Mostly or Fully Voice-acted

[NoScript]

A bit bummed I will not be picking this game up due to the lack of most or full voice-acting (when I say most here, I do not mean 50%+, I mean 97%). That was one of the things I was hoping would come to PFK after its success through a complete edition (like with DE's recent announcement), but to no avail. With the announcement of PFWotR, I thought for sure the Kickstarter would include it as a stretch goal (since the only real reason I have ever heard a game dev give for not including VA is cost), but if it was a goal, I did not see it listed.

I am not sure if it is a design philosophy or what, but I really hope that if PFWotR is a success, that most/full voice acting for the third entry will be more heavily considered. I love these types of games, but I lose interest when there is a lack of voice acting and have had to stop buying ones that do not include it for that reason (because I just do not finish them). On one hand, you could reach the conclusion that these games are not for me, but on the other, you could reach the conclusion that adding VA does not alienate an audience (it could always be disable-able), and other games in the genre have done it to great success.

I also think there is a huge misconception that only non-readers want this. I am an AVID reader (just finished The Stand by S.K. and currently read about two books a month) so it is definitely not that I do not like reading. But when I sit down to read, I am sitting down to read. When I sit down to play, I am sitting down to play. There is no hybrid for that because a game is, by design, a different activity. The way I see it, there is really no reason not to include full-VA when cost can be addressed by KS.

Just my two-cents. If someone else knows the specific reason it was not included (unrelated to cost), I would love to hear that.

[Baraz]

Reality check :
- Voice-acting about one million words cost *over* a million dollars US. If a dialogue-rich game has everything voice-acted. And that is only in English.
- Imagine if they also had voices for other languages ! it would cost many millions of US dollars.

- AND they translate all the dialogues in 4 other languages. Cost less than voice-acting, but certainly a good amount still.

- RPG players do not need every single line or dialogue to be voice-acted.
- The pressure to voice-act everything also drastically limits the capacity to quickly fix or change quests, add quests, etc.

- Official answer : they stated, in a very recent devstream, that initial dialogues (first time you meet a companion) and important scenes will be voice-acted. WotR already has a lot of banter during camp.

Anyhow, my point is your OP is about being a spoiled gamer, to say it politely.

[elbentzo]

Escrito originalmente por Jackal:

voice acting isnt expensive just requires time, and management
these devs take a year to make a game playable post-launch, so dont expect them to put in the effort

XDDDDDD
Voice acting isn't expensive? XDDDDDDD
Let me guess. You have absolutely no clue what you're talking about. You're either a two bit troll or just a dumbass who thinks he can make stuff up and it must be true because that's what it seems like to you....
Voice acting is one of the most expensive parts of making a video game. Studio time alone can run costs through the roof.

[IVR]

Go play Baldur's gate 3. Plenty of VO there.
Shoo.

[aramintai]

Escrito originalmente por IVR:

Go play Baldur's gate 3. Plenty of VO there.
Shoo.

1. Larian is working on a whole other budget, Owlcat studio is a small indie developer.
2. Pathfinder: Kingmaker had waay bigger word count per chapter than what I've seen from any of Larian's recent Divinity games and BG3 EA, and if Wrath of the Righteous is gonna have the same you'd need a very big budget to VO all of that.
3. VO is very expensive, do your research.

[Nifty]

Just dropping by to say, I actually think voice acting specifically in these types of games causes a decline in story telling. With top down / istometic rpgs writers have quite the creative freedom to describe a scene or emotions of characters which your imagination will run wild while reading and having a general scene presented to you with minimal animations running in the background and ambient sounds.

An example would be pillars of eternity, while that is actually a great game and I'm not trashing it at all, the story telling drops quite a bit in quality from the first to the second and being fully voice acted, for me the imaginative process of that game without descriptive text just sort of ruined the experience.

I do hope that voice acting in the genre doesn't become too popular and a standard, I do mean you can always disable it but a game written without voice acting and one that is written for voice acting are quite different in their story telling; you miss quite a bit of the descriptive text with the latter.

[Baraz]

Escrito originalmente por Nifty:

Just dropping by to say, I actually think voice acting specifically in these types of games causes a decline in story telling. With top down / istometic rpgs writers have quite the creative freedom to describe a scene or emotions of characters which your imagination will run wild while reading and having a general scene presented to you with minimal animations running in the background and ambient sounds.

An example would be pillars of eternity, while that is actually a great game and I'm not trashing it at all, the story telling drops quite a bit in quality from the first to the second and being fully voice acted, for me the imaginative process of that game without descriptive text just sort of ruined the experience.

I do hope that voice acting in the genre doesn't become too popular and a standard, I do mean you can always disable it but a game written without voice acting and one that is written for voice acting are quite different in their story telling; you miss quite a bit of the descriptive text with the latter.

Speaking of Pillars of Eternity, it does not voice-act every dialogue. It is an example of a game with excellent voice-actors, who can really give life/personality to the characters, yet they do not need to voice-act the entire game. It is a good mix.

nb : I am saying that in response to the OP. Not reacting to your preferences.

[Cat]

Pillars is a good example of the part that annoys me, they have partly voiced dialouge but it cuts off after a few sentences or the opening to a scene, yet their entire narrator voices most if not all of the main quest bits. Specifically in the 2nd game. All the voice acting did was give an impression of how some characters sound then it goes back to be silent again. If you are gonna voice a scene, then voice all the dialouge in that scene and make the rest text, not just voicing the first couple of lines and then stop.

[Cordatus]

Escrito originalmente por Sunricer:

Pillars is a good example of the part that annoys me, they have partly voiced dialouge but it cuts off after a few sentences or the opening to a scene, yet their entire narrator voices most if not all of the main quest bits. Specifically in the 2nd game. All the voice acting did was give an impression of how some characters sound then it goes back to be silent again. If you are gonna voice a scene, then voice all the dialouge in that scene and make the rest text, not just voicing the first couple of lines and then stop.

Pillar devs explained that. It was used as a means to set the tone and show the personality of the character. Mercer is a top-level talent, so they got a bargain with his performing multiple characters, and his level of skill would also mean less outtakes. Less outtakes, less dosh spent on the talent.

With that in mind, voice actors (good ones) are not cheap in the slightest. To hire a mid-level talent can run you around the area of $200 - $300 per hour of their time. The star of a game can get upwards of double that amount. The average amount of time needed varies greatly on the project, but you can figure about one minute per line of text is needed. You have to say the line, say it again, etc until you get the one that "feels right". When you multiply that by the number of characters, just counting the A / B cast of a game, the price gets spicy.

Did I mention post-editing? Cleaning the audio, directing it, applying filters etc.. Yeah that all costs a lot of money as well. You have to have a quality sound team to make the magic that VO and other investments towards sound can bring forth. Otherwise, all you do is damage your product's atmosphere with poor quality sound. Avoiding excess spending where possible without sacrificing the quality of the overall work, is in my approximation.. a rational thing to do.

And this isn't a case of "they can do both" either. Owlcat is a small studio. They are making their way, one step at a time and doing a wonderful job of it. I look forward to what they can bring to the industry down the road. If I could give advice to them.. it wouldn't have to do with VO, but everything to do with simultaneously incentivising exploration of a map, while also forcing a time restraint on rpg players. If I want to spend x_time looking behind every single tree and rock.. How about not have a giant death laser shoot my main city :P Just a thought.

[Nifty]

Either I'm being stupid and can't remember I thought Pillars 2 was fully voiced. So my bad on that, I was comparing Pillars 1 to Pillars 2 text, to me the first game was better story telling and just overall better writing to tell a scene better and for my imagination to add to it. But I also didn't like how most of the main quest is about 60-70% voice acted and then it cuts off.

I remember using this as an example for specifically pillars of eternity 1
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/208535964107145216/807771400043233350/Untitled.png

This was a fully voiced part of the dialogue, but after the voice actor was finished I went back and reread this part of the dialogue and got a much better sense of the scene that was happening because we're a top down view we don't get to see the details like this as a first person game would. So to me voice acting is just pointless. However the solution would be to just read all of this and use the 'narrator' read the descriptive text.
But this ties into my main issue with Pillars 2, because it was fully voiced or at least 90% if I remember right you didn't get as much descriptive text with it, you were just looking at an isometric scene and a bunch of text there wasn't much left to the imagination.

A good example of very minimalistic voice acting to give you a sense of what to imagine the characters voice to sound like would be Disco Elysium & I think Torment: Tides of Numenera did a good job with that too. But Pillars 1, you miss out on too much and end up rereading it after the voice actor is finished anyway and get a much better sense of the scene.

[ErikMalkavian]

Escrito originalmente por NoScript:

A bit bummed I will not be picking this game up due to the lack of most or full voice-acting (when I say most here, I do not mean 50%+, I mean 97%). That was one of the things I was hoping would come to PFK after its success through a complete edition (like with DE's recent announcement), but to no avail. With the announcement of PFWotR, I thought for sure the Kickstarter would include it as a stretch goal (since the only real reason I have ever heard a game dev give for not including VA is cost), but if it was a goal, I did not see it listed.

I fully agreed and after all of the Voice Acting that was in Kingmaker and coming from playing Pillars of Eternity 2 Deadfire, it will be hard for me to spend $50 on this.

I just think the game is TOO Quiet and has too much dialogue not to be at least 75% Voice-Acted. It sounds dead too much in the gameplay I have watched.

[MjKorz]

Escrito originalmente por NoScript:

Mostly or Fully Voice-acted

This is how you spot the zoomie.

Full voice acting is the bane of RPGs, because it forces the writers to trim dialogue trees down to the absolute bare minimum.

[Atlas817]

Or you use voice actors that are not expensive.

[SotiCoto]

Escrito originalmente por NoScript:

A bit bummed I will not be picking this game up due to the lack of most or full voice-acting (when I say most here, I do not mean 50%+, I mean 97%).

You are part of the problem. One of many problems ruining gaming.
The entire industry should have moved away from hiring voice actors and using pre-recorded audio at least a DECADE ago, as it causes massive amounts of game file bloat and presents unnecessary difficulty both for community modding and even official expansions and updates. Most games don't even need recorded voices at all, and so much more can be done with optional dialogue when one doesn't have to worry about the size of the audio files... but even where such things would be desirable, it would be better to make use of modern text-to-speech technology, as it has come a long way since the 1990s. BUT unfortunately progress is being held back by shallow troglodytes who insist on everything being fully voiced by real people, and thus pressure the industry NOT to improve... which ruins it for everyone. And so we have to put up with games where our choices don't matter and the content is frankly lacking because too much of the game space and budget is being allocated to prerecorded audio.

[Sabrine]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.