Goblin Squad Member
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Given there are no active topics I'm finding all that interesting at the moment I decided to come up with something that would spark a heated debate. This is the best I could come up with in a few moments.
How much voice acting should we see? Random character grunts? Fully voiced quests? Character voice themes like in Neverwinter Nights?
Round 1... fight! I mean discuss...
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Goblin Squad Member
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Supposedly, a lot of the budget that went into SWTOR was voice acting. Didn't pan out too well for the game as a whole. ;) Going F2P w/ MTX did far more for it in that respect.
If most of the game is supposed to occur between players, it would almost make more sense to have the players speak for their characters aloud, with various filters to add a vestige of authenticity where possible.
Then again, there's nothing quite like clicking on a peon repeatedly just to hear what they say next. ;)
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Goblin Squad Member
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Given the number of North Americans on this forum, I know this will be somewhat controversial, but I do find an American accent very out of place in a pseudo-medieval or Renaissance setting. I would prefer European accents; English, French or German for preference.
I know that it is a fantasy world and therefore ahistorical by definition, but the US accent sets my teeth on edge when coming from an armoured knight or Arthurian sorceress.
Maybe one of the non-human races could have the US accent, as they do in Dragon Age where the elves speak with the American drawl.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If most of the game is supposed to occur between players, it would almost make more sense to have the players speak for their characters aloud, with various filters to add a vestige of authenticity where possible.
I really like the idea of voice-filters, but they're apparently fairly difficult to do well in practice.
I even downloaded EQII so I could log in and try out Voice Modulation. Unfortunately, it wasn't very good.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I feel the number of near essential features we will have to wait for, investing any time, money or development resources into voice over is wasteful.
If our characters and their settlements interactions are the content, then text only NPC interaction is all that is necessary in my opinion.
GW will get more mileage out of releasing the core races and glasses than they will from some gimmick like expensive voice over. What usually happens shortly after hearing it a few times, players will call for the ability to skip it anyway.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I think that the cost/benefit curve starts to flatten after vocal noises and before spoken prose. Giving the same few sound bites to every character is an arrow to the knee, and providing enough unique voice acting is expensive and provides little benefit over none.
I don't think that there's a stock goblin sound set that does Paizo's goblins justice, and the cost of getting a professional studio to record the things you are doing is well worth it.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Supposedly, a lot of the budget that went into SWTOR was voice acting. Didn't pan out too well for the game as a whole. ;)
Ill have to go with this. Too much money and time wasted that is just fluff for the game as a whole. Not needed, I would rather read the NPC interactions and have a functioning game.
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Goblin Squad Member
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There's some amount of audio that's in the minimum viable product.
Agreed. I don't think we need anything too extreme upon release, but if my character is entirely silent all the time, that's just crazy.
Eventually though, if there are quests I hope they are voiced. Text quests just seem so dry after having played SWTOR and GW2. I would imagine this actually wouldn't be a huge undertaken as opposed to SWTOR where there were five billion quests hiding under every rock.
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keanus reeves as valeros
whoa
I know weapon specialization
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Goblin Squad Member
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There's some amount of audio that's in the minimum viable product.
Well yeah, but we dont need voice overs that would put the game back another year.
The voice acting is great in SWTOR, but past that the game is lacking anything other then what KotOR already had. Basically a single player MMO... makes sense right?
so basically just have Nolan North do every single sound in the game, got it
Y'know ... I have ALWAYS wanted to do voice over work. :)
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Goblin Squad Member
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Star Wars: The Old Republic's decision to radically re-envision the storytelling process was a reasonable one. There's something terribly unsatisfying about reading quest text, and there's something even more unsatisfying about not really remembering what I've accomplished when I complete a slew of quests in an area. I applaud them for trying to find a new model that works, and I feel for them that they failed.
I'm rather hopeful that the paucity of quests in PFO means that they're much better written, and more engaging. I'd much rather have a single quest that required me to kill the final boss in four separate dungeons - which required me to kill a number of mini-bosses in those dungeons in order to reach the final boss, than to do a half-dozen quests in each of those four dungeons that I hardly remember when I'm done.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Star Wars: The Old Republic's decision to radically re-envision the storytelling process was a reasonable one. There's something terribly unsatisfying about reading quest text, and there's something even more unsatisfying about not really remembering what I've accomplished when I complete a slew of quests in an area. I applaud them for trying to find a new model that works, and I feel for them that they failed.
I'm rather hopeful that the paucity of quests in PFO means that they're much better written, and more engaging. I'd much rather have a single quest that required me to kill the final boss in four separate dungeons - which required me to kill a number of mini-bosses in those dungeons in order to reach the final boss, than to do a half-dozen quests in each of those four dungeons that I hardly remember when I'm done.
You know that's actually a really great point. Part of the problem with the quest systems of most MMO's is we are handed a page of dry text about an uninteresting job we have to accomplish, and this is done dozens of times in each zone.
Having those quests voiced and attached to a moral decision made this system much more interesting, but the novelty did wear off a bit after a certain point.
But if questing consisted of a major task, or many, many such minor tasks all rolled into a single mission, then that would be a huge step toward making the whole system more bareable. After all, in Pathfinder your quest is generally to slay the bandit chief. Not a bunch of separate quests to kill goblin warriors, kill goblin shamans, burn goblin banners, snap goblin spears, poison the goblin's water supply, recover 15 goblin idols, burn 10 crates of goblin supplies etc.
The solution really could be making quests intended to take 30 minutes to 3 hours instead of about 5 minutes a quest. I would still like for those quests to be voiced at some point in the future, but quest length and scope actually sounds like the more important side of a good two sided approach to the problem.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I had a thought a while back over the novelty of taking one of the Text-to-Speech libraries that Google or whoever uses, applying modulations and figuring out a good way to handle cadence. It would sound.. not amazing, but at the same time.. every single character could easily be voiced.
Combine that with some kind of voice recognition that learns your speech habits, Dragon Naturally Speaking or Google again, and contextual search. You could potentially carry on limited conversations with an NPC.
It would be like every other first step into such a venture, very shaky.. but potentially awesome if developed further.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I've stated it before. While voiced characters can be nice it can often be limiting. /Roar can be nice. But what if you want it to be more feral? A fierce, gutteral roar? And all we get is a half hearted. Waarg! Best give us some good animations, visual representation and let the text do the rest.
While voiced characters can be neat, it is however most often used like this http://youtu.be/DozQBMROQUI?t=15s
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Goblin Squad Member
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Star Wars: The Old Republic's decision to radically re-envision the storytelling process was a reasonable one. There's something terribly unsatisfying about reading quest text, and there's something even more unsatisfying about not really remembering what I've accomplished when I complete a slew of quests in an area. I applaud them for trying to find a new model that works, and I feel for them that they failed.
I'm rather hopeful that the paucity of quests in PFO means that they're much better written, and more engaging. I'd much rather have a single quest that required me to kill the final boss in four separate dungeons - which required me to kill a number of mini-bosses in those dungeons in order to reach the final boss, than to do a half-dozen quests in each of those four dungeons that I hardly remember when I'm done.
Yeah, but I'll go with the masses on this one, it was really out of place in an MMO. It was really good, it really was well done. But when actually playing with other players you never get to enjoy it. Every PUG group I've ever quested with blew through the VO, and then when you were soloing it got pretty cumbersome pretty quick since it's all just a grind to 80 anyways.
Unless I was soloing AND the specific quest was really interesting, I'd rarely enjoy it. Considering how much dev time/money/HD space all that VO takes up, I'd rather they just skip it for PFO.
A couple lines here and there, city bustle noise and your obligatory "arrow to the knee joke" is enough for me.
I would like to be able to pick a voice for my actual character to grunt and say hello in, but it's not that high on the list.