Why is so little invested in voice acting?

[13752]

Okay, I can answer part of this myself. The big talent costs money. Keith David and people can't be cheap, let alone the hollywood casts. But I don't understand why companies like bethesda studios appear to invest so little in voices, considering its integral to the immersion the franchise prides itself so heavily on. We've all played new vegas. You've got the black guy, the old guy, the kid, the old woman, the young bastard, the greaser, the soldier etc. which seems to apply to EVERY person you meet.

I mean come on. Voice acting cannot be that expensive. Heck Bethesda, you're building an open world game here, an entire state practically populated with thousands of people, and you only hire 81 voice actors? What does it cost to hire a voice actor? everyone's got a voice. I'm damn sure a lot of people have a lot of good voices, but heck any voices would be better than only 80 good ones. Give your game some variety.

I dunno. When you're working on a big budget franchise like Fallout I'd expect a bit better. You don't need to hire from agencies or studios, just get five hundred people off the streets and throw them into a recording studio and give em $20 each to record 20 or so lines for an hour each. I cannot imagine that would be too much of a strain on a company that made an estimated $300 million.

 

[Kortney]

Yeah I've got no idea why Bethesda have something against hiring a varied voice acting cast. It breaks immersion when you hear the same person fifty times in a game.

Bioware generally do that side of things much better.

 

[Radoh]

Well, you can get bad voice acting for cheap, or you can get good voice acting at a great expense. Do you know how much it cost Bethesda to pay Captain Picard for his like, seven lines?

 

[Geo Da Sponge]

Well, you can get bad voice acting for cheap, or you can get good voice acting at a great expense. Do you know how much it cost Bethesda to pay Captain Picard for his like, seven lines?

But that's the problem, for the money it took to get Picard, they could of had enough variety in voice actors to stop the generic NPCs sharing so many lines and sounding ridiculous.

 

[nima55]

I always point to mass effect 2 when it comes to VA because look at how many people (who are relatively famous) and look how good it (mostly) is.

 

[Hyper-space]

I mean come on. Voice acting cannot be that expensive. Heck Bethesda, you're building an open world game here, an entire state practically populated with thousands of people

You've just answered it, making that expansive world with thousands of NPCs, dungeons, locations, events, quests, a script for EVERY quest and NPC, is pretty expensive and takes a lot of man-power to accomplish. Meaning that by the time they're done making ALL of that, the money and time they have to spend on VA (something that delivers so little compared to the time and money spent on it) is minuscule.

Also, i do not think hiring loads of people off the street would be any better, as most people do not know how to properly voice-act, meaning that you would end up with painfully bad voice acting (which would be detrimental to the immersion). Plus, theres the logistical and legal issues that follow with pulling something like that off.

Bioware generally do that side of things much better.

Bioware can manage, because they only have a number of NPCs that you can interact with properly in each game (but you still hear many of the same voice actors again), and they have the money for the talent, as they are not making an Open-world RPG with thousands of NPCs and Quests.

 

[Radoh]

Well, you can get bad voice acting for cheap, or you can get good voice acting at a great expense. Do you know how much it cost Bethesda to pay Captain Picard for his like, seven lines?

But that's the problem, for the money it took to get Picard, they could of had enough variety in voice actors to stop the generic NPCs sharing so many lines and sounding ridiculous.

Then I misunderstood what this thread's direction was, I thought he was asking why not forgo the expense and get the big guns.

 

[mew4ever23]

This is really tricky. To little and you run the risk of getting something like this:

The problem is that there's only so much money a dev team has to develop a game. The more they spend on voice acting, the less they have for other things.

 

[Link XL1]

WHOA DUDE! hold the phone, bethesda didnt make new vegas. that was obsibdian, bethesda only published it. so dont go saying bethesda's got bad actors cause they got Patrick Steward and Liam Neeson in their ACTUAL games. seriously get the facts right dude. if you're talking about bad acting why dont you bring up the sonic games? or pretty much any japanese game (im not saying all of them), cause that shit does not translate well to American. (yes American is it's own language)

ok, now that i've blasted you with fire. i'll get to the main point. voice does cost money, and unfortunately it costs a lot because actors like to think its equivalent to movie acting. and at the same time, its not the most important aspect of the game. there are plenty of great games out today that have no voice at all.

 

[Dark Knifer]

I'd imagine the companies don't really see it as worthwhile for the game since games aren't really known for voice acting so they don't pay it much attention. The standard for voice acting is low so they see it as a good way to save money I'd imagine.

 

[The Apothecarry]

It's cheaper to hire 81 people to voice a thousand characters. I'll admit that Oblivion had issues with voice-acting and dialog assignment, but it didn't feel all that bad in Fallout. Besides, Fallout had a much wider variety of actors than Oblivion. Oblivion had what...10 voice actors including Sean Bean and Patrick Stewart?

Say you have 100 characters and you hire 25 people plus one celebrity at $10 for each of the regulars and $40 for the celebrity. That is $290 compared to $1000 for 100 individual people. Much cheaper.

I've never had problems with breaking immersion in Fallout. The voice acting in F3 and FNV is good and adds to the flow and feel of the game. They took a hint from the beggars in Oblivion going from stupid sounding to suddenly intelligent. Nothing breaks immersion in a game like dialog switches.

 

[Azure-Supernova]

Best games for voice acting in my opinion? Grand Theft Auto.

Vice City
Tommy Vercetti - Ray Liotta
Steve Scott - Dennis Hopper
Avery Carrington - Burt Reynolds
Umberto Robina - Danny Trejo
Phil Cassidy - Gary Busey
Kent Paul - Danny Dyer

San Andreas featured a good number of black actors and artists... I'm just having trouble remembering anyone other than Ice-T and Faizon Love. Oh fuck and Samuel L. Jackson as Tenpenny!

Now they're hardly all big Hollywood stars, but they gave a great performance as memorable characters am I right?

So how come sandbox shooter Grand Theft Auto gets this loveley cast whilst Oblivion was confined to Shaun Bean and Patrick Stewart?

 

[emeraldrafael]

Probably cause people take voices for granted, cause most everyone has one and most everyone thinks they can voice someone/thing better and that its just reading a script, so you didnt do anything a kindergardener could do.

 

[pyramid head grape]

This is really tricky. To little you sometimes get this:

The problem is that there's only so much money a dev team has to develop a game. The more they spend on voice acting, the less they have for other things.

Tidus well with the name I give him "dickbag" had terrible voice acting and before all FF fanbodys get on my case. One of my favourite games it going to be called on the same thing silent hill 2 take the stand. Next too all the characters had bad voice acting.

 

[Risingblade]

No one buys a game to listen to people talk. that it not the main focus therefore the money is not focused as much on it.

 

[CrystalShadow]

Okay, I can answer part of this myself. The big talent costs money. Keith David and people can't be cheap, let alone the hollywood casts. But I don't understand why companies like bethesda studios appear to invest so little in voices, considering its integral to the immersion the franchise prides itself so heavily on. We've all played new vegas. You've got the black guy, the old guy, the kid, the old woman, the young bastard, the greaser, the soldier etc. which seems to apply to EVERY person you meet.

I mean come on. Voice acting cannot be that expensive. Heck Bethesda, you're building an open world game here, an entire state practically populated with thousands of people, and you only hire 81 voice actors? What does it cost to hire a voice actor? everyone's got a voice. I'm damn sure a lot of people have a lot of good voices, but heck any voices would be better than only 80 good ones. Give your game some variety.

I dunno. When you're working on a big budget franchise like Fallout I'd expect a bit better. You don't need to hire from agencies or studios, just get five hundred people off the streets and throw them into a recording studio and give em $20 each to record 20 or so lines for an hour each. I cannot imagine that would be too much of a strain on a company that made an estimated $300 million.

I'll give you another important consideration, and don't laugh, because it's been said quite a lot by developers at one point or another:

Games are limited by technology. And in a case like this, voice samples take up a lot of space. In fact, unless a game has pre-rendered cutscenes, the single biggest use of storage capacity in a game is sounds.
And, amongst the sound resources, the biggest proportion of space being used is going to be either the music, or any voice acting.

If your publisher says your game needs to fit on 1 CD, (and have 50 megabytes left for their unrelated stuff), you have 600 megabytes or so to fit the ENTIRE game in.
If you've got 601 megabytes of assets, and they're already heavily compressed (which they probably will be), you're going to have to remove something.

OK, so CD's are obsolete, and PC games have moved towards copying the whole thing to the hard disk anyway. (which allows more aggressive compression, and makes disc-swapping less of a headache as an idea.)
But consoles certainly still don't encourage disk swapping.

And just because a DVD can squash 7-15 times the amount of stuff onto it a CD can, and Blu-ray can in turn fit 5-10 times that much on it again, doesn't mean you aren't going to run into that same problem again.

But of course, that's not really a fair or accurate point unless the voice acting is limited in scope.
If 30 characters all have the same voice, but different lines, that's got nothing to do with technical limits.
If however, those 30 characters all share the same voices AND the same lines of dialogue (or mostly the same lines), then there's a fair chance there's some kind of technical constraint involved as well.

 

[Meggiepants]

This has always baffled me as well. My only guess is they just don't think it's worth the money for it. I guess they don't think people will really decide to buy a game based on the voices, but they will based on the graphics.

Not all game companies do this though. I've noticed their are some companies that really take care with their voice choices, like NIS America. Their voices are always so much fun.

 

[Krythe]

Professionally: It's a point of pride. Voice Actors pride themselves on being able to do a number of different voices, though I kind of think it gets silly when a character starts talking to themself.

Unofficially: It's an easy fix for financially cutting corners. Video games are all about making money, which is why I get a kick when people talk about it as a "lifestyle".