Ok, soapbox time. I’m going to alienate a lot of people and say that ubiquitous voice acting in many games, particularly roleplaying games, is a bad thing. The reason is that it’s constraining the ability of script writers, particularly in conversations.
It’s obvious really - recording voice is more expensive than text, both in terms of the time required to produce it, and the space it consumes on the final media. Therefore, it’s a scarce resource. You simply cannot afford to have a ton of conversation that only 5% of the player base will ever hear.
I think about the games that I hold as some of the best in terms of script writing and particularly flexible, engaging and truly variable dialogue, and they’re all in the past, because they are all text-based. Planescape Torment sits on the ultimate podium here - a game simply bursting with rich, well-written dialog with a very large number of variations. Also Fallout (the original) - where you really could affect the world around you, and have genuinely different conversations depending on what you did, and the kind of character you were. It’s watching the videos of the latest one that I can clearly see how far conversational systems have fallen from those heights.
Fast-forward to the current generation and current ’standards’ say that we can’t expect the player to actually read anything, because today’s gamers expect everything to be narrated to them, as if they’re a 3-year old wanting a bed-time story. Sure, in games like Mass Effect there’s a bunch of supplemental material that you can read if you want, but all the information pertaining to the actual game experience is stubbornly all voice acted. As such, although they clearly do try to make it individual and variable, the constraints of time and space mean that the dialog options can’t hold the merest glimmer of a candle to the best roleplaying games I was playing 10-15 years ago. How many games do we see now where the only conversation options are:
- “No thanks”
- “I’ll do it”
- “Give me more money and I’ll do it”
- “I kill you! I kill you now!”
Is this the best we can do?
Far too many games these days want to be movies so badly that they seem to forget that there are other media forms they could also be looking to for inspiration, such as literature. A good book is arguably much richer and deeper than any film could ever be, simply because it doesn’t have to rely on moment-to-moment live communication through visuals and narration; it is consumed by the mind first and foremost, rather than the eyes and ears, and as such the flow of information is dynamic - I can choose the pace at which I consume and how much I ponder. Guess what - games can be consumed at varying speeds / intensities depending on the player too, so why aren’t we giving people more opportunity to have a deeper experience if they look for it, rather than going for the lowest-common denominator, the whiz-bang Hollywood level?
Planescape Torment was so good precisely because it tapped into the principle that you can deliver good literary material in pieces, as part of an adapting, changing story, in response to the players actions. There was a huge amount of material there if you decided to dig for it, and different players had genuinely different experiences, and not just at a superficial level. The beauty of games is that they can mix different media and make it new - I don’t want to sit there just reading pages and pages of static text, any more than I want to sit there watching a long cutscene (I’ll read a book or watch a film if I want those things), but I can certainly have a wide variety of quality writing delivered to me piecemeal on demand, interactively, depending on on my actions - that’s what a good conversation system should be like, deep and involving with lots of options, that almost certainly can’t all be voice acted economically.
But, of course visual and audio spectacles sell by the bucketload to the kind of people who buy the latest consoles, and far too many of these players wouldn’t know a good book if one hit them in the face. There’s probably no going back to text conversations in games, but I do think we’re the poorer for it in many cases.
August 31st, 2008 at 1:47 am
So we have those movies, with all their ultrafast cars, (but) slowmotion action, badass heros, and some blood around… those are intended for the kind of people that dont like to read too much… they just want some adrenaline pushed thanks to the Booms and Bangs and THXs. And those movies make millions.
So when games traded their green text screens for full HD monitors/TVs, they gave up the narrative style for the hollywood experience… and everybody loved it, lets buy lots of speakers, a big graphic card, a big screen and big explosions… It’s the same audience, so you give them the same fix, lot’s of guns and instant multiplayer action with nothing behind… in first person if possible
And they make millions.
But there are lot’s of movies apart from the hollywood ones, more complex and far less noisy in every way, but it took them some time to appear. The same will happen with games, but right now we are in the wild west movies era, not so much argument there.
So…. hmmm it’s just your fault, isnt it?! hahaha
If there were no “cameras” in game engines there would be less moviemaker-wannabes inside the game industry… 
hehehe
Anyway… i loved and still love adventure games… real adventure games (text adventures, graphic adventures)… they feel like interactive books. Most of them were text only and some full dubbed, and that wasnt a problem back then. Maybe their problem is that they dont have enough explosions…. if any…
August 31st, 2008 at 1:47 am
Since GTA IV and it’s copy cats are some of the most popular games on the market, then yes, I would say mainstream games have a dialogue problem.
However, I don’t blame the use of the human voice. After all, no one speaks like they write. Thank goodnes. So, if you want to play a book as a game, go for it, if you want to play a talking game then play that. But, can we just stop making filth like GTA IV so damn popular?
August 31st, 2008 at 5:06 pm
@MaaS: damn, obviously I need to stop Ogre and make a text adventure game engine instead…
@Dan: the point is that no-one makes games with the conversational / plot depth of a book anymore, and one of the reasons is that everything *has* to be voice acted; like it or not, this *does* constrain the amount of content, particularly branching content, that makes it into a game, except occasionally as spurious, tangental-to-game-experience stuff like in Mass Effect. The depth and breadth of writing that was present in the core game experience 10 years ago in Planescape Torment and Fallout is entirely absent in any game that I can find today.
“if you want to play a book as a game, go for it,”
I can’t play these kinds of games anymore, because they don’t get made - values have changed, and not for the better in certain genres. That’s my problem. It’s not a case of how I play, it’s the case that games as a media have become shallower, and all the talk of ‘games as art’ is total crap. Sure, Heavy Rain looks great, sure it’s like a horror / drama movie. But the interaction is still about where you wander to and what QTE’s you experience, it’s much like a sauced-up Dragon’s Lair as anything else. That’s not even on the same planet as Torment in terms of depth, no matter how realistic some bird looks as she blubs in front of the camera. The games industry needs to stop viewing film as the ultimate pinnacle of art and media, it’s just so limiting.
August 31st, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Hmmm i dont mind, if you keep Ogre… but only for promotional purposes of the real next-gen thing : TATAE - The Awesome Text Adeventure Engine hehehe ^_^
*sigh* ‘miss those times…
September 1st, 2008 at 9:51 am
Well, if it’s just a budget problem… let’s just hope voice generation will make enough progress in the future to enable it into games.
September 1st, 2008 at 11:09 am
The best use of text conversation in a game of late that I can think of would be the Phoenix Wright games on the DS. After all, about 95% of the game is dependant on text. What’s more the dialogue in most case is superb and amusing – bonus. You also get a reasonably varied option of replies and queries. I do, however, seem to remember that some reviews have criticised the games when reviewing them for being nothing more than being electronic novels (with options of course), but to be frank, who cases. What’s wrong with that exactly?
One way to cut down the costs of voice acting in games is to use both voice acting and text. A prime example would be Final Fantasy XII (I know your not a fan), which uses voice acting during cut scenes (which I know you also dislike), but text during the rest of the game, where the dialogue is heavier.
Another aspect of voice acting as opposed to text is that for established characters it can be extremely off putting when suddenly voice acting is used, when in previous games it hasn’t. Hands up those who *hate* the voice acting for Sonic since the Dreamcast days? Use of voice acting in a sparing way, where a few occasional phrases are used, but the rest of the game is in text can work, I’m thinking of something like Mario games, where Mario will utter a few occasional phrases, i.e. “It’s a me, Mario”, but whenever there is heavier dialogue, this is in text.
One of the best examples I can think of voice acting that does work well in a game recently has to be Uncharted: Drakes Fortune. This is mainly because the dialogue is well written and acted. Also, it is saved for a few cut scenes and amusing, Han Solo style quips during gameplay.
@ Dan… Not a fan of GTA IV then…
September 1st, 2008 at 11:26 am
@Michael: I’m not holding my breath - I think text-to-speech interfaces have considerable distance to go before they’ll be acceptable.
@Baz: Yeah I’m not saying voice acting itself is bad - when it’s done well it can be great, I just don’t like that it’s deemed necessary for every piece of dialog to be voiced. In a game like Unchartered it doesn’t really matter, since the plot is essentially linear anyway, but in RPGs it suppresses the variety available IMHO.
It’s good to hear FFXII bucks that trend anyway, even though I’m not a big fan of the JRPG genre. Knights of the Old Republic is probably the best voice-acted game I can think of, the writing & acting really were excellent, but while you did have more variety in the dialog than many other games, it was still a constraint to what kind of conversations you could have.
I must get around to playing Phoenix Wright sometime. Along with about 10 other games of course! I still haven’t got to GTA IV yet, and I’m not even sure I will this year.
September 1st, 2008 at 4:46 pm
@Steve: Sounds like look a good segment for an indie to jump in and make a splash. The ultimate goal is for that indie to pickup a publisher perhaps and hit the open markets. One thought is that perhaps the semi-open waters of the upcoming community games for XBL could spawn a few console incubators. Of course there’s the 150MB size limit, but perhaps an episodic approach could work. Of course XNA games run on windows too, so no charge there if the indie so chooses. (Hope I don’t get bashed for mentioning XNA here, it’s just what I’m using lately.)
September 2nd, 2008 at 4:12 pm
@ steve, yup size limit and variety and depth. we are losing the fun from nex gen RPGs.
@ Dan, Yup a Indie idea is really nice one, couple with fact that more text means less cost. And wvariety is spice of life so we actually need variety, said from POV of human inside me.
@steve, sometimes people regress in disguise of progress. We are losing depth for visual show. But IMHO Bioware games still contains loads of text, but u still have the point.
@ Baz, But variety is still good, say text heavy, voice heavy, mixed based on game. Say how much text Assasin Creed or Jedi Outcast need, and how much voice acting is needed for even NeverWinter Nights one.
@ Michael, Text to Speech interfaces are answer but voice acting will be more accurate and still TTS has a long distance to travel, prime example is Unreal Tournament 3 which has such an interface.
@ Mass, TATAE hee hee, great name.
September 2nd, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Has nobody played okami, or various Wii games?
In these games they imitate speech by making strange noises, just to give additional feedback that somebody is speaking. This also allows the same audio to be used in japanese and english, since the voice is not any language in particular. Some people might think it sounds bad, but I thought it was a really cool idea. I’m nearing 30 hours into Okami and haven’t gotten tired of the speech noises, I find them kind of humorous.
September 2nd, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Yeah, I’ve played Okami, but there’s no real significant dialog sequences to speak of, it’s just linear stuff (and typical bonkers Japanese stuff too, which I wouldn’t rate that highly in literature terms ;)).
I’m talking about meaningful, player-driven dialog, typically the preserve of RPGs.
September 2nd, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Well I meant that you could use the same effect and have long, narrative dialogues. The text isn’t constrained to the speech capabilities, like you said earlier. It would cost considerably less to have this kind of voice effects. If I was making an RPG I’d probably take this path.
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:10 pm
@ KungFooMasta - Have you ever played any of the Animal Crossing games? These are king of the “strange noises” in place voice acting…
Especially hearing K.K. Slider singing during his normal weekly Satirday evning slot