, where I'd take Garrus and Thane along, and they would say absolutely nothing all the way though. Why? Because they'd have to get the voice actors back in at significant cost. Again, while playing Skyrim, I noticed that most NPC's had about 3-4 soundbites, and despite the fact that you'd done X, Y or Z for them, they still said the same or similar thing. This hasn't moved on from NPC's 10+ years ago.


Compared to Baldurs Gate, which had huge amounts of text yet only a small amount was voice acted; probably due to budgets and storage limitations of the day - the rest you actually had to read instead. Imagine how interesting NPC's would be in Skyrim if it was purely text based dialogue?? They could easily be given masses of input based on your appearance or actions, and be far more interactive and intelligent.

But on the flipside, would that totally break the immersion? Is voice acting now a total requirement for NPC's in this age of gaming? If so, how do we move NPC's along, do we have to wait for a method of using a natural-sounding voice synthesiser to turn text to speech? But would it struggle to convey any sense of emotion?

As an avid RPG gamer, I'm a big advocate of immersive depth, something I feel is getting a little lost in gaming these days as studios tend to move toward big-action games (step forward, Bioware) so it seems something of a hurdle.

I suspect this aspect won't progress for quite a while...
 
Matmulder said:
Is voice acting now a total requirement for NPC's in this age of gaming?
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I think it is. I wish it were otherwise, but gaming today is largely about being accessible and your average gamer doesn't want to read a wall of text. I was actually having a similar discussion with a friend today - how current video games are trying to emulate a more movie like cinematic experience and how older titles, particularly rpgs and point and click adventures, were more like reading a book. That's what was great about Planescape Torment - it was like being a detached reader shaping the events to come.

torment%2B2011-01-21%2Bmage%2Btraining.jpg


Getting back on topic - I agree with everything you're saying :)
 
Well I agree on NPC's they should have a variety of answers and speech. Sound is just as important as graphics. I do like text based games though, as I feel reading what I am saying makes it feel like the character is myself.
 
Warbie said:
I think it is. I wish it were otherwise, but gaming today is largely about being accessible and your average gamer doesn't want to read a wall of text. I was actually having a similar discussion with a friend today - how current video games are trying to emulate a more movie like cinematic experience and how older titles, particularly rpgs and point and click adventures, were more like reading a book. That's what was great about Planescape Torment - it was like being a detached reader shaping the events to come.

PIC

Getting back on topic - I agree with everything you're saying :)
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Aaahh Planescape Torment was such a game! I think I need to play it again now :P

On-topic:

Good voice acting makes for a much more cinematic game. And I'm a sucker for a story. Developers seem to want the best of both worlds: Immersive, cinematic, voice-acted gameplay... and low production costs.
 
I only think it's a problem in big scale RPGs with tons of NPCs where you need hundreds of boiler-plate responses and you have more characters than it's sensible to get voice actors. Getting a even a hundred unique voices for something like Skyrim, with a hundred lines would be a mammoth task and expensive to boot.

Adventure games have had superb voice acting throughout for decades now, and you only have to look at the acting for supporting characters in cinematic games like the Uncharted and Metal Gear Solid franchises to see how good it can be.
 
I think i would be good if games followed the l.a noire way witb motion capture so speech does look really good and sounds even better. 2 problems... Wont help with disk space, takes an afe to get the games out there.
 
Zelda is one of the most popular games on the planet and although it is RPG "lite" it has zero voice acting if I remember correctly and I loathe the game for it.
 
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Good question, I'd say there probably is a case for this. Maybe in the future we'll have voice emulation in games whereby the answers can be fed in as text and the computer constructs the voiceover from the text, perhaps with some sort of hint on tone of voice, emphasis etc. A long way off before we get to see a computer that can pull off realistic human voices (over a variety of different text) though I guess.

One possibility might be to still record voice dialogue but lose the requirement to have seperate voice actors, and then have some sort of fancy algorithm that can translate into a different voice. So the 'style' of reading will be retained just in a different voice/accent.

Finally I'm currently playing Portal 2 and I think the voice acting is brilliant and definitely adds to the experience.
 
orderoftheflame said:
I only think it's a problem in big scale RPGs with tons of NPCs where you need hundreds of boiler-plate responses and you have more characters than it's sensible to get voice actors. Getting a even a hundred unique voices for something like Skyrim, with a hundred lines would be a mammoth task and expensive to boot.
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I'm sure I read somewhere that Skyrim had something silly like 60 voice actors?
 
HecFam said:
I think i would be good if games followed the l.a noire way witb motion capture so speech does look really good and sounds even better. 2 problems... Wont help with disk space, takes an afe to get the games out there.
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The characters' faces in LA Noire reminded me of the JohnnyCab 'driver' in Total Recall. The Uncharted games might not use facial motion capturing, but I found the end result far more pleasing to watch.
 
I thought voice acting was suppose to be getting better. With actors like Patrick Stewart, Kate Mulgrew and Claudia Black getting in on the scene theres a lot to hope for. Of course long live Ron Perlmans Fallout into. All i needed was David Warner (i think) in this little clip to make me get back into Baldurs gate 2 "You will suffer, you will all suffer!".


Two Worlds (1) was killed for me because of the voice acting, terrible voice acting.
 
I was watching my son play fifa on the xbox the other day, and wondering about the commentary. They seem to have very cleverly recorded a load of generic sayings that are strung together really well to give the impression of a live commentator. It helps that most commentary is short, clipped sentences though.

You could probably do something similar with most npcs, if the actor recorded about a hundred short phrases. Wouldn't be perfect, but better than nothing.
 
Bit of a catch-22 really. It's all about finding the right balance between having in-depth NPC's with a lot to say, to having them voice acted. One side clamour for more story via NPCs (this was a complaint with Skyrim in particular, I seem to remember; comparisons were made with Morrowind), and the other side probably wouldn't end up buying the game if it had little or next to no voice acting to allow for more text.

The way it is at the moment, it's far too costly to hire voice actors for the amount of material that a lot of people would like to see, and it would probably push the development time of the game so much that it'd be unfeasable, as tech would have moved on etc, and the game would no longer hold up in all other aspects of the game (graphics, gameplay elements, etc) to its competition with shorter development cycles.
 
My biggest beef with voice acting is the (IMO) cheesy American accents spewed out in nearly game (RPGs are the main culprit). I can understand the logistics behind it, but it doesn't mean I find it any less annoying.

I have to admit though, Metal Gear Solid is the epitome of voice acting, I couldnt imagine a different voice for any of the characters, they just fit perfectly. It's probably to do with the points raised above, it's much easier to have a few characters done well than a whole world of varied people.

Edit: Oh, and since with how tech has progressed and allowed 3d face-to-face conversations to happen in games, it has almost put a requirement on voice-acting to make such interactions realistic.

I would however like to see a return of text conversations in some games (RPGs mainly). If you like reading books and can use your imagination to 'fill in the blanks', I think you can get greater enjoyment by imagining the characters voice in your head rather than have a generic actor mumble over the lines.
 
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I think the problem is devs are aiming for too much content in a way, in a game with 100-500 hours gameplay like Skyrim it would cost a fortune to have sufficient voice acting.
 
Haggisman said:
I'm sure I read somewhere that Skyrim had something silly like 60 voice actors?
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That's no small number though. They might have had to spend a few days in a studio each to record all of the unique lines and the cost soon adds up. Yet it still feels repetitive in places.

There's no obvious solution for a game on the scale of Skyrim unless you make non-story NZCs all mute, which would just be worse.
 
The solution is a technological one through voice emulation. It's a tough one to crack but I think we will see it soon enough. A more realistic short term goal would be a single voice actor making a lot of audio then having a transformation run over the top to give you lots of different accents and voices. This might help in cases of large numbers of NPC's with the same or similar things to say.
 
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