Just putting something out there about fallout 4 and protagonist voice acting.

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joshua1029384756

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http://www.thepetitionsite.com/799/728/577/a-voicless-protagonist-for-fallout-4/

What do you guys think about giving the protagonist a voice in Fallout 4? A natural evolution or the removal of the roleplaying aspect from the game?
 

Fieldy409_v1legacy

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Oct 9, 2008
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Nobody cared when Bioware started doing it back in the day. I dunno, less options for voice over text does somewhat stifle role playing freedom but better immersion will help you feel like you're playing as a person rather than a blank staring robot aka dragon age 1 so.... The industry should do both I think.
 

joshua1029384756

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Feb 20, 2010
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Yeah, I agree but it just erks me that we aren't doing both. If you don't count the Dark Souls series considering that is a Japanese based game and both industries could NOT be more different if they tried, then what big blockbuster RPG IS text based? Skyim seemed to be the last one if the next Elder Scrolls follows the same design. I mean, I think people are split on how they want to play but would it really be so difficult to simply have it as a option? I mean, it would be super easy to mod but it should really be in the game to begin with, plus I feel people just don't care. It's really disappointing that so many care so little about personal game interaction now. Just because Mass Effect did it well doesn't mean all games should have it, Fallout being one of them.
 

Aerosteam

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Sep 22, 2011
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I'm sure you'll be able to press a button and skip your own dialogue during a conversation.
 

Redryhno

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Don't really care for it myself, considering nearly every game that's done this has ended up having four options, angel, devil, snarky asshole, and information. When a series is known for having a wealth of speech options, this seems very limiting because instead of having something like ten options per character you can talk to, you're going to end up with like three because you have your own voice, or you're going to not have very few people you're allowed to talk to, meaning there's going to be an emptier world.

It's incredibly limiting and so many games that have voiced protags that aren't set in stone and that you make yourself have voices that only really fit the default option. It was disorienting because I made an Apollo Creed expy my first ME playthrough, and the guy was the whitest boy ever heard. I'd rather have no voice so that 1)I can make up the voice myself and 2)I have more choices that have more range.
 

BloatedGuppy

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Feb 3, 2010
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It's a natural evolution for a AAA RPG series.

I've heard all the arguments for and against voice protagonists. I understand why some people dislike them. But it's the way the industry has been moving for some time now. It's not like there aren't scads of options for text-heavy RPGs, what with your Shadowruns and your Divinities and your Pillars and your Numeneras. If you absolutely must stand there like a gormless mute choosing from one of seventy three options to feel fully immersed, there's an entire buffet of titles for you to choose from. Um...if you're a PC Gamer, I guess (sorry console people I forget!).

We've got these game series now, like Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Witcher, etc, where they spend enormous amounts of time and energy scripting engaging characters and giving them voice through quality voice acting. If the protagonist..the wheel upon which the story turns...stands there like a department store mannequin during emotional conversations, something essential is lost. Yes it might limit some text options. Yes, every now and then you'll pick a reply and the tone will be off or they'll respond in some way you didn't expect. The payoff is worth the risks, IMO.

In the case of Fallout and Elder Scrolls, you'll very probably be served with a "mute protagonist" mod at some point, so rest easy (again, console people, I am very sorry).
 

DementedSheep

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I don't care about being unvoiced for "immersion" and since the last couple of fallout games haven't been dialogue option heavy I doubt this one was going to be that either so it doesn't bother me.
 

joshua1029384756

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I would argue being a mute, just a blank slate is the point since you then project onto them. Even if you are one for making a full, detailed, story driven character by making them silent robots you actually put some of yourself into their interaction. It's like how silent robots in sci-fi get so much love, because they don't need to speak, people project emotions onto their actions and the same goes for video game protagonists.
 

Kyrian007

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I don't think I'll mind that much. Some people are talking about how it's different than in Skyrim. But it isn't. The Dragonborn's "Fus Ro Dah!" didn't sound much like me, and I liked Skyrim. Therefore, I doubt this will bother me all that much. In the end, It's all about how well done it is.

But I'm not even sure it's really happening. Or that it's going to exist in little more than cutscenes and a few barks. That petition seems to be basing their information on the trailer. Which is hardly conclusive proof that FO 4 will have a full protagonist VO. That could just be a voice used for the trailer, that we won't even see in the game. It's just not important enough or even solid enough a fact for it to bother me in the slightest.
 

Zhukov

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Dec 29, 2009
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Nah, gimme the voices please.

I'm really sick of silent protagonists. They're alright in games which are all gameplay and no story (eg Dark Souls) I guess, since there won't be much for them to say. I also don't mind having protagonists who don't talk because they're actually mute (eg Red from Transistor).

But I'm done with having my Gorgeous Hero of Ultimate Destiny standing around like a gormless fucking fence post while surrounded by expressive characters chatting it up in distinctive voices. The end result is comedic at best and ridiculous at worst and I will gladly see it rectified at the cost of being able to pretend that my silent, walking fence post is an otherkin vampire prince from space.
 

w23eer

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I don't care about the self-insertion aspect. In fact I think I prefer the idea of the protagonist having a set backstory.

However I still don't like the voice acting. And I'm talking about voice acting in general, not just the protagonist. It always, always sounds stupid, especially in Bethesda games, how every third or fourth person has the exact same voice. It's generally badly acted as well; and it doesn't matter how well written a character is, if his/her voice acting is terrible it's not gonna make a blind bit of difference. I honestly think it's worse than having mute characters.

Of course, these are things that could be improved, with more actors with better talent. But that crap costs money. How much do you reckon Bethesda paid those voice actors for Skyrim? How much more would they had to have paid to make it bearable? There's much more productive things to spend money on, like a another programmer or QA people or whatever.

I tend to find I just read the subtitles myself and skip the dialogue in RPGs, so it wouldn't really make a difference I suppose. It is something I respect in terms of scope. I just feel that their efforts or money can be better redirected elsewhere.

In my opinion the best system was the ones in earlier RPGs, like Fallout or Baldur's Gate or whatever; only include voices for important NPCs/conversations, throw in a fair bit of ambient dialogue for good measure and leave it at that.

It's not gonna ever happen again for AAA RPGs - they've set a standard now - but it's not something I'm fond of.

EDIT: I just want to mention that I'm not going to sign the petition regardless of what I said above. I'm still looking forward to the game, and despite my preferences I don't feel that strongly about it.
 

MysticSlayer

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I have a hard time seeing how this is going to seriously affect Fallout 4, at least in a bad way. Fallout 3 didn't exactly fill its dialogue options with page after page of options. In some cases, you really did just have "Good Karma", "Bad Karma", and "Information" as the options, and if you ever got over 3-4 options, you can guarantee it was because there was more than one "Information" option. At the same time, Mass Effect has shown us that voiced protagonists can still be a blank slate that allows us to create a character.

Not to mention, this is a Bethesda game. Much of the role playing will come in what we do in the world, not in what we say to other people. It's worked well for them up to this point, and I don't see how not having the greatest dialogue system will prevent that. This is especially since it isn't like people should have been expecting them to push the bounds of high-class dialogue in this game, what with how often their writing has been criticized in Fallout 3 and the last two Elder Scrolls games.
 

Thyunda

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Definitely in favour of a voiced protagonist, here. You can complain that it ruins your immersion and that you can't project yourself so well onto the character, but, first, I had no trouble projecting myself onto Geralt and he's an established character who occasionally lets the player decide his morality, and second, a mute protagonist just makes you a spectator in everybody else's stories. Let's take Fallout 3, for example. The Lone Wanderer is the protagonist, but since he's a total mute and simply cannot project any kind of character beyond what the player is feeling, it's less of his story and more of his father's colleagues' story. The Wanderer just opens doors and shoots mutants while everybody else does the emotional heavy-lifting.

The same goes for Skyrim. Sure, I'm the Dragonborn, but it's Delphine and Esbern who undertake any actual plot. I just kill the dragon they tell me is the one that needs to die. It's exactly the same in the Civil War plot. Sure, in my head I can say, well I joined the Stormcloaks because I was almost executed by the Empire and took it personally, or I joined the Empire because I believe they're what's best for the region, but ultimately, Ulfric or Tullius point at a camp or a city and I clear out all the mooks so they can come in and have their story told. The siege of Whiterun isn't about the Dragonborn single-handedly taking on a city. It's about Jarl Balgruuf's noble attempt to remain neutral in a horrific conflict ending in tragedy. No matter which guild you eventually become chief of, the story isn't about you no matter how many times they call you the 'chosen one.'

You can see it most plainly in the difference between Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 - and I'm not talking about gameplay or even dialogue variety because both are irrelevant, and I'll explain why. Origins had multiple origin stories, but for the sake of the plot they all had to end badly so you would have an excuse to join the Grey Wardens. If you're a human noble, your whole family gets wiped. Your character does not care so much, because, beyond saying "I'm really upset because my family died," there's only so much selecting a line of dialogue can convey. There's no tone, no inflection, and only what the player imagines it sounds like, and since video-games are intended to give our imaginations form, that seems a tad redundant. As a result, though, you remember Alistair, you remember Morrigan, and Wynne, and Sten and all that lovable bunch because no matter how many lines of dialogue you are offered, you're always going to be upstaged by the wit or eloquence of somebody who actually has a voice.

Dragon Age 2 suffered a little less from this problem because you could hear Hawke. S/he spoke. Sure, maybe you were disappointed that every conversation boiled down to Diplomatic, Sarcastic or Aggressive outcomes, but I didn't really see much more variation in Origins. Especially not when it came to choices that mattered. I, personally, enjoyed conversations much, much more when they had two voices, rather than the one-man interrogation Bethesda games specialise in, because they actually sound more like conversations, and less of info-mining.

If a game's world is convincing enough and the protagonist's voice actor talented enough, you could be playing the most linear game ever and still feel invested and immersed. If Fallout 4 does this well enough, the protagonist can actually be involved in the side-quests and the main plot, rather than watching somebody else's story unfold while standing awkwardly by the door. You might have liked Veronica a lot, but your character stared gormlessly at her and gladly put her life at risk while unblinkingly mowing down bad guys and monsters, and then recited some unconvincing compliments.
 

Tayh

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Apr 6, 2009
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I'm against it, especially since FO4 will be one of those games that will be modded until it barely resembles its former self. When the quest mods come out, it will only be all the more jarring to go from fully-voiced protagonist in the original game to silent protagonist in the user made content.
Additionally, what if you don't like the voice that the player is assigned, or that you think it doesn't fit the RP character(old, gruffy, young, etc) you made, thus breaking your immersion?
Well, sucks to be you.
 

Smooth Operator

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Oct 5, 2010
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Well it's a straight forward problem, the casual consumer demands it, casual consumer is the majority vote, and casual consumer will not miss what is lost.
What gets lost? The range of dialog. With several voice options it means you aren't just paying a writer that can add a new dialog trees into any interaction as long as development is running. Now the writer needs to have everything prepared in advance, checked and rechecked until the date where all voice actors show up in a studio with a director, have to run and re-run lines for days, thousands of hours of sound need to be edited down to the good ones and then taken back to the game. Meaning all dialog is very expensive and it's best to cull it down, and it can't be added if the writer comes up with anything new because that is a whole new batch of very expensive recordings.
And so we very quickly come back around to the Mass Effect rainbow wheel bollocks.

Apart from the necessary shrinkage we also run into the issue of delivery, what you imagine the character will mean can be very far apart from what the character actually ends up saying which makes your apparent choices a random bag of strange that might or might not work out. Bringing us back to Mass Effect and it's hairline split between psychotic evil, psychotic jovial and psychotic good, or in summary...

But since that is taken as the most desired conversation system this shit was inevitable, my only remaining hope is they don't stick a camera up everyone's badly modelled/animated/lip synched nose while they speak.
 

baddude1337

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Jun 9, 2010
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Eh, Fallout player characters have never been 'blank slates' like Elder Scrolls characters. They usually have some kind of back story that is mentioned at the start and through the game. For example, the entire Lonesome road DLC for New Vegas is about the player.

Not sure about voiced protagonist though. I get why they exist in other series with a very pre-set protagonist, Fallout, even with set characters, allows you to roleplay to a certain degree. Can you even select a gender in this one?

It doesn't bode well for a future Elder Scrolls game. You can usually pick the various races in those. Having a set voice will limit you race choice greatly.
 

Gethsemani_v1legacy

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Oct 1, 2009
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I am alright with it, seeing as how I have no strong feelings either way and think both voiced and silent protagonist are good design choices.

More specifically, the voice acting in CRPGs has been getting more and more expansive with every game ever since Oblivion made it a thing to voice all the NPCs. With the NPCs getting so much voice work done, there's bound to be a limit on how many dialogue options you get anyway, since you can't write expansive dialogue for every NPC out there. In fact, let me point you to the Witcher 3, a game lauded for its' great NPCs, player choice and good writing. Most characters in the Witcher 3 rarely has more than 2-3 dialogue options going on, the most I spotted was 5 I think but it was still alright since the options we were given mattered and the NPCs were well written. As long as the dialogue and VAs are good, I don't mind fewer options and if I already get few options due to the constraints of voicing NPCs I might as well get a voiced PC out of it.
 

[Kira Must Die]

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Sep 30, 2009
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I'm for it. I'm getting a bit burnt out on silent protags. It's fine in some places, but others it feels like you're controlling an expressionless robot rather than a person.

I'm waiting to see how they'll handle a voiced protagonist for FO4, though.