Games that have dialogue but no voice acting.

[Sixtyfivekills]

EDIT: talking mostly about 3D games, no retro.

How do you feel about these? I am not opposed to reading but I personally think it drags the experience down heavily and I don't understand the artistic decision behind it.



Take a game like Gravity Rush. It is using made up language and the opening section leaves a good impression, you can hear characters talking but after 2 minutes of gameplay, everyone goes full text and mute aside from grunts and moans. It feels incredibly jarring and removes a lot of personality from the characters.


Or how about a good chunk of Nintendo games, I tried out Hyrule Warriors since I enjoyed quite a few Musou games, but there's literally nothing aside from grunts and moans which for this genre feels so weird.



Can someone perhaps share a viewpoint that will make me understand why some games do this aside from saving budget?

[Krypto]

I'm too used to games with voice acting, so when a new one comes along without it, it throws me off.

FF16 has side content where the first part of the sentence is voice acted, then it's just text. Threw me off since other lines are fully voiced.

[Dadpool]

Not sure if I want to know Link's personality, he just does not seem like interesting guy, so I'm ok with this.

[Plaid]

Maybe they can't fit all that audio on a cartridge.

[salamander]

i am in my 30s. every game growing up for me had no voice acting so, this isnt really anything new or strange for me personally.

if you are speaking of why games still might do it today? stylistic choice. the zelda series has traditionally never had voice acting, only grunts/noises to go with the dialogue. newer games like botw and totk are an exception to this. nintendo in general, their video games attempt to have somewhat of a "fairytale" quality, to them.

i play a lot of retro games still to this day, with no voice acting. i guess i just dont really need it. i read a lot of books, i enjoy reading dialogue and imagining the characters voices myself in games too.

i dont have anything against voice acting. i play plenty of games with voice acting as well. its just that, as someone who is a little older i guess i dont need it nor prefer it one way or the other.

[Logan]

Chants of Sennaar

[Sixtyfivekills]

Originally posted by salamander:

i am in my 30s. every game growing up for me had no voice acting so, this isnt really anything new or strange for me personally.

if you are speaking of why games still might do it today? stylistic choice. the zelda series has traditionally never had voice acting, only grunts/noises to go with the dialogue. newer games like botw and totk are an exception to this. nintendo in general, their video games attempt to have somewhat of a "fairytale" quality, to them.

i play a lot of retro games still to this day, with no voice acting. i guess i just dont really need it. i read a lot of books, i enjoy reading dialogue and imagining the characters voices myself in games too.

i dont have anything against voice acting. i play plenty of games with voice acting as well. its just that, as someone who is a little older i guess i dont need it nor prefer it one way or the other.

That's the thing, when it comes to retro games I don't mind it at all, in fact I am surprised when I hear voices like in Capcom's DND arcade game, but when it comes to newish 3D games I just don't get it.


Both of us played Yakuza so we know how it is, only Yakuza 6 is fully voice acted, BUT, there's something about the presentation of its other entries that makes the lack of voices not seem off at all. Or how about a game like Okami, its all gibberish that loops but each character has a distinct sound they're making which makes them unique, and I think it works well and would take it any day over dead silence.

[Coinkydink]

It's all about the money, honey.

The problem is double because those developers that can afford it become so in love with their product that they feel compelled to force all that dialogue onto the player with sometimes limited ability to skip- and most of the time no option in the settings to just automatically skip the friggin cut scenes. SKIP, MOFO

[SÜM1 i§IN myHead!!!]

lazy-haste (rushed into development) &/or talent-lacking devs?

Maybe they lost the voice acting people and couldn't find good replacements in time?

Perhaps just trying to find a different way to capture the player's interest?

[peppermint hollows]

Doesn't really bother me if the game is good. Morrowind is one of my fav games of all time, and 90% of the in-game dialogue is text only

[SÜM1 i§IN myHead!!!]

Originally posted by Plaid:

Maybe they can't fit all that audio on a cartridge.

and this.
maybe they wanted to save data and make the size smaller, also for faster loading.

[Pierce Dalton]

It's alright if the game doesn't have too much dialogue, but for something like Metal Gear, for instance? It would be off putting for sure.

[Stingray_tm]

I think the three Shadowrun Games actually benefit from not having voice acting. The writing is so good and goes far beyond simple dialogue, that it would have been grating to switch from very detailed, prosaic descriptions of the environment to voice acting and back.
Also being able to take in the text in my pace and not being dictated by the speed of the voice acting, gave the text time to breath, just like reading a good book.

Obviously there are many examples, where good voice acting elevated the game, but it really depends. Some games simply don't need it.

[the vampire of time and memory]

I mostly play indie games so I don't see a problem with it, it's a scope/budgetary limitation that leads to creative alternatives sometimes

[Sixtyfivekills]

Originally posted by Stingray_tm:

Also being able to take in the text in my pace and not being dictated by the speed of the voice acting, gave the text time to breath, just like reading a good book.

I have played VNs with voice acting and honestly I never felt that the voices finishing the dialogue before I read it all or go on felt wrong to me, mostly because I don't understand JP language.


Of course everything depends on the context of the game and the way its presented, for example I could not imagine voice acting in something like Ace Attorney since characters are all so animated and bursting with personality, but at the same time if someone gives me a modern Type Moon novel and expects me to not hear the dialogue is crazy.


but then there are games that miss the mark completely to me like previously mentioned Gravity Rush where the characters on the screen are barely expressive at all, there's no additional SFX and music is pretty much just background noise, at that point I'd much rather just read a novelization of it if there was one.