Vernon Vincent

I have to admit that I prefer the Dragon Age: Origins (or Eclipse) engine to this one, but that's because I really like being able to shift and move the camera perspective. But that's just a personal preference. This is so far an excellent story and one that I'm taking my time in enjoying.

I think there may be a perception that getting quality voice actors would be a problem, especially if they are volunteer (i.e. unpaid). But I think the concerns of quality - both with the recording equipment and the talent - may not be as bad as some believe. I currently do voice work at home (I'm unpaid voice talent on a fan-driven Wing Commander audio drama) and it works out reasonably well. I use a laptop computer, with a decent condenser microphone - no headset mikes - in a quiet (but not soundproof) room to record my lines. The producers usually run our lines through a process to remove any extraneous background noise and to help equalize all of our lines (since all of us are in different locations across the country). You don't need an expensive setup to do this unless you're doing high-end commercial quality - like for animation. In terms of talent - there are a number of voice acting websites out there. VoiceActingAlliance.com is a big one, but there's also VoiceActingClub.com and others. Many of the actors on those sites are good. They're not necessarily "fan-boys" or "fan-girls" (although some are), but they usually are committed to giving good vocalizations to the characters they portray. The majority of the projects on those sites are unpaid, but you can still find decent talent for the project that would be willing to work unpaid. That said - with a game the size of P:E - you might have a hard time getting people to work on this due to the sheer size of the project. The largest role I've recorded, to date, was a 100 lines for a 30 minute Halloween audio drama. That took me about 4 hours (for various reasons). If there is a lot of recorded dialog, with a lot of branching decision trees - then that's going to take a lot longer to record. That would need to be considered if you planning on relying on your unpaid talent to generate major amounts of content that you, in turn, will need to process and standardize audio-wise. As an aside - I work a day job, and take vacation days at specific times to bulk record all the lines for the various projects I'm involved in. It works at the moment, but I know I'd have to find another method if I make the transition to paid work as that lack of timeliness could be an issue for a paying producer. So, while I think using an unpaid base of voice talent wouldn't be as big of a problem as some had presented, it does have it's own set of challenges that need to be considered and accounted for if it is to be a success. Good talent can be found if you want to look, but you need to consider things like deadlines, script complexity, the need for post-production processing of recorded lines, the need for specific redos (in case, for example, the lines of two actors don't happen to sound right together - even if they sound fine individually), and other technical requirements. For myself, I like voices in games. Done well, they really help me get in the mood of the game. I really liked the work in DragonAge and DA2 and some others. But that's a personal preference and I can see where others might not.