Baldur’s Gate has a lot of text you need to read
Let me start by saying I have a huge love of voiced videogames, which many are nowadays – RPG’s being the ones I like most. But harkon back a fair few years – before DVD’s, even before CD’s – what was possible when putting a voice to a sentence?
The best answer is likely your imagination; you put the voice there. Maybe there is an opening sentence which is voiced (common in some RPG’s), and after that, all but silence except perhaps “bleep bleep bleep”. Maybe it was all silence. You always had to put a voice to it for it to make sense, and this, I think, was one of the most fun elements of a well written game (or book for that matter), giving the characters your own interpreted voices.
For me, the majority of my early experience with it comes from the Baldur’s Gate series from Bioware – which simply had too much dialogue to record it as voiced. There might have been an initial line, and rarely, a few lines, which started your ideas about how this person spoke. You then had to add the arguments, the crying, the feeling to the words. Sure, the big bad got his demonic voice, but even your party lacked recorded dialogue for most of the game.
I realise I am not the best person to talk about this – I’d have thought the players of text adventures had it better, since when there was spoken word it was basically spoken as a book. Putting the personal touch to a story that otherwise is not in the players control is a great way to get them into a story and game.
Newer “text adventures” like Phoenix Wright and Hotel Dusk go with strategic “bleep” sounds when text is spoken, with maybe one or two spoken words in the entire game. Putting voices to these characters is fun, and part of it – an interactive text adventure comes down to the story, which these games provide ample amounts of.
It’s a great tool for some games which are voiced too – reading books in-game, for instance, can setup a character well before meeting them, or knowing what a dead character was like.
So, one of the best voiceactors can be our own minds! Some games might be improved by this to a degree – the fact there were only 6 or 7 voiceactors in the entire Oblivion game (except for very very special people), grated on the nerves, and definitely limited a great amount of depth that Morrowind had – a game which relied on reading, providing that much more entertainment.
I admire and respect fully voice acted games, but in some cases, I wish I could take back that control, and act it out in my head. After all, it’s very easy to entertain yourself, and not have an annoying voiceactor make a likeable character the most hated!
This is part of the March Blogs of the Roundtable called Our Masters’ Voices:
I would have to agree that this is an issue that needs to be addressed somehow. If animation continues to expand, and AI continues to grow more realistic, dialog will have to keep pace. Voice acting is becoming a major bottleneck in a lot of productions. Unlike animation, for example, you can’t easily construct things procedurally. People will notice if you try to piecemeal a sentence or paragraph together.
What to do? Is there a novel solution out there or do we spend more time and money in the recording studio?
In dialogue, I think a move back to reading text (which most people do anyway!) would be a good idea – get as far away from Oblivion and back to rich dialogues.
Record combat phrases, introductions, and dramatic speeches or important lines, but the rest doesn’t need drastic voiceacting, does it? I love getting the feel of a character from their initial phrases (those help a lot, although nowadays faces look a lot more detailed which helps too), then putting that voice to later dialogue.
Some games can come closer to pulling it off – although not a great story, Neverwinter Nights 2 voices all it’s dialogue (there’s a ton of NPC’s in it). Knights of the Old Republic is long (and rather detailed in places) and has all it’s text voiced. So some do succeed – but probably at the expense of the recording studio like you said!
For faster games, there usually isn’t that much audio needed – Call of Duty has snippits of battle dialogue which is easier to manage, but in any game with choices or longer non-combat dialogues need some effort to work well.
NWN2 voiced all of the cut scene dialog – however, all the menu driven interaction was text. Sometimes, there were combinations of the two at the same time – an introduction line or two that then went into the menus. That was an odd disconnect.
Eeek, good point 🙂 you’re entirely correct now I think about it – it’s only the major characters who have the full voiceacting done for them. A good compromise perhaps – the minor characters don’t need the voiceacting, which leads to perhaps more variety in opponents then Knights of the Old Republic that does voiceact everything.
Although I still would prefer only the major major bits to be voiceacted, such as Baldur’s Gate was, which was a lot easier to read with your own ideas of voices.