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http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/78825-the-reason-why-a-lot-of-va-isnt-voiced/?p=1680668 After I made the post linked above, and observed the conversation that ensued for a while, I started thinking... VO is quite expensive. Like... really expensive. And if we assume that a game development studio has a given amount of money allocated to a game, say X dollars... then it follows that any money spent on VO is by necessity money that can't be spent elsewhere. That's how money works. My own personal preference is that games like this have some VO, but not a huge amount. Think "original BG and Torment" levels of VO, not "BG:EE or modern RPGs" levels. I think a small amount of VO adds a huge amount of characterization and immersion to the world - but that any more than that isn't worth the money it costs. Again, any money spent on VO is money that isn't spent on more talents, areas, quests, characters, QA... etc. So I'd prefer that a PoE expansion or PoE 2 have some VO, but not quite as much as PoE and certainly not more. I'd prefer to see that development money spent elsewhere. That's just my personal preference. And although we could (and probably will, knowing this forum ) have a protracted discussion about the pros and cons of VO, that's not my main purpose in making this post. I just want to see what the community thinks. Because although it's entirely possible that most people want more VO or Obsidian has their own strategy/design goals/marketing research and doesn't really care what a forum poll says... it's also possible that most people don't want more VO and Obsidian doesn't actually realize that. So... although the chances of that second scenario are probably pretty small, I figured I might as well check. Why not? All this can do is give Obsidian more information, which is good for everyone. In the post I linked above, it seemed like the vast majority of public opinion was on the "nah, don't spend more money on VO" side - but then again the people who actually post on the forum are a small subset of the people who read it, so I'm curious what the poll will say. So tell us - what do you think Obsidian should prioritize in the future? More money on VO, or no?

In the RPGCodex Q&A, I asked a question about the Voice over distribution in Project Eternity. Josh Sawyer responded with: Icewind Dale 1 had 24 Voice sets (12 Male, 12 Female) in the default game, and 6 more in the expansion. The male voice set is mostly the same guy doing different voices and there's a couple different ones. The female voice set is kind of similar although I think more actresses are used. Anyway Eternity is more nuanced than Icewind Dale is as far as races, culture and ethncity goes. I think it will be very interesting to see what we end up getting for player voices, because I wouldn't be surprised if Josh Sawyer has pronounciation guides for accents from different regions or something - that would be cool. I'm really interested in the Vailian accents in particular, a combination of chocolaty dark actors/actresses with the pseudo-italian/occitan pronounciation will be very interesting (if they end up being accented, it might be more expensive to do because it will take longer to get right). Having some Cultural or Ethnicity based voice sets would also be cool because you could throw in some conlang words or phrases for battle cries, curses etc. It would be funny if a particular culture had a tendancy to mix common tongue words with their own when they get angry. Here's also hoping that we get a similar amount, or perhaps slightly more voice sets. Another thing that got kind of monotonous in the Infinity Engine games was that the game always played the voice set of the highest party member in the formation order every time you had a group selected. It would be cool if it played a random character's voice instead or the option of randomness was available in the sounds menu - something to make voices less monotonous anyway.

Since PE has almost $2.5 Millions now, I'm curious what were the budgets of other similar games like BG1/2, Torment, Icewind Dale and so on. Any clue or reference?