The reason why a lot of va isn't voiced?

[WorstUsernameEver]

Hopefully, for the future, Obsidian will take a page from inXile's internal constraints for VA and not have lines of voice acting sandwiched between descriptions. Even worse, sometimes the descriptions are in between two consecutive lines of voice acting, so I first have to listen to the lines and then re-read the dialogue as it was originally intended. Love the game, but that was pretty sloppy.

[Monte Carlo]

 

This is incorrect. Due to the limited funding the project had, we were unable to fully voice the entire game. There were close to 25,000 lines of dialog written for the game. Our original VO budget was for about 6,000 lines. We went over budget a bit, but not by a large amount.

 

To fully voice everything we would have needed about four times the original budget. To do that we would have needed to reduce scope in other areas to make up the cost.

 

That said, in the future we will probably try to do what we can to get more voice acting budget.

Just for the uninformed, that is $24 million. Just for VO.

 

 

Bryy, no, VO is literally free. You see fans can do it. Right? Riiiggghhhttttt?

[Grand_Commander13]

game doesn't need voice acting anyway.

You're right, doesn't need music either. Or ambient noise.

 

Wouldn't you say that's kind of a false analogy? Music adds at least as much, if not more, to the experience, and is far cheaper to add to the game. The same with ambient noise: there's a high bang/buck rate on those, up to a certain point.

[VahnXIII]

The level of voice acting is great. It allows you to get a flavor for the characters and have enough for your imagination to use as you navigate through conversations. I will always be an advocate for having a few voiced lines woven through great writing and a high volume of choices.Good work Obsidian. I look forward to future works!

[Sannom]

I'm not really complaining, but was the reason why a lot of va wasn't voiced

Being pedantic here : VA (short for "voice acting") not being voiced is kind of an impossibility.

 

I am not sure if you mean DA origins or DA inquisition, but I would have preferred if they took all the money they spent on VA in DA:I

That would have been all the money spent on the VA and the animation, because the later really wouldn't work without the former.

 

Hopefully, for the future, Obsidian will take a page from inXile's internal constraints for VA and not have lines of voice acting sandwiched between descriptions. Even worse, sometimes the descriptions are in between two consecutive lines of voice acting, so I first have to listen to the lines and then re-read the dialogue as it was originally intended. Love the game, but that was pretty sloppy.

This. Voice acting with textual description in the middle is really awkward. Better keep the voice acting for inter-party banters and only voice the lines before the first descriptions.

[barakav]

 

This is incorrect. Due to the limited funding the project had, we were unable to fully voice the entire game. There were close to 25,000 lines of dialog written for the game. Our original VO budget was for about 6,000 lines. We went over budget a bit, but not by a large amount.

 

To fully voice everything we would have needed about four times the original budget. To do that we would have needed to reduce scope in other areas to make up the cost.

 

That said, in the future we will probably try to do what we can to get more voice acting budget.

Just for the uninformed, that is $24 million. Just for VO.

 

Or just 100000 considering the math....

 

If the sequel will be partly  kickstarted that should be the first stretch goal.

 

[Elzarath]

I like the quality and amount of VA we currently have. It's true to form (Kickstarter description). Definitely don't want you guys to sacrifice something for the sake of adding more.

[Hassat Hunter]

 

 

that should be the first stretch goal.

Heck no it should not. If you can choose between 'big city' and VO... which would you pick? I slap you if you picked the second btw.

 

And yeah, the VO going on without the description lines inbetween which you had no time to read since VO wouldn't pause was... very new. And not something I would want doing again.

[Ramireza]

 

that should be the first stretch goal.

Heck no it should not. If you can choose between 'big city' and VO... which would you pick? I slap you if you picked the second btw.

 

And yeah, the VO going on without the description lines inbetween which you had no time to read since VO wouldn't pause was... very new. And not something I would want doing again.

 

 

descriptions lines >>>>>>>>> VO

 

The Planescape´esqe writing style is one of the main strengh of this game. Better leave out VO´s instead of this detailed writing.

[Luckmann]

This is incorrect. Due to the limited funding the project had, we were unable to fully voice the entire game. There were close to 25,000 lines of dialog written for the game. Our original VO budget was for about 6,000 lines. We went over budget a bit, but not by a large amount.

 

To fully voice everything we would have needed about four times the original budget. To do that we would have needed to reduce scope in other areas to make up the cost.

 

That said, in the future we will probably try to do what we can to get more voice acting budget.

 

Please don't.

 

It adds very little to voice act a lot, and in PoE, it even detracts at many points. It also locks dialogue down once recorded, and makes it virtually impossible to revisit or revise certain areas of the game unless you happen to have that particular voice actors on hand, and the time and money to re-record it.

 

If you want more immersion, give us more NPC portraits or something along those lines.

[cctobias]

 

I would have preferred if they took all the money they spent on VA in DA:I and spent it on making the game feel less like a grindy MMO, but that is probably more about design than money.

 

That was 100% a design call. Mark Darrah wanted a game that could take "20 to 200 hours to complete". 

 

 

Yeah and I think its a kind of silly goal since I can easily make a game that takes 10000 hours to complete just by changing the metrics on the grind.

 

But I think I wasn't clear enough in that I meant once they went down that design path it was a done deal as far as this phenomenon.  Its not just DA:I all these F/TPS "free roam" things have the same repetitive souless, grindy feel nowadays (Assassins's creed, Far Cry 4, Prototype etc. etc. etc.).  It was cool for one iteration maybe 2 but now its just deadly effing dull no matter how much they voice act the living bejeebus out of it. 

 

The core gameplay of these various isometric RPGs (POE, all the IE games, WL2, Divinity OS etc etc) is basically solidly and reliably interesting when crafted well.  Not all get crafted well but that is the nature of making things.  Even these really well made/craftted "open" f/tps games are so meh I mean I can't even play them anymore with a few notable exceptions to some extent.  I liked the initial installments of them and I am not even burned out, they are just a mile wide and an inch deep no matter how much fake progression or bells and whistles get put in them.  You start playing one and you are like "Oh this is pretty cool, looks like nice plays nice".  10 hours later I am feeling an oppressive sense of deja deja deja vu.   They are all flash and that is one of the reasons they have so much voice acting, because without it they just have shallow repetitive gameplay and usually poor writing.

 

I don't know if its still the case but in the first months of release you could easily solo every single dragon in DA:I with a Knight Enchanter build.  And you just did the same thing over and over rinse and repeat in the fight.   The actiony gameplay of it was pretty cool feelingwise in that you were basically an elemental jedi with a staff and a mana-saber, but in the end completely shallow just like most MMORPGs it was just a sequence of moves that will pretty much work as a formula. 

 

I actually don't particularly care that the build itself was pretty OP, I am fine with swing like that really.  More the problem is the typical formulaic gameplay stuck in a vast shallow lake of repetition.  These things are barely even games.  They are just toys not games.

[anameforobsidian]

 

This is incorrect. Due to the limited funding the project had, we were unable to fully voice the entire game. There were close to 25,000 lines of dialog written for the game. Our original VO budget was for about 6,000 lines. We went over budget a bit, but not by a large amount.

 

To fully voice everything we would have needed about four times the original budget. To do that we would have needed to reduce scope in other areas to make up the cost.

 

That said, in the future we will probably try to do what we can to get more voice acting budget.

 

I'd personally say: don't worry about it. This level of VO is just about right, even on the high side for this kind of game. If you can get more funding, put it into more quests/abilities/areas/QA instead!!

 

 

I was just about to say that.  I could have gone with less voice acting, especially if we had 3-5 more wilderness areas.

[Matt516]

Howdy all.

 

After seeing BAdler's comment about A) the exorbitant cost of VO and B) potentially increasing the amount of VO in the future... and then seeing the very-nearly-unanimous response of "no, you really don't need to do that", it occurred to me that it's possible Obsidian thinks a lot more people want VO than actually want it. That said, this post is an uber-small sample size. But if... IF most of the community wants the same amount (or less) VO in the sequels.. and BAdler/the rest of Obsidian aren't aware of this... that could be a problem.

 

So I made a poll. I know it'll probably still be a small sample size as well, but I figured it couldn't hurt to give Obsidian a little bit more information. Because if they could save money on VO in the future, and instead use that money to make future games more content-rich and feature-complete... well, that'd just be dandy.

 

So here's my poll. Cast your vote. I want to know what the community thinks.

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/78909-how-much-would-you-like-to-see-spent-on-voice-acting-in-the-sequel/

[barakav]

 

that should be the first stretch goal.

Heck no it should not. If you can choose between 'big city' and VO... which would you pick? I slap you if you picked the second btw.

They probably already made enough money for a sequel so it is reasonable to ask for stretch goals that are more cosmetic...

[Hassat Hunter]

There are far cheaper and more game-improving 'cosmetic changes'...

[barakav]

Well I don't agree with you than. It will give the game more life than other things I can think about will ,but perhaps you can change my mind if you suggest something that is better.

 

As I see it now the two most important things that should be added to a sequel are companion AI and improved pathing.

 

After that ,more VOs , only to make the game more accessible to a larger audience and more immersive...

Edited May 2, 2015 by barakav

[Venatio]

I could care less for voicing everything, as long as the developers save time and money for more important things like new contents, items and quests.

[Hiro Protagonist II]

Just for the uninformed, that is $24 million. Just for VO.

 

That's not correct.

[YorkshireYank]

I like that there isn't VO for every single line. It gives me room to do my own voices and imagine what the people might sound like which I find really fun.

[Sannom]

Heck no it should not. If you can choose between 'big city' and VO... which would you pick? I slap you if you picked the second btw.

More VO? I mean, "big city" basically means "something on the scale of BG2's Act 2", and that was more than half the game! That feels way too ambitious.

 

it occurred to me that it's possible Obsidian thinks a lot more people want VO than actually want it.

Another possibility : Obsidian likes giving a voice to their characters, and the more the better? And since VA doesn't come with animation in the kind of game that PoE is, it isn't as taxing on the amount of content the developer can create. I mean, sure it's probably not easy nor pleasant to waste all that VA, but at least it doesn't mean that you have to build the dialogues and scenes around what VA you already have!

[Hassat Hunter]

Ehm, yes it does?

 

Imagine you wrote  "Eothas is a poopy-head". Then voiced that. Then wanted later to change the character to actually like Eothas, the options are;

 

1) Delete the entire line.

2) Re-hire actor for a new line ($$$)

3) Rewrite the convo but leave the faulty VO (which is rightfully classified bug then).

 

How, honestly, can you say without animations VO isn't limiting. It is, it *very* much is infact.

[GrinningReaper659]

You know, there are only a few things that most of us could agree on as being clear contributors to the regression of the quality of CRPGs, at least for those of us who still do love the IE games and haven't found many games that we love since. One of those things is expanding VA. We know for a fact that doing this is expensive and consistently leads to limiting the written words in the games. To say that I would be disappointed to see Obsidian take this franchise down that road would be a pretty big understatement. Make the world bigger, make the story better, add more and better content and please don't tell me that you're going to actually limit content because you want to add more VA for unknown reasons.

 

Seeing BAdler mention that they hope and plan to expand the VA for the sequel is pretty disheartening. There's no question on this: expanding the VA budget reduces the amount of written words - that's quests, character interactions, etc. You can't add VA money without 1) taking that money from being used somewhere else in the budget, and 2) encouraging an attitude of limiting the amount of writing to accommodate a more fully voiced experience.

[Sannom]

Ehm, yes it does?

 

Imagine you wrote  "Eothas is a poopy-head". Then voiced that. Then wanted later to change the character to actually like Eothas, the options are;

 

1) Delete the entire line.

2) Re-hire actor for a new line ($$$)

3) Rewrite the convo but leave the faulty VO (which is rightfully classified bug then).

4) Rewrite the convo and don't use the VA.

 

Seriously, how did you miss that?

[Miraklum]

I rather like it, and did not notice it most of the times. The feel reminds so much of a few years ago, when games where awesome in terms of immersion.

[Hassat Hunter]

4) Rewrite the convo and don't use the VA.

 

Seriously, how did you miss that?

Because you wanted each and every line voiced?

Isn't an option than just to leave 1 line blank, probably causing same "bug!" complains as a VO/ST mismatch