Romances in RPGs

[metadigital]

Meh, Alexader The Great was buggering boys in the Aristotlean times! It was not only cool, it was mandatory. What about Achilles? Don't believe that silly Hollywood version of the myth; Patroclus wasn't his "cousin", he was his lover.

[Gabrielle]

Alex the Great buggering boys?? A stud like him could have any women and he goes after boys??

[metadigital]

Alex the Great buggering boys?? A stud like him could have any women and he goes after boys?? 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I don't know how you might come to believe he was a stud (alright there are a few busts about, but they could quite easily be traditional Hermes likenesses, ascribed to him), but King Alexander III of Macedon was definitely one who liked snails as well as oysters. He also sacked the Persian city of Persepolis and the Royal Palace of Xerxes, which almost qualified as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

[Magena]

It's rather amazing how many men in history were interested in the men near them in more than one way.

 

 

I actually like having the option of romances in the games... but I like them when they are OPTIONS, and not something that is needed to move the game along. It can definately be fun to have romances go on, and have side stories to go along with them can help with the feeling of role playing in the game.

[Walsingham]

Nikolai Dante uses romance to get the job done.

 

Well, I don't know about romance, as such, but bedrooms are certainly involved.

[Drakron]

...

I actually like having the option of romances in the games... but I like them when they are OPTIONS, and not something that is needed to move the game along. It can definately be fun to have romances go on, and have side stories to go along with them can help with the feeling of role playing in the game.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

That is the problem, romances being a option end up being disconnect, short and empty.

 

I think that is why BG2 romances were good because there was expecific interaction ... Bodhi would kidnap the romance and turn into a vampire, there were expecific comments on turning into the slayer.

 

Romances cannot be just a option, they must be connected to the story and most of the time they are not, a NPC just have a crush on the main character and have some dialogue related to it.

[alanschu]

That's still optional though.

 

You don't miss out on anything but not having any romances in Baldur's Gate 2.

[Drakron]

Not the issue.

 

The issue is that because there is only so much content that can be made when romances are a option they are disconnected from the story because making the connection would require extra work, dialogue and so time and money.

 

So romances are half assed.

[alanschu]

What do you mean not the issue?

 

 

Couldn't you have romances more like the BG2 ones in new games?

[Drakron]

Recorded dialogue and disk space.

 

When it was just text it was one thing, with voice acting is anoter.

 

A lot of things that were done in older games cannot be done now because of how technology evolved and space and cost became a issue.

[Diogo Ribeiro]

There wouldn't be such an issue if technology was used moderately instead of trying to use all its blitz and glitz in every game coming out. You can still do what was done during the Fallout - Torment - Baldur's Gate era; developers just won't.

[Musopticon?]

OT: 'Player, I otherwise get your sig; but what's fila fila?

[Diogo Ribeiro]

It means 'line" (as in, "line up") in Italian and Portuguese.

[Musopticon?]

Ah, poignant.

[Magena]

I think that is why BG2 romances were good because there was expecific interaction ... Bodhi would kidnap the romance and turn into a vampire, there were expecific comments on turning into the slayer.

 

Romances cannot be just a option, they must be connected to the story and most of the time they are not, a NPC just have a crush on the main character and have some dialogue related to it.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

On one hand you are right, in BG2 the romance did have some points which would push the game. However, if the romance didn't exist then the characters would still end up going to those places. It wasn't as though if you didn't have Aerie in your party and weren't going at it with her then you couldn't finish the game. There is a part where it was intwined with the game, but at the same time, it isn't intrigal to the game to have the romance.

 

As a matter of fact I had problems with the game because I was getting the butler coming into the underdark to get Anomen back.. yet at that point we couldn't do the next trigger, so the romance fell apart. But at least the game continued on.

 

Also, I thought that it truly sucked that for the females there was ONLY the choice of one man, while the men had three choices.

[metadigital]

Recorded dialogue and disk space.

 

When it was just text it was one thing, with voice acting is anoter.

 

A lot of things that were done in older games cannot be done now because of how technology evolved and space and cost became a issue.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

There wouldn't be such an issue if technology was used moderately instead of trying to use all its blitz and glitz in every game coming out. You can still do what was done during the Fallout - Torment - Baldur's Gate era; developers just won't.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I fail to see why there can't be a modular system created for dialogue.

 

What I mean is: I had a talking calculator about twenty years ago. It would read out every character typed, and the answers in full. Obviously someone didn't sit there and speak every number to ten decimal places (despite what the mother of a friend of mine thought).

 

Similarly, it is not difficult to programme any speech, given sufficient phononyms (all the discrete vowels and consonents for given target languages). I'm sure everyone here has heard an automated telephone answering service, and some of the better ones already do this.

 

I would think the main impediment to this idea is the fact that so little time and money is spent on VO; it seems to be almost an afterthought, a post-production icing-on-the-cake concept.

 

This cottage industry producing games still has a lot of ground to make up, before it becomes truly mature ...

[Squidget]

I would think the main impediment to this idea is the fact that so little time and money is spent on VO; it seems to be almost an afterthought, a post-production icing-on-the-cake concept.

 

And the fact that telephone answering services do not have to produce things like tone, emphasis, and feeling.

 

There are a lot of different ways to say a given sentence that will vary based on the message the character is attempting to get across, their mood, their feelings on the sentence's subject matter, ect. This isn't something you will easily simulate with a computer program.

 

VO is expensive - but at the moment, the technology doesn't really exist to replace it with a computerized voice and have it sound the same.

[Walsingham]

We could get round the stiltedness by having the persons concerned either

 

a) robots

b) insane

c) on drugs

d) aliens

 

Or possibly all four at once.

[metadigital]

...

VO is expensive - but at the moment, the technology doesn't really exist to replace it with a computerized voice and have it sound the same.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Why does this myth persist? VO is not expensive, not compared to every other component of game production. They don't employ Robert DeNiro and Mel Gibson, y'know! Jobbing actors are happy to not starve, they don't get tens of thousands for VO.

 

And your point about tone is not really valid. Sure, early phone systems sounded like Stephen Hawking, but the latest generation do not. It is quite possible to create different intonations and the speech is well within acceptable limits, and a lot better than even some of the poor VO on K2.

[Kaftan Barlast]

You thought K2 had poor voiceovers? Then you obviously have not played a jerry RPG where you can really hear the "actors" reading random lines from a paper without a clue to the context :D

[metadigital]

You did hear Bao-Dur in the beginning of the game (he was much better at the end, I guess by then he was used to reading), I take it?

 

I wasn't sure if he had said his lines backwards, and the devs had reversed his recording ...

[Guest Fishboot]

It is quite possible to create different intonations and the speech is well within acceptable limits.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

This is something you'd have to show me, because I have a hard time believing this is remotely true. On top of that, it's hard enough for artificial voice to even sound like a natural human, much less to *act* on top of that, much much less to act in the same league as the better human VO actors. I could see it in a long timeframe, decades, but imminent?

[metadigital]

It doesn't need to be completely machine generated, for a start. You've heard of sampling, right?

 

It is trivial to sample a voice and change the scale from treble to bass, for example.

 

What I'm advocating is not as simple, for sure, but it certainly isn't as difficult as you are making out.

 

I maintain that the main reason the VO is such a cumbersome process, is the nature of the production and the innate procedure followed by the developers: they are just adding a post-coding VO phase to the overall production.

 

Re-thinking the development methodology is the main way to drag a quondam cottage industry process into the automation age. (I know, I did a thesis on it.)

[Walsingham]

I found what I think is an excellent example of how good voice acting can carry even simple graphics. Here.

 

http://www.big-boys.com/articles/fewgoodmen.html

 

Powerful words, powerfully spoken.

[Meshugger]

*Hugs his FF VIII copy*

 

DONE RIGHT.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Maybe the love story itself was done right in the context of the story, but it didn't stop me from loathing Squall