Removing Voice Acting and Cinematics to reduce the costs of video games.

[Zhukov]

Portal with subtitles instead of GLaDOS's passive-aggressive sarcasm?

Bioshock with text scrolls instead of Andrew Ryan's arrogant and grandiose speeches?

Mass Effect without Wrex's grumpy baritone, Liara's soft-spoken sincerity and Mordin's hyperactive babble?

...

Fuck no. To hell with that. I'll happily pay for games with voice acting.

Basically, I think sound (i.e. voice) is far and above the best way to present dialogue. Period. Text has its uses, but it's essentially a form of translation, taking an aural signal and turning it into a visual one. Voice acting cuts out the middle step, and delivers the dialogue directly.

Cinematics are another matter. I'm fine with a game not having them so long as they either:
a) Find another way to present the story. For example, by using environmental clues or Valve-style in-engine scripted sequences.
OR
b) Simply not have a story, like in a puzzle game or online multiplayer game.


Lastly...

EDIT: For people that think that Voice acting takes away from Immersion , im guessing you guys don'T read BOOKS? you know that WALL OF TEXT between two covers that has a story , and a begining and an end? Books can be pretty immersive if you ask me , and no voice acting is required. Just an extra thought.

I love books. Which is why, when I want to read a story, I pick up a book rather than booting up a game.

Saying, "Games should use text because it works for books" is like saying, "Books should make you play the lockpicking minigame every three pages because it works for games."

 

[Nouw]

People seem to forget that Voice Acting and Cinematics are one of the best aspects of strategy games *****!

Having said that, it should be put out when not necessary.

Only if its Gears of War.

THEY'RE SINKING CITIES WITH A GIANT WORM!

 

[Manji187]

I still have fond memories of the PSX era Final Fantasies and other Square RPGs. No voice-acting...just text.

IMO, a game can have as few as 2 cinematics = intro and ending movies. Everything else could be done in-game.

On the other hand...I do have a hard time imagining Mass Effect 2 without voice-acting.

 

[Vault101]

FUCK NO

voice acting and cutscenes have made games so much more enjoyable for me and engaging..and when done well give you the x factor that makes a great game a great game

to get rid of all the would feel like amajor step backwards

anyway you want good games without all that theresalways the indie market

 

[Vault101]

Absolutely not. How can you have a decent storyline or narrative without voice acting?! It's impossible.

BRB right after I go burn some more books.

hey if I want to read..Ill read a book, I dotn want to read a book when Im trying to play a game

Voice acting, no, it's generally too important unless your game doesn't have any sort of narrative at all (a la Tetris) or minimal narrative (Peggle).

Cinematics are a different story - in fact, I think we should do away with all cinematics in games (or at least the vast majority of them). To me, they undermine the defining characteristic of a game that sets it apart from all other media, interactivity. About two days before the Extra Credits guys published the episode where they said this (I don't remember which one), I realized that "do, don't show" might be gaming's golden rule. When they came out with the exact same thing I did, I realized it was true. So to answer your question, yes, I would pay for a game with no cinematic. I already paid for Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Portal, and Portal 2 (why is Valve the only company doing this?)

I dont think cinematics are bad if used WELL

honestly there is no "this way is better than that" it depends ON THE GAME

like ME wouldnt nearly be as good without its cinematic style

AND they way I see it is portal and half life DO have cinematics, the only difference is YOU are controlling the camera...thats all

 

[Blackpapa]

Absolutely not. How can you have a decent storyline or narrative without voice acting?! It's impossible.

BRB right after I go burn some more books.

hey if I want to read..Ill read a book, I dotn want to read a book when Im trying to play a game

My point exactly. If I'd want to read shit I'd read the fine print on the back of a beer can or something. I indulge in video games to satiate my thirst for intellectual stimulation by blowing shit up, following a magic compass arrow and being reminded by the game how special I really am.

Oh, by the way. Any particular reason why reading text in a book is fine and reading text in a game isn't apart from possibly having a monitor that needs replacement?

 

[Vault101]

Absolutely not. How can you have a decent storyline or narrative without voice acting?! It's impossible.

BRB right after I go burn some more books.

hey if I want to read..Ill read a book, I dotn want to read a book when Im trying to play a game

My point exactly. If I'd want to read shit I'd read the fine print on the back of a beer can or something. I indulge in video games to satiate my thirst for intellectual stimulation by blowing shit up, following a magic compass arrow and being reminded by the game how special I really am.

Oh, by the way. Any particular reason why reading text in a book is fine and reading text in a game isn't apart from possibly having a monitor that needs replacement?

because I dont think I should be inundated with a wall of text in a game, it breaks imersion and quite frankly is tedious to read (I can read books fine but I feel with games my brain is in another mode)

seriously there are better ways of presenting info than solid text EVEN if we got rid VA and cutscenes (and thank god that isnt the case, because A. its subjective B. would make games a lot less enjoyable), hence why we have voice and cutscenes..and of coarse stuff actually happening in game....

 

[Ace of Spades]

No, no, and no. If you remove voice acting and cinematics, then you have crippled the capacity for storytelling. I am not going to pay $60 for a game that just dumps a mountain of text on me. Some games can do it well, retro-style freeware games like Cave Story, or you could take the Skies of Arcadia route of using text, but including a few snippets of spoken dialogue to establish a character's voice and personality, but in a story driven game like Mass Effect, I expect characters to speak.

I am entertained by your reference to Skies fo Arcadia, because the voiceovers were not dropped from that game because of time or money, but rather because it was a dreamcast game already taking up 2 disks of space and adding full dialogue would have made it 3 or 4.

Also on the note of Skies of Arcadia, for the time, that was a lot of cinematics.

I only played the Gamecube version, so I'm not well versed in the actual development of that game, but either way, saving money or disc space, I think it was an effective compromise between no dialogue and full dialogue.

 

[Noswad]

1, no, you think i would have gone through any of the ME codex if it was purely text
2, meh depends i'm happy to buy cheap little indie title with no speech, but for a triple A title thats just being lazy and lets face it a reduction of price will only occur with the second coming of christ.
3.walls of text where voice acting should be is unpolished.

All in all this seem like an pretty stupid idea, taking the medium backwards isn't going to get us anywhere. This would mess with immersion for many games, would the introduction to half life two be even a tenth as good if the G-mans words were contained within a text box. Come to think of it the G-Man as a character could not really exist without voice acting. shockingly the non-gameplay elements of a games are also important. This would be like taking away music from games, after it's nothing to do with game play, so its not important, right.

 

[Blackpapa]

because I dont think I should be inundated with a wall of text in a game, it breaks imersion and quite frankly is tedious to read (I can read books fine but I feel with games my brain is in another mode)

seriously there are better ways of presenting info than solid text EVEN if we got rid VA and cutscenes (and thank god that isnt the case, because A. its subjective B. would make games a lot less enjoyable), hence why we have voice and cutscenes..and of coarse stuff actually happening in game....

Well if you enjoy gaming in an altered state of consciousness (if I understand correctly) then you might want to try different drugs. I imagine that trying to read text in games while high on ketamine would be very difficult indeed. Edit: Even though I can see why you would decide to do this as that makes the current generation games actually worthwhile, interesting and challenging.

Getting rid of VA actually enhances immersion when the VA in question is done badly - think Bethesda's Fallout 3. I would never skip the voice acting of the Legacy of Kain series and indeed they're crucial to the experience. But voice acting costs. Good voice acting costs a lot.

If Planescape Torment tried to voice all characters not only would it come on 20 CDs (I'm pretty sure MP3 wasn't used in games at that time) but either they'd have to have easily 10 TIMES their budget or get their friends, family and other random nitwits to record the lines. Which would be almost as atrocious as Bethesda's Fallout 3's Moira Brown.

On another note: Who found Stalker's approach to voice acting and text in character interaction immersion-breaking?

 

[Vault101]

because I dont think I should be inundated with a wall of text in a game, it breaks imersion and quite frankly is tedious to read (I can read books fine but I feel with games my brain is in another mode)

seriously there are better ways of presenting info than solid text EVEN if we got rid VA and cutscenes (and thank god that isnt the case, because A. its subjective B. would make games a lot less enjoyable), hence why we have voice and cutscenes..and of coarse stuff actually happening in game....

Well if you enjoy gaming in an altered state of consciousness (if I understand correctly) then you might want to try different drugs. I imagine that trying to read text in games while high on ketamine would be very difficult indeed. Edit: Even though I can see why you would decide to do this as that makes the current generation games actually worthwhile, interesting and challenging.

Getting rid of VA actually enhances immersion when the VA in question is done badly - think Bethesda's Fallout 3. I would never skip the voice acting of the Legacy of Kain series and indeed they're crucial to the experience. But voice acting costs. Good voice acting costs a lot.

If Planescape Torment tried to voice all characters not only would it come on 20 CDs (I'm pretty sure MP3 wasn't used in games at that time) but either they'd have to have easily 10 TIMES their budget or get their friends, family and other random nitwits to record the lines. Which would be almost as atrocious as Bethesda's Fallout 3's Moira Brown.

do you wonder why some people skip cutscenes? and yet also enjoy movies? would you sugest "they" are on some kind of drugs?

and again this is the magic word SUBJECTIVE

ohhh sure lots and lots of text id probably just your kind of thing

but FUCK THAT it doesnt work for me, and Im not wrong or right, it just is

oh and you want examples? ok I can do examples, Bioshock, portal half life 2 BAM they need the VA

anyway to get rid of it would seem like a step backwards...so no Im quite happy how things are, (and quite frankly it annoys me people that people think THEYRE way is better...and hypothetically could fuck up games for the rest of us if they were given the choice)

AND I get the inpression of some nostalga goggles....

oh and who found S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s aprouch imersion breaking? I DID

 

[Blackpapa]

do you wonder why some people skip cutscenes? and yet also enjoy movies? would you sugest "they" are on some kind of drugs?

Because the cutscenes are badly done crap with minimum effort. Movies are done by people with experience in making movies. Cutscenes are done by game designers and often they turn out to be garbage that does nothing but takes space on the disk and eats up the budget.

oh and you want examples? ok I can do examples, Bioshock, portal half life 2 BAM they need the VA

Of course they do because those games have:
1) Very little voice acting
2) Very high quality of voice acting
3) A HUGE amount of effort put into everything related to voice acting (facial animation, character, model, writing.. do you know how much time Valve spent adjusting Ellen's voice until it sounded just right? Or how many lines got re-recorded for Portal 2 because the writing was "too mean"?)
4) Voice acting along with other elements forms a cohesive part (again Portal)

So yeah in those games VA is essential. I'm talking about content-heavy games like RPGs where it's impossible to deliver quality voice acting in the required quantity in the budget. In those cases it's better not to have any VA than have shitty VA. Don't you agree?

anyway to get rid of it would seem like a step backwards...so no Im quite happy how things are, (and quite frankly it annoys me people that people think THEYRE way is better...and hypothetically could fuck up games for the rest of us if they were given the choice)

It's because it is better. You still fail to see the obvious my delusional friend. The Planescape Torment script contains 800000 words. While I would certainly love to see LoK-class VA in PT it would kill the game budget a dozen times over. It's an acceptable price to pay for a content-intensive game especially since having to record all that is indeed constraining on the writers, it's not like you can go back and rerecord half as easily as rewrite dialog.

 

[Fanfic_warper]

a: NO
b: NO!
c: NO!!!!!

Cinimatics and voices are part of what make current gen games so great I think. the only problems I've ever had with games is the plots. Aside from that, I would sooner quit on the media altogether than sacrifice cinematics and voice acting.

 

[Vault101]

do you wonder why some people skip cutscenes? and yet also enjoy movies? would you sugest "they" are on some kind of drugs?

Because the cutscenes are badly done crap with minimum effort. Movies are done by people with experience in making movies. Cutscenes are done by game designers and often they turn out to be garbage that does nothing but takes space on the disk and eats up the budget.

oh and you want examples? ok I can do examples, Bioshock, portal half life 2 BAM they need the VA

Of course they do because those games have:
1) Very little voice acting
2) Very high quality of voice acting
3) A HUGE amount of effort put into everything related to voice acting (facial animation, character, model, writing.. do you know how much time Valve spent adjusting Ellen's voice until it sounded just right? Or how many lines got re-recorded for Portal 2 because the writing was "too mean"?)
4) Voice acting along with other elements forms a cohesive part (again Portal)

So yeah in those games VA is essential. I'm talking about content-heavy games like RPGs where it's impossible to deliver quality voice acting in the required quantity in the budget. In those cases it's better not to have any VA than have shitty VA. Don't you agree?

anyway to get rid of it would seem like a step backwards...so no Im quite happy how things are, (and quite frankly it annoys me people that people think THEYRE way is better...and hypothetically could fuck up games for the rest of us if they were given the choice)

It's because it is better. You still fail to see the obvious my delusional friend. The Planescape Torment script contains 800000 words. While I would certainly love to see LoK-class VA in PT it would kill the game budget a dozen times over. It's an acceptable price to pay for a content-intensive game especially since having to record all that is indeed constraining on the writers, it's not like you can go back and rerecord half as easily as rewrite dialog.

"I" am delusional?

first of all Im dececting some serious Bias against current gen games, aside form the few that I mention I also have tons of favorites that wouldn't be the same without voice acting

plane scape torment is a good game...but I found the amount of text tedious, yes for technical reasons text may work for a RPG like that..but then again I like RPG's that are imersive (reaosn why I got rid of subtitles in the fallout games)

and no people dont skip cutscenes because they are bad in themeslfs (again not ALL people skip cutscnes) they skip cutscnes because they are the kind of people that that are like "I wanna kill things dammit!" it would be no different for text

in fact if cutscnes are used well (and not oever done) then there less reason to skip them

oh and YOU may think alot of cutscenes are bad....but the magic word it SUBJECTIVE seriously learn what it means

and you are essentially saying "the way I enjoy thing is RIGHT you are WRONG" you may get off on text but I prefer VA all that way thats the way it is

 

[Squilookle]

To be honest I'd be willing to play that way even if it didn't have a price drop. If losing cinematics allow for better, longer stories with more options and outcomes, then that's all I need.

 

[brunothepig]

Morrowind. Best game I ever played. Voice acting is minimal, and cinimatics? There is not even enough to count on my left hand.

So my answers is yes across the board.

This is true, but that minimal voice acting was quite important. Can you imagine walking through the streets of Balmora without hearing "you n'wah!" growled from the shadows? Stealing a daedric sword and the owners only reaction is to draw their weapon? No call for the guards, no shout of "thief!", no "die fetcher!". Voice can be a very powerful tool to create immersion, especially in open world games such as Morrowind.

Besides that, voice acting is expensive true, but that's why so often it's either poorly done, or voices are shared, such as The Elder Scrolls. I'm actually looking forward to the promised extra diversity in voices for Skyrim. That said, not every game needs flashy cutscenes or a lot of voice acting, and I do think some games waste resources on prettier cutscenes for an extra selling point. Still, these elements have their place, and it's an important one.

So, anyway.
a) Would you Play a current gen AAA game with no Voice acting and no cinematics?
Maybe, but it wouldn't exactly be a selling point for me.
b)Would you be willing to sacrifice Voice acting and cinematics for a lower video game release price?
In certain situations, though like I said I feel voice acting can really benefit a game, and I do doubt it would lower the price, especially considering your argument is they could use the resources on other aspects of the game.
c)Would you Willing to sacrifice Voice acting and cinematics for a more polished game?
Once more, situational. In a puzzle game? Absolutely. In an RPG, I feel the loss of voice would be a far greater loss than the gain that could be made in other areas.

 

[Vault101]

1, no, you think i would have gone through any of the ME codex if it was purely text
2, meh depends i'm happy to buy cheap little indie title with no speech, but for a triple A title thats just being lazy and lets face it a reduction of price will only occur with the second coming of christ.
3.walls of text where voice acting should be is unpolished.

All in all this seem like an pretty stupid idea, taking the medium backwards isn't going to get us anywhere. This would mess with immersion for many games, would the introduction to half life two be even a tenth as good if the G-mans words were contained within a text box. Come to think of it the G-Man as a character could not really exist without voice acting. shockingly the non-gameplay elements of a games are also important. This would be like taking away music from games, after it's nothing to do with game play, so its not important, right.

I also get the feeling that people who are all for it are ones who have favorites outside of the current gen

mabye thats the reason I so much against the Idea, my favorite games are this gen and the VA and cutscnes make the game for me

 

[Albino Boo]

Small but important point, games have been getting cheaper not more expensive because of the that thing know as inflation. The price point of has remained about $60 for the last 20 years. If you adjusted for inflation the price would be about $98-99. The reason why the price can drop in real terms is because the size of the market has expanded over the same period. So cutting voice acting would run the risk of reducing the size of the market and pushing up the cost per unit volume.