A voice for our character

[RenovatioBlue]

Hello everybody! 

I'm Renovatio and i'm playing The Outer Worlds, of course. After so many hours with that, i've to say there are some pro and cons (when i'm inside NPC's homes, some of them should get inside to tell me i've to get out; it's to easy to steal. Obsidian should insist to show us some realism, and in general, they should see at some very old games that still are loved by rpg players, such as Gothic 1 and 2). 

Anyway, dialogues are very well written, and some sentences should be even listened, not only read. When i got to read "you had my interest, now you have my attention" (django, of course), i think it would be SO awesome to listen to an actor that says it the same way the movie actor does. 

Could be very very powerful, even for our identification in the main character. And also note everyone can talk in the game, except for our alter ego (and i think this does not work for empathy, in my opinion). 

Thanks a lot for attention. Let me know what you think about it. 

[Ommamar]

That would of extended the budget which is one thing that Obsidian struggled with causing them to make decisions not to add common features found in most games today.  The thing about having a voiced over protagonist is it is hard to match everyone's expectation.  One thing that always bugged me about FO4 is my character would saying things based on a tone I selected that didn't match what the screen said or how I think the character would of said it.  Which is another hard thing to with voice over a suave charismatic diplomat would sound and phrase things much different then a grungy hardened mercenary with a shoot first ask later mindset.  It is easier to capture the difference they would have in text, if you try to make a dozen different voice overs based on different build types you would add a lot of overhead to building the game.

Edited November 11, 2019 by Ommamar

[thearmourofGod]

NO voiced main characters in a non-preset character game (witcher) is almost a must for me as developers dont know how to do it properly.

Ommamar stated the reasons why perfectly.

In true rpgs tone, character type and appropriate dialogue are a must. 

Its one of the core principles of actual rpgs.

Fallout 4 got it perfectly wrong!

Edited November 8, 2019 by thearmourofGod

[RenovatioBlue]

1 hour ago, thearmourofGod said:

NO voiced main characters in a non-preset character game (witcher) is almost a must for me as developers dont know how to do it properly.

Ommamar stated the reasons why perfectly.

In true rpgs tone, character type and appropriate dialogue are a must. 

Its one of the core principles of actual rpgs.

Fallout 4 got it perfectly wrong!

Well, i think it's easy to answer you could 'turn off voice' and just read as good as it is right now. 

 

Of course it's hard to match every taste, but i have this desire and i understand it's not the first thing to work on in the future. But i hope this can be an option for the next rpg by Obsidian 

[Omgilovesteak]

I want my character to sound like Napolean Dynamite.

[thearmourofGod]

3 minutes ago, Omgilovesteak said:

I want my character to sound like Napolean Dynamite.

easy enough:  just paste fallout 4’s B button responses

[DrWorm73]

A voiced protagonist really squashes the number of choices that can be taken in a conversation.  FO4 has a ton of lines voiced by Nate/Nora, but still it had to really limit the potential branching options and outcomes to make it manageable.  That is expensive.  Keep in mind that all has to be done multiple times due to localization.  I LOVE the Nora performance!  Working on mods has given me an opportunity to listen to her lines and even without visuals they resonate, but I think in the end it should not be in open ended RPGs.

Voiced protagonist is really powerful in TW3 and the Mass Effect series (yes, even Andromeda), but limits RPGs where the character is supposed to be whatever the player wants it to be.

[UrbaNebula]

I much prefer imagining the voice for my protagonist in a first person RPG. I've said it before that the protagonist in Fallout 4 was a catastrophe. The fact that your character has a backstory loosley determined by the developers and a voice that might not match the appearance that you create at all, it creates a disconnect with the character I was asked to create. That was the least of the game's issues of course, but it stands to reason that I've only ever managed to play the game through once.

The Outer Worlds has a lot of dialog and as such, a voiced protagonist for the male and female player character would require two voice actors to record more lines than any other character in the game. That is a serious chunk of their limited budget which was thankfully spent elsewhere.

I'm not saying that a voiced protagonist can't work when the game has an established character, such as The Witcher and Mass Effect franchises, but for a game like this I really don't think it would be a good fit.

[uuuhhii]

if only all the dialogue option are spoken then that is not much

voicing it shouldn't be much a issue

and it doesn't take away anything from the game

if so many feel strongly against it

then maybe also add a option to disable it

[gloomseeker]

I don't like voiced protagonists in CRPGs for the reasons listed above. 

I got used to Shepard being voiced in Mass Effect but that's the exception. For instance I really don't care for Geralt's American accent in the Witcher. Geralt and Shepard are set characters (more or less) so voicing them is not as jarring as in games like Fallout 4 in which the voice becomes yet another limitation when it comes to devising your character. 

[Wormerine]

1 hour ago, uuuhhii said:

if only all the dialogue option are spoken then that is not much

voicing it shouldn't be much a issue

and it doesn't take away anything from the game

if so many feel strongly against it

then maybe also add a option to disable it

I have written more extensively about in another thread. It is not about simply having/not having VO. It is about writing and presenting PCs in certain way. Mass Effect/Witcher’s/Gothic didn’t just add VO - their characters are prewritten and predefined characters which you nudge into certain direction but can’t change who they are. A bug chunk of roleplaying is done for you. If that is what you enjoy, it’s fine, I all games that I listed. But this is different kind of game, and it would be better if it stayed that way as Obsidian is great in doing those, and we don’t get many alternatives these days. 

Edited November 9, 2019 by Wormerine

[uuuhhii]

4 minutes ago, Wormerine said:

I have written more extensively about in another thread. It is not about simply having/not having VO. It is about writing and presenting PCs in certain way. Mass Effect/Witcher’s/Gothic didn’t just add VO - their characters are prewritten and predefined characters which you nudge into certain direction but can’t change who they are. A bug chunk of roleplaying is done for you. If that is what you enjoy, it’s fine, I all games that I listed. But this is different kind of game, and it would be better if it stayed that way as Obsidian is great in doing those, and we don’t get many alternatives these days. 

dialogue option are already defined what the main character can be

most of their meaning are clear no matter what voice are given to them

voice them take nothing away from the game and doesn't limit the game in any way

[daven]

I prefer not having a voice, similar to Dragon Age/KOTOR/BG etc. Feels more personal to me.

I never felt like Shepard/Hawke/Inquisitor was MY character.

 

Edit: That being said, I still like Shepard as a character and think it worked in those games having more of a defined character. I guess it depends on the game.

Edited November 9, 2019 by daven

[DrWorm73]

5 hours ago, uuuhhii said:

dialogue option are already defined what the main character can be

most of their meaning are clear no matter what voice are given to them

voice them take nothing away from the game and doesn't limit the game in any way

It does add a TON of cost to the making of the game.  I'm not sure how many languages Obsidian did localization for with this game, but it was probably at least 3.  So you need at least six quality voice actors to come in and do tens of thousands of lines.  This process also takes time to cast because you want them to be the best you can get due to voicing the primary character in the game.  Getting a Jennifer Hale (female shepard) or Courtney Taylor (ADA, Lilya Hagen- TOW, Nora- FO4) level voice actor is not cheap.  I'm sure Ashley Burch is starting to get up there in cost too, as so many people  really enjoy her work in games. 

As to turning it off- that depends on how it's done.  If, for example, TOW2 had an option to play in first and third person perspective then I would also expect them to use the same cinematic camera style used in the first game.  That means now you have to add animations for talking.  I can only speak to Bethesda's Creation Engine, but animations are hard tied to the audio file, and that makes it really hard to just switch off the voiced protagonist.  

Edited November 9, 2019 by DrWorm73

[thearmourofGod]

9 minutes ago, DrWorm73 said:

It does add a TON of cost to the making of the game.  I'm not sure how many languages Obsidian did localization for with this game, but it was probably at least 3.  So you need at least six quality voice actors to come in and do tens of thousands of lines.  This process also takes time to cast because you want them to be the best you can get due to voicing the primary character in the game.  Getting a Jennifer Hale (female shepard) or Courtney Taylor (ADA, Lilya Hagen- TOW, Nora- FO4) level voice actor is not cheap.  I'm sure Ashley Burch is starting to get up there in cost too, as so many people  really enjoy her work in games. 

As to turning it off- that depends on how it's done.  If, for example, TOW2 had an option to play in first and third person perspective then I would also expect them to use the same cinematic camera style used in the first game.  That means now you have to add animations for talking.  I can only speak to Bethesda's Creation Engine, but animations are hard tied to the audio file, and that makes it really hard to just switch off the voiced protagonist.  

it blows me away that people dont understand that the “i want 3rd” and “i want voiced” and “i want xyz” requests are so naive

especially considering the budget and limitations of this console-first game

having said that, it baffles me that people know or even care about who a voice actor is

voice acting inherently means more fluff and less gameplay 

thus, one of the primary reasons for the current state of console gaming and its

dumbing down and handholding

 

 

 

[uuuhhii]

55 minutes ago, DrWorm73 said:

It does add a TON of cost to the making of the game.  I'm not sure how many languages Obsidian did localization for with this game, but it was probably at least 3.  So you need at least six quality voice actors to come in and do tens of thousands of lines.  This process also takes time to cast because you want them to be the best you can get due to voicing the primary character in the game.  Getting a Jennifer Hale (female shepard) or Courtney Taylor (ADA, Lilya Hagen- TOW, Nora- FO4) level voice actor is not cheap.  I'm sure Ashley Burch is starting to get up there in cost too, as so many people  really enjoy her work in games. 

As to turning it off- that depends on how it's done.  If, for example, TOW2 had an option to play in first and third person perspective then I would also expect them to use the same cinematic camera style used in the first game.  That means now you have to add animations for talking.  I can only speak to Bethesda's Creation Engine, but animations are hard tied to the audio file, and that makes it really hard to just switch off the voiced protagonist.  

many game get away with bland or awful main character voice

even mass effect

narrator usually have far more lines then main character

but dos2 somehow give narrator a voice the whole game

reading long text are painful to many

especially rpg players that most likely spend way too much time staring at monitor

audio make everything easier

[xSean]

Also on the side of preferring to not have the voice, mostly after seeing how it turned out with Fallout 4.

Even just adding a toggle to turn it off wouldn't remove the issues with having it in the first place, specifically....

• Cost
  • Hiring a minimum of two actors for all of the dialogue the player can choose is going to be very costly
• Limitation of dialogue
  • Even with it off, it still has to allow for things to "fit" when on
• Availability of the actor
  • What if the actor just doesn't have time and the studio wants to create a DLC / sequel?

 

 

[DrWorm73]

31 minutes ago, uuuhhii said:

many game get away with bland or awful main character voice

even mass effect

narrator usually have far more lines then main character

but dos2 somehow give narrator a voice the whole game

reading long text are painful to many

especially rpg players that most likely spend way too much time staring at monitor

audio make everything easier

First, Mass Effect?  I can't say for other languages, but the english actors were great.  I only played the games through once with male shepard, but he was good, and FemShep was phenomenally voiced by Courtney Taylor.  Neither were bland by any means.

A narrator is not supposed to have character to their voice, it is supposed to convey the emotions of the text in a fairly neutral way, compared to the actual character actors.  That said, since there is no narrator in games like TOW that is irrelevant.  

FO4 has more than 13,000 lines of dialog for the protagonist, and that is with a script that has to limit branching dialog and player choice.  TOW is a smaller game, but the conversations branch with more complexity and scope, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was close to the same number of lines.    

Edited November 9, 2019 by DrWorm73

[gloomseeker]

Plus voiced main characters make the addition of modded content problematic. Old CRPGs could get nice mods that felt well integrated because the voice acting was pretty limited (sometimes all you had was some soundsets to acknowledge generic actions and reactions). In more recent games it has become a nightmare for modders to add fan made quests no matter how good the writing can be simply because you need the contribution of amateur voice actors and to be able to get around some technical difficulties (lip syncing for instance) and that makes building up on existing characters a real pain. Some modders for Fallout 4 went really far using existing sound files and recycling lines to use for mods and you've got to admire the efforts it took to make it work. That's something worth keeping in mind when talking about a voiced protagonist. 

[Mushashi7]

On 11/8/2019 at 8:01 PM, thearmourofGod said:

NO voiced main characters in a non-preset character game (witcher) is almost a must for me as developers dont know how to do it properly.

Ommamar stated the reasons why perfectly.

In true rpgs tone, character type and appropriate dialogue are a must. 

Its one of the core principles of actual rpgs.

Fallout 4 got it perfectly wrong!

If Bethesda got it all wrong how come I've played Fallout 4 in 3.729 hours by now?

[thearmourofGod]

you think poorly implemented voiced dialogue choices are acceptable game mechanics

oh, wait, you want to argue your logical fallacy:

you enjoy average sandbox shooters full of repetitive and shallow gameplay

lol, u tell me

[True Story]

Silent protagonist works best.

Fallout 4 shows how having a voiced protagonist is a fail.

Perhaps if you could change the voice pitch in the settings then it might work but I prefer a silent protagonist in these type of games.

[SzabiK]

On 11/9/2019 at 10:51 AM, uuuhhii said:

if only all the dialogue option are spoken then that is not much

voicing it shouldn't be much a issue

and it doesn't take away anything from the game

if so many feel strongly against it

then maybe also add a option to disable it

Voicing them one time with one specific voice and tone is not the issue. Fallout 4 did it, Mass Effect series did it... 
The issue is, that only one tone and voice option is immersion breaking for the majority of the builds and character lookalikes. 
The devs would need to record sever times all the dialogue to cover all the different type character just to let them stay in character.