[Merged] Voice Acting- Suggestion

[Troller]

Duke Nukem voice actor and Solid Snake voice actor for the important characters pls!

[eatplayhate]

Non-voiced PC and semi-voiced important characters is the best setup. I think fully voiced NPCs are great, but I would pick more dialogue and more story over that any day. Voiced player characters only really work for me when the character is well defined (e.g., Geralt from the Witcher), not when they are my own creation.

[WDeranged]

Duke Nukem voice actor and Solid Snake voice actor for the important characters pls!

 

I'd go for that over some of the forgettable junk we get from most computer games, character is so damn important when you only have a few lines to work with.

[Leferd]

Felicia Day ?@feliciaday

I just backed Project Eternity on @Kickstarter http://kck.st/Sl7W7K

[fkldnhlsdngsfnhlsndlg]

It's also worth noting that voice acting has as lot of other downsides other than an increased budget.

1. It is a logistics nightmare. Congrats, now you're dealing with thousands upon thousands more loose dialogue files, not to mention you have to find actors who fit all your characters properly. If you can't, what do you do... just get rid of the character? Change the character? The demands for making a voice-acted character are way higher.
   
2. It adds to development time - getting good recordings, reviewing them, asking for revised versions, editing the clips (compression, normalizing, EQ), syncing them up with in-game text, etc.
   
3. Characters who are voiced need to be written differently to come across naturally, and we expect them to communicate differently and with more subtlety. This changes the writing style, possibly negatively. Irenicus, for instance, was a character who literally was driven entirely by his actor - without that great voice he would be just another boring, one-note villain with cliche motivations.
   
4. Any bad voice-acting will wreck immersion immediately.
   
5. It adds potentially hundreds of megabytes to a game's file size - possibly an issue if Obsidian ever, say, decide to port the game to tablets or phones.
   

Trust me, it's really not worth it.

Edited September 16, 2012 by sea

[D3xter]

I got an idea!

 

http://forum.baldursgate.com/ are looking for Volunteers, almost all the work and bug fixes and a lot of what they should be doing is being done by a community team.

 

They even have a "Volunteer" section for all sorts of different languages and whatnot doing translations and all that. How about you take your drama team and try voicing for BG:EE, after all it is an already finished game with defined characters and personalities and dialogue. Then come back and show what you've done, maybe Obsidian will reconsider.

[Moonlight Butterfly]

I'd like Felicia Day please. She has been excellent in every voice acting role I have seen. Also Claudia Black is pretty amazing too

 

I understand if costs don't stretch that far but those are two voice actors I really like.

Edited September 16, 2012 by Moonlight Butterfly

[Ieo]

It's also worth noting that voice acting has as lot of other downsides other than an increased budget.

1. It is a logistics nightmare. Congrats, now you're dealing with thousands upon thousands more loose dialogue files, not to mention you have to find actors who fit all your characters properly. If you can't, what do you do... just get rid of the character? Change the character?
   
2. It adds to development time - getting good recordings, reviewing them, editing dialogue files, syncing them up with in-game text, etc.
   
3. Characters who are voiced need to be written differently to come across naturally, and we expect them to communicate differently and with more subtlety. This changes the writing style, possibly negatively. Irenicus was a character who literally was driven entirely by his actor - without that great voice he would be just another boring, one-note villain with cliche motivations.
   
4. Any bad voice-acting will wreck immersion immediately.
   
5. It adds potentially hundreds of megabytes to a game's file size - possibly an issue if Obsidian ever, say, decide to port the game to tablets or phones.
   

Trust me, it's really not worth it.

 

6. Fully voiced/cut-scened content is extremely passive and boring (IMO)

7. I absolutely hate it when I can't completely skip (only "fast-forward") talking heads for quests I've done before or NPCs I have to talk to multiple times. AUGH.

 

Also, the amount of comprehensible content one can pack into text is substantially more than in speech within the same amount of time. People read on average around 300 wpm (English) and speak on average less than 200 wpm, with ranges on either end of course, but reading speeds simply outstrip speech/listening speeds. More content is good.

 

Anyway, as for VAs.... Jennifer Hale.

[The Sharmat]

Obsidian has the experience and contacts to get just the right voices for all their characters. Don't think we have to worry there.

 

EDIT: Jennifer Hale is practically guaranteed. She's in everything. And that's not a bad thing.

Edited September 16, 2012 by The Sharmat

[Grimlorn]

Voice acting is bad. I suspect it's one of the main reasons RPGs have gotten so terrible these days, and this is suppose to be more of an old school RPG.

 

So hell no OP.

[dubq]

lol at the OP. Drama student =/= good actor. There is a reason why they are students.

[Oerwinde]

Also, having loads of actors all volunteering for credit/demo tape content/resume padding is all good, but if you don't have a decent voice director, most of the performances are going to be lousy.

[Nakia]

 

 

Either do it well or don't do it at all.

 

Agreed

Sound takes up memory, a lot. It can cause problems for lower level computers.

Skyrim is fully voice acted. It can be very annoying. There are times when I find myself screaming at my computer "shut up!" Stopping myself from having my character kill the speaker.

I love good voice acting and it adds a lot to the game for me but it is tricky.

As an amateur voice actor I know that it is not a simple matter of picking up a mic and recording. There is a lot more to it than that. You would need professional equipment. How much time and effort would it take for Obsidian to adapt the many different types of sound they would get from people using various types of equipment and sound editors? Assuming the opened voice acting up to people around the world. Just listening to thousands of auditions would take time and money. Sure a lot of us would love to have our voice in the game but I certainly do not have available to me the equipment needed. Being a drama student does not automatically make one a good voice actor.

 

I would like the main characters fully voice acted. Casual background conversation in Taverns does add to the atmosphere.

 

No matter what Obsidian does someone is going to complain. This is a USA company. I really am not interested in hearing hundreds of lines spoken in "standard American English" or obviously fake accents. I like variety.

 

Give me good legible text over crappy voice acting.

[Dashwood]

Some people aren't getting the point, this isn't Voice Acting for main characters, major NPCs or the PC, it's for the sideshow bobs and relative unknowns, the countless "Commoners" and "Peastants", "Thugs" "Orcs" "Goblins".

 

The Nameless Ones, as it were.

 

Few games, if any, have had an extremely varied amount of "Background" voice actors, and any deuce with a mike can make a moderately good "Die Do Gooder!" generic humanoid impression, hell after a good few years of DMing I've really noticed the difference between sessions where I actively zest up the random commoners with some form of unique speech as compared to the ones where I cop out with a "he tells you the cave is north" approach.

 

as for the snarky about Drama students, they may have no job prospects but they have good voices and good voice control,most of them have been in dozens of professional(ish) productions.

 

Lastly for the BG:EE enquiry, I'll check it out.

[moralitis]

Although its more than likely there will be no voice acting(unless it

[Phekdra]

I hope the Obsidian developers stay away from these forums until the game is completed. I worry that everyone has their own idea of what the game should be and if they try and cater to their customers (as J.E.Sawyer called us) they'll dilute or completely change their own initial vision. You hear that, Obsidian, go away and count your cash!

 

But I agree with the no-voiced PC and partially voiced NPC (if at all). If it really is going to be influenced by Planescape Torment (and we can only hope), there's going to be far to much dialogue, far too many branches, and far too much nuance to possibly fully voice, even if you could find perfectly suited actors to do it. And, as for a voiced PC, well, look at how Bioware's dialogue has vastly simplified (sorry, evolved) since they went fully voiced and tell me if you think THAT was a good idea...

[Gamgee]

 

I would be fine with a tad of voice acting to sprinle some flavour for major conversations, but NONE for the PC. What so ever. No fully voiced conversations at all. Maybe just a few lines here and there ot get an idea what they sound like.

[Longknife]

[Bos_hybrid]

No.

 

Nein.

 

Non

 

Nyet.

 

[LadyCrimson]

Going to add my voice to the "no" chorus. I doubt they'll have trouble filling in the battle-cry, exclamation, and occasional npc bits, and that's largely what I'm expecting/envisioning for this game.

 

Don't get me wrong, I do love good voice acting in games and the voice acting can be extremely important in allowing me to connect with the characters as I sit there watching their lips flap over their teeth for long minutes. So I appreciate good VA work and what it can bring to the table.

 

But for Project E., don't want the full voice treatment. There's enough of those already these days.

[generic.hybridity]

It's a valid artistic choice to have limited voice acting. I think it also allows for much more branching and therefore gets the thumbs up from me. Sorry OP but I have to say NO to the idea of voice acting ALL the dialogue.

[Mystwalker]

Planescape did it best: Great voice acting for important characters and moments, but not much else beside that. This might sound strange to some people, but I've always found it easier to immerse myself in the setting when voice acting is at a minimum. Some of my favorite games of all time (Morrowind, BG, Planescape, Fallout 1/2, the Wizardry series) manage to hook me with little to no voice acting, and I feel at times it's BECAUSE of that fact, and not IN SPITE of it. There's just something about articulating voices in your head that draws you in. Smaller lines of voice acting also made them more iconic and memorable, and I think that's because developers made sure that if they spent the funds on a voice actor, they'd use them to say things that spoke volumes for the character (instead of just talking for the sake of talking).

 

On a side note, I remember laughing at myself a few times when I ran into recruitable characters in Planescape. It'd be something like "AW HELL YEAH! This guy has voice acting, which means he's recruitable!". Would be cool to bring that feeling back.

[Kaldurenik]

No. Maybe around how BG did it but... Overall little to no voice acting.

[silvercross]

Feargus briefly mentioned what's gonna happen with the voice acting in an interview with Game Banshee.

 

Our goal is to use voice over as flavor and not as something that exists for every written word in the game. We don

[Gorgon]

Max von Sydow as your soul ability sensei. He makes lengthy and unlikely explanations of a core game mechanic go down really easy.