Is Voice Acting Hurting Video Games?

[Ketsuban]

The permadeath mechanic in Valkyria Chronicles opens up an opportunity for a wonderfully non-linear evolving storyline depending on which characters live or die at which points in the game. However, because the designers hewed to a strict linear narrative at all times the result is four characters are effectively invincible because their death is an instant gameover and the rest of the game's large cast is effectively wasted.

After reading the LP by gravitypenguin (in lieu of playing it, since I neither own nor intend to own a PS3) I found myself wondering why they didn't either get every voice actor to voice the cutscenes as each character (thus ensuring that e.g. Largo doesn't get any special treatment since if he dies he just gets replaced in cutscenes by Jann) or actually make character death meaningful by changing the progression of the story if characters die.

I can't seem to get away from the idea the fault in all of this is the voice-acting - if the cutscenes weren't voice-acted they'd have the freedom to do so much more because they wouldn't need to store voice data for every line of dialogue. So that's my question - is the fact we as gamers expect console games to have voice-acting hurting our ability to make the most of our medium's interactivity?

 

[Zeraiya]

It's a hard question to answer, but I don't think voice acting is hurting video games.

For me the voice acting is what makes the game immersive - granted that it's GOOD voice acting - because it allows you tap into the emotion of the moment. Voice acting is put into games to give the player some sort of information; whether that's the blatant "use this to kill that" or a character explaining their past.

A game without voice acting seems very strange to me as I find it hard to imagine. I'm thinking over all the games I've ever played and the vast majority of them have voice acting in them, but the thing is imagining the game without the voice acting... makes the game horrible in my eyes. The other games I have played that don't use voice acting... don't really have much of an impact on me which is almost a failed game.

I think another question you have to ask is what games do you think could even WORK without voice acting? Voice acting makes the games more personal, so what games could work without that?

 

[Palademon]

They could simply choose not to have voice acting.

You know actually sacrifice something we used to have text boxes for, for the sake of the actual game, if it was their desire to give it that effect.

At first I thought of this question as applicable to anything before I read the OP. Just the title made me think "Is music hurting video games?".

 

[Irridium]

This sounds familiar [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/experienced-points/7588-Experienced-Points-Voice-vs-Choice].

But yeah, if I have to give up voice acting for more choice and branching stories, then awesome. Most voice acting is pretty "meh" anyway. Most prominent example I love to use is Oblivion. Voice acting did not help that game at all. All it did was make 99% of the NPC's shallow mannequins, and they killed the best voice actor in the first 30 minutes. There's also the reduced amount of factions you can join. But that was an issue going from Daggerfall to Morrowind, so it's old and worn out by this point...

 

[Pedro The Hutt]

You can fault it entirely on the writing staff. =p Branching story lines have existed in games with voice acting.

And removing voice acting is something that can't really be done anymore in story driven games. I know that many cutscenes and conversations in many games would lose a lot of their emotional impact if they didn't have fantastic voice actors or seiyuu delivering the lines. And plenty of others would just lose all their gravity.

Now don't get me wrong, I still enjoy old school RPGs where text bubbles or boxes were all you had to drive the story forward, I even enjoy text adventures still, but I will say that removing voice acting from story driven games would be a step, if not a stumble backwards rather than a step towards making the most of the medium.

And heck, the upcoming Star Wars MMO The Old Republic will have over a quarter of a million lines of dialogue delivered by a cast ranking in the hundreds. By comparison the original KotOR had about ten to twenty thousand lines of dialogue, if you're curious.

Edit: And wow that article by Shamus Young assumes a lot, just because he reads text with attention and skips through voice dialogue doesn't mean everyone does, in my years in LotRO I've had to help out numerous players who had no idea what to do or where to go because they didn't read the quest text, so that's a load of nonsense. If people don't care for story they won't pay attention to it no matter if it's voiced or written.

 

[shogunblade]

I would probably say yas, but I would also say no, just as easily.

It all depends on the game. Are RPG's being ruined by voice acting? Absolutely. You go back to the Final Fantasy's before X (10), you notice that there is a bunch of dialogue, but you had to pay attention to that dialogue. It was a lot harder to lose investment in these characters because you were casting the game in the actors you wanted (BTW, Kelsey Grammar voicing Adelbert Steiner in Final Fantasy IX (9) is probably the greatest voice acting idea ever).

But I was intrigued by the game. You get to FFX, and suddenly, everything you paid attention to was reduced to how inappropriate was the voice acting and less about the video game.

But if you look at something, like Metal Gear Solid, while that game gives you the offer to bypass most of the codec conversations, you can still keep them and listen to them, or press the button once and bypass all the voice acting altogether. It would be painful to try to click a button to get rid of every single line of dialogue, much like the RPG's of old.

Some games benefit from Spoken Dialogue, but RPG's are probably the worse ones to do it with. Yeah, most RPG's are pretty epic and all that jazz, but it destroys any chance of immersing the audience because you aren't being allowed to cast it how you would want to.

Imagine, if you will, Dragon Age having no spoken dialogue, how much better would the game have been. Yeah, it would probably take longer to play, but I bet you would pay attention to it and have more fun than you did when they spoke.

 

[DustyDrB]

I know it limits your dialogue options in RPGs...but I still much prefer a voiced main character. This is odd coming from me because I'm still to this day a big Zelda fan.

The player character in KotOR I and II freaks me out with his/her face cycling through the range of emotions constantly. I'm guessing they do that so he/she doesn't stick out as happy, angry, or sad. Instead...he's just confused.

 

[Ratlover]

Kind of think fanboys are something that need to stay out of any video game making choice. Can't stand nitpicking, thats all fanboys do. Don't think voice acting is hurting anything, if the developers know that it is going to make money, then the voice acting is usually pretty okay. Of course every once in a awhile they think it is a good idea to replace the main characters voice for no reason in the second game. Got me a bit confused, but other than that, no. No more Pyramid Head in any Silent Hill game please, stop listening to fanboys!

 

[Mike Laserbeam]

*Snip*

*Snip*

Sorry if I'm wrong but, did either of you read anything more than just the title of this thread...?

 

[MikailCaboose]

Erm...kind of. It's mostly because of how bloody expensive it is, which lessens the non-linearity of games. Then you have people who find it "lazy" for a game to have unvoiced text, who I assume developers would attempt to please.

 

[Frozen Donkey Wheel2]

Actually, Mass Effect solved this problem already by just having each character do all the voice acting for each mission, so that you can bring any squad member you want and they'll still have something to say.

So....I guess that's a "no".

 

[Ratlover]

This is not something that needs to be talked about in great detail. Did provide an answer, I just think that there are more pressing matters than bad speech. Sorry doesn't excuse you by saying that we didn't read the article, I hate people that start sentence by say, I know this is going to sound fucked up but.

 

[badgersprite]

Yeah, I've been thinking the same thing with respect to the Final Fantasy franchise. After they switched text for voice acting, I can't help but feel that the franchise suffered (at least for me personally) and I can think of a few reasons why this might be:

1. Everything has to be in a damn cutscene now. Thanks to voice acting, any time a character wants to say something, it suddenly has to transition into a cut scene. They can't just say one line to each other and move on, the camera has to pan around and everyone has to say something to justify the effort of rendering everyone talking. And, because you have to listen to them talk (which is, for most people, slower than they read) everything takes so much longer.

2. Some things sound stupider said out loud than when you read them. Yeah, this is a more minor thing, and it probably has as much to do with annoying voices as anything else, but, put simply, some of the writing in the earlier games would sound really stupid if it were someone saying it. And a lot of the stupid lines in the later games would probably sound less stupid in text, simply because, as human beings, it bugs us when we hear things that don't sound quite right. It's like the Uncanny Valley Effect. Things that are close to familiar but a little off rub us the wrong way more than something detached like text.

3. It limits characters, game length, and the amount of input you have into what happens. Audio files take up space. This is common sense. Because of that, you end up having fewer memorable side characters, or even villains. You don't get optional dialogue with secret characters. You don't end up developing these characters as much as in FFVI or FFIX, purely because they don't have room for it. FFXIII was on three discs, and yet, practically nothing happened. The amount of character development that happened in that time was miniscule compared to FFIX.

For example, there's a major event in FFXIII where a character betrays you and tries to kill you. After having paid attention to every cutscene, I DIDN'T KNOW WHO THIS CHARACTER EVEN WAS. And even when I figured out who he was, it wasn't significant, because he hadn't done anything, because they didn't have enough room in the game to actually make him do stuff. It felt like they were compressing a game that was meant to be much longer and much more detailed into a far smaller space. Compare that to the memorable side characters of FFIX like Baku, Regent Cid, Beatrix. They could cut to them without taking up time or disc space. And that's not even talking about all the individual bits of dialogue given to NPCs with one or two lines that add so much.

So, yeah, I do think that the switch to voice acting hurt this particular type of game. It's not the sole factor, of course, but it's a contributing part of the problem, and created a few issues of its own as well. But, hey, this is just my opinion.

 

[dessertmonkeyjk]

Ogg Vorbis is surprisingly good at downsizing the size footprint while keeping very close to the original quality of the file. For comparison, I had a 22050 kHz 16-bit 139 MB .wav file converted to a 22050 kHZ 16-bit 29.3 MB .ogg file at quality setting 10. About five times less (not sure it's multiplied) then it was.

Too bad you have to be restricted by what you say then what you do most of the time in games with multiple endings. The sophistication of whether or not you meet characters, help, taking or reject advice, abandon, keep waiting, smack in the face, your partner showing up while you are talking to someone, coordinating, etc. are many actions that determined how the character(s) respond to you as well as deciding their fate.

Dialogue trees are currently the driving force but a picture (or action in this case) says a thousand words in one.

 

[ImprovizoR]

It can hurt an RPG experience a lot, but at the same time it adds a lot as well. It depends on what kind of game you want to make. I don't think Dragon Age: Origins suffered from voice acting. Mass Effect either because it's just that kind of game. It's more of a shooter than RPG anyway. And would you play Mass Effect without awesome Garrus voice? But games like Oblivion, Fallout 3 and New Vegas definitely suffered from it and you can feel that. I would prefer those games with just written text, like Morrowind.

 

[Kahunaburger]

I think that, generally speaking, voice acting (and cinematics) cut into choice and consequences for video games. Whether you think that's a good trade-off or not is personal preference. Now, there are modern games that incorporate a degree of C&C and voice-acting/cinematic cutscenes, but they'd clearly be able to do even more if they weren't tied down by every word and every cutscene in their game increasing development cost.

 

[The Abhorrent]

Voice-acting doesn't explicitly limit choice in video games, but logistically it can have some unfortunate side-effects. The main thing is that it costs money and takes time to add voice-acting to games, and don't forget the extra time & money allocated to animating characters talk as well. The effect is probably most prominent on story-driven RPGs, which can be very dialogue-heavy. With text only, much more content can be added without incurring too much cost. When everything is done through recorded dialogue and has to be animated, the cost is significantly more by default; adding in branching storylines and dialogue trees causes this to rise exponentially. This isn't to say that voice acting is all bad (as it still does add a level of immersion), only that the costs associated with it are significantly higher.

---

Perhaps the best way to look at it is the difference between a book and its respective film adaption. Even in an immensely ambitious project like the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, some storyline events had to get cut; this sort of thing is more or less guaranteed for any film adaption. Sometimes it's due to the changes in the medium, but more often than not it's due to the budget not being able to justify including everything from the source material.

However, there's also very little stopping an author from including an extra chapter or two in his book. While there still is risk to the pacing of the story, the only concern is the quality of the story itself; going over budget shouldn't be an issue.

All in all, it just costs a LOT less to make an ambitious and branching epic without voice-acting. With it, the costs are insane and the project unfeasible. Still, I suspect that developpers are being a bit reluctant to let go of voice-acting in games; it would be a daring move to make a (story-driven) game without it, but quite a bit could be done if a developper was willing to try doing it.