Suggestion: voices for all dialogs

[vandf]

The game will be better if It has voices for all dialogs. And It would be better to hear main character's questions during convetsations.

[Roby Atadero]

No disagreements there.

 

However, this requires more time for people to record all of that and for the audio team to splice it all up and add it into the game correctly and verify each option. Then add a lot more money to the budget because you have to pay people to voice every line and every possible dialog response for each voice type. If you want the voices to sound good then you will need professional voice actors which increases your cost as well. All of this new audio will increase game size and requires more testing to make sure everything is working correctly as well.

 

The more voiced text you have, the less text edits you can do once the audio has been voiced. Typically, you cannot just get said actor on the phone and tell them you changed a line or missed a line and need them to come in for 30 minutes. They usually do it all in a set block of time and that's it. 

 

More or less, you have to pick and choose where you can allocate your budget and doing every line of text as voiced would have meant ballooning the budget A LOT, or essentially cutting other features or areas of the game to make up that cost in which you then end up with less content or less polished content.

[Bryy]

First, a general response: VO takes a lot of money. Like, a ridiculous amount. First, you are dealing with not only a persons personal fees, but also union fees if they are in SAG. Then, you're dealing with equipment and a recording booth. Obsidian has their own recording booth. Then, you add in the fees for the audio engineers. An average booth session with a SAG-certified actor can go up to the double digit thousands, and union rules (as well as common sense and the larynx) dictate that breaks happen every four hours. Add in about a months worth of mixing, editing, and bug fixing (since every new addition to a game can properly **** any other section, related or not).... and you've got utter hell. And Pillars has, what, over 80k lines of dialogue? No Kickstarter would be able to hit that.

 

Secondly, a personal response from my own experience. My team was very, very, very, very lucky. We're small. We're funding by ourselves, meaning our budget is only $5k. Through various friends as well as contacts, we managed to get a lot of people that otherwise would have costed us.... quite a bit. We are not publicizing who we have, just because we called in favors and also because of how long development on our small project has actually been going on. We have a cast of 68 in-game (and probably only 20 or so VA), and no real access to quality sound equipment minus our mics and the people onboard who already have sound stuff, so audio is going to be... uneven at best. But if we were, say, Obsidian, you can bet your butt that people would not be doing it for free. Which is the real takeaway from my story.

[Valmy]

Voicing the main character is an extremely difficult proposition. Not only does this character have the most lines but you need at a minimum two voices. Probably you would need a couple more to do it right. That is incredibly expensive.

 

They had to limit character creation choices to make this work in Mass Effect and Dragon Age post Origins and that was with far greater resources.

[Bryy]

Let's do some fun math:

 

Say PoE has 80k lines of dialogue.

And each actor/VO session cost $2k.

 

That's $100 million plus just for voices.

Edited April 25, 2015 by Bryy