The Sharmat

I swear I remember them denying any plans to do a console port for PoE 2 a year or so ago. I don't think it was originally their intent, but if some other studio wants to put in the work and pay them royalties, why not? I'm also skeptical that they did full VO because the majority of backers asked for it. The feel I get online is that it's a divisive issue among the grognard types most likely to be backers. But then I'm kind of confused about this in general. This is apparently a new development, or they'd have been trumpeting it from the rooftops for ages. But isn't voice over work usually one of the first things finalized in this industry?

Yeah that always depresses me but I was one of the fools holding out hope that save import might actually mean something for the third game. Didn't even get so much as a cameo for Iorveth... Can't blame them though I suppose. Marketing data shows they'd have been fools to sink resources into stuff 1% of their playerbase would have recognized. Shame about all the people willing to miss out on great games because the integer after their name is too low though.

I have to respect the players that chose to forego a permanent stat boost just to be a strong independent watcher that don't need no deity.

I'll never fathom people that start with a sequel but the one thing I do know about them is they clearly don't care that much about continuity, so why would it bother them?

Well Durance was a traveling preacher. Maybe his accent got diluted from all the wandering? Just as an aside, no "all" do not agree. I think planescape: torment is the most over hyped insult to the campaign world it is named after that ever was. It had crap gameplay, the"philosophy" was often sophomoric and pedantic, and quite frankly the game was 100% style over substance. No thank you. Your example is great though because it shows why Dragon Age is actually better. See the thing is, your three options are limited to only three, and they are sort of corny, but the person you are talking to actually responds differently to each option. Unlike planescape torment where you are faced with the illusion of choice. As for this announcement, that's fine, if they could budget it all good with me. As long as they avoided the Bethesda Water Cooler gimmick where 50-70% of the npcs in the game are just voiced by Bethesda staff and all sound the same. "Choice" wise it won't be significant because the main character has no voice anyway. There may be need to record multiple responses but it is still only half the conversation. I wouldn't say Dragon Age 2 is better in most or indeed any respect. Just different. There's still tons of railroading even for an RPG. It's slightly more responsive within a given conversation than Torment on the whole, maybe, but the writing is significantly worse (though I think Torment's writing is overrated. Avellone's best work was KOTOR 2), so I call it a lateral move. Baldur's Gate 1/2 are great examples of nostalgia at work. People criticize modern Bioware's writing heavily, often rightly so...but many of these same people seem to think that they used to be much better at it. Baldur's Gate has all the same tropes as Mass Effect or Dragon Age, executed to pretty much the same level of quality. Planescape: Torment meanwhile was a truly different game experience, which is rare in any age, regardless of quality. I will say that I think RPGs, and video games in general, have on the whole changed a lot over this span of time; simultaneously going for a much more cinematic feel and leaning more towards instant gratification than deep involvement. For me the former has good and bad aspects, while the latter is almost entirely bad. So I'm sympathetic to this feeling that RPGs have passed their golden age. I just try to be realistic about it. That said I doubt this was primarily done with console players in mind. I doubt Obsidian is doing much of anything with Pillars with console players in mind. This kind of game is just very poorly suited to a controller and as far as I can tell Obsidian is content to let any company that wants to give porting it a shot free reign if they dump some money on them, but isn't itself invested in it at all.

Josh said earlier on that you don't start the game with them but you can regain them over the course of the game IIRC. Presumably as you partially restore your soul or something? No idea if that's still in though.

I think most Americans can get it down to the general region but I'm not sure most of us can get any more specific than West Coast/East Coast/South/Midwest etc unless we've spent time there, with some exceptions for places like New England where there's a pretty big diversity of radically different accents. America is a huge country but it's also a fairly new one with a relatively homogeneous post colonial culture, so the accent diversity is pretty low compared to an old world country like the UK. With the exception again of some places on the East Coast where the oldest colonies were established.

I agree on most cases. I get tired of the fake RP English accents everywhere just because it's a vaguely " medieval" setting. How do you feel about the Witcher's VO though, out of curiosity? They used actual Brits and a nice variety of regional accents which were consistent throughout, in the latter two games. Redanians were always vaguely Northern. Aedirnians were Welsh (except Yennefer but almost all the sorceresses are certainly faking their accents), Kaedweni were Irish, etc. EDIT: For that matter, I'm curious, can you guys actually hear different Southern American accents? I know some of the regional English accents that are said to exist all sound the same to me, but that may be normal since I didn't grow up there. I'd assume a foreigner can probably hear the difference between say, a Bostonian accent and a southern accent. But could you tell the difference between a Texan accent and an upper class Georgian one, I wonder?

It doesn't take a great leap of logic to assign some responsibility to that dude about your awakening, any more than it would take to suspect that the giant Eothas statue marches into the ocean after the prologue of POE 2 what with the game taking place in the Deadfire and all.

No it's not, it's like learning about Thaos and that you spend the game chasing him and that he turned you into a Watcher You know all of that but Thaos' name before playing if you followed POE1 development. The prologue with the caravan leading up to the end of Cilant Lis was used in most of the hands on previews.

Before even, during the beta. During the beta wasn't it mostly just Sensuki? So I watched the stream that actually had story companions. I like what little I am hearing. Serafen sounds like, well, a pirate. But it works here. If my ears aren't mistaken then Xoti seems to indicate that New World types still have American southern accents (albeit, Xoti sounds more Deep South than southwest/Texas like the Dyrwoodans, a nice detail since she's originally from Readceras). Which is good news for me but probably bad news for a lot of people from comments I've seen online. But screw you guys, the Devil of Caroc was great, southern accents are great.

These early plot points are always considered fair game. I wish they wouldn't do it to but realistically they have no choice. You have to market something. If you want to be completely in the dark you basically need to follow nothing until release day. Still, there's way more egregious examples than this. Every single preview of KOTOR 2 spoiled the HK-50 reveal at Peragus. That would have been a cool moment as a surprise.

RPG Codex started doing that when POE was released and never stopped.

I never found that jarring at all but maybe I'm just used to it. if I started with games like Mass Effect maybe I'd find it weird.

Yeah most of the voice work in New Vegas put me to sleep. Good VO>No VO>Bad VO

Heh, Laura Bailey was exactly who i was thinking of when I wrote the caveat about some of them not getting to exercise their range lately. She actually has a ton of vocal range in older stuff but recently has gotten somewhat type cast and sounds samey. Not her fault. Just gotta hope the voice direction avoids that. Where did you hear Liam O'Brien as Serafen? There are voice samples floating around of these characters?

I think it's safe to assume that this is English only. PoE 1 didn't get dubbed in any of the languages it was localized in, did it?

So end of act Narrator voiced sex scenes are still on the table?

All the VA's from Critical Role at least have a similarly diverse range as far as I know, even if some of them haven't gotten to use it much lately.

Less dialogue can certainly be a good thing if the reduction is solely in clunkily delivered exposition so I'm not too worried.

Did you realize that Edér and Aloth are done by the same voice actor? This is *really* not the norm for VO though, especially not in PoE. I mean, I'm replaying the first game at the moment and there is quite a lot of voice repetition, especially with the White March installed. This announcement does absolutely nothing for me, especially if the VO is one the same level as PoE and Tyranny. But hey, maybe we can have a voiced protagonist and dialogue wheel for PoE3. :p PoE's VO doesn't seem to have had a lot of effort put into it outside Thaos and the companion NPCs. There's no reason a very small cast of talented voice actors can't do dozens or hundreds of characters if they have the range, and it's certainly been done before. I don't know if that will be the case with Deadfire, but given what I've seen of the people involved I expect a lot higher quality stuff than in PoE 1. The only inherent problem with voice overs is budget and dev time. Any criticisms beyond that stem from bad voice acting or direction, not anything specific to voice acting as a concept.

Doesn't make any difference at all as long as the main character isn't voiced. Even in games with 15 dialogue responses to everything, usually the same three or four replies come from the NPC in response to what you picked. The ability to roleplay in old videogames is frankly greatly overrated. It's sadly just not possible on a very meaningful level outside pen and paper. EDIT: In fact there's a great meme image about the downfall of RPGs that illustrates this very nostalgiac delusion. I can't find it at the moment but it goes like this. It's from the act two climax of Planescape: Torment, a game all agree is a roleplaying masterpiece. Ravel is asking the Big Thematic Question of the main character: What can change the nature of a man? There's something like 30 responses the player can give. The writers went out of their way to accommodate as many takeaways of the question the player could conceivably had as possible. Ravel responds exactly the same way no matter which of these dozens of options the player picks. Whoever made the image didn't show that part. It's juxtaposed with a picture of Dragon Age 2's dialogue wheel with its three predetermined good/bad/snarky options. I agree with the comparison it makes between the two games, really. But I think it entirely misses what the actual problem is. It's not lack of dialogue options that dumbed down the modern RPG. That's a symptom, and a pretty cosmetic one at that.

Yeah, she basically explicitly says "level up more first".

I get you on the expansion stuff but unfortunately the state of the market right now is just that making DLC that way is a sure path to losing money. I still liked White March and the improvements it brought to the game even if I'd have rather had something more traditional for a 90's/early aughts style expansion.

Or perhaps, unlike you presumably, I prefer reading in most cases. I read books. Video games are a different medium. Even if I read the text faster than a VA could ever say it, if the voice work is good, I wait and listen to it anyway. If that doesn't hold your attention, then it can only be because the writing or the voice work, or both, are lacking. Either that or you mute your TV and keep it on closed captioning whenever you watch it. Which is weird, but whatever floats your boat. EDIT: On reflection this probably comes off as insulting and presumptious, what with telling you what you do and do not enjoy. What I'm getting at is I suspect if you really do this with every single game that maybe you've just been misfortunate and never played something with good voice work.