Suggestion from latest Alpha footage

I watch all the Alpha footage you guys put out which is awesome and have a suggestion that would bring some life into the game.

I have no idea how hard this would be, but I noticed while you guys where talking to NPCs it was very lack luster(being alpha) and just seeing a brick of text left me with a bit of disconnect/immersion from the game. Just as one of your team said "Look at you guys being responsible gamers and reading the text", " Actually I kind of skipped it as well." Is there plans to voice the NPCs? If not, I think it would be really awesome to let the community do it. Have a spread sheet with the NPCs that need a voice, and a small text description or a backstory for the quest and let the community voice those text blocks.

I feel this would create ownership in the game leading to a greater game connection with community involvement. This would also eliminate that cookie cutter MMO vibe I got watching the videos when interacting with NPCs. It would be really cool to play the game and notice some big streamers voices or possibly find your own voice when exploring the lore of the game.

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Comments

Ostaff

Interesting concept... community members doing the voice overs. Definitely has the possibility of saving money on that end, however, there would be a cost as well for having to listen through them all. I would think the majority of the member's voices would just not work as with Audio books, it takes the right type of voice and a bit of skill to actually voice over properly. But definitely something to look into!

Of course, the other possibility is using text-to-voice software. Though I really don't know just how good it has progressed through the years and the text has to be properly marked in order to have the accents and sounds come out correctly.

Wandering Mist

Thread moved from Support to General Discussion.

maouw

Text to speech has had enormous breakthroughs recently thanks to machine learning AI. There's one that just needs a 5 second sample of your voice to create a full deepfake of your speech:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQgYPv8tb6A

Just get the community to read a paragraph, submit and you have a library of voices that can say whatever you want.

Not at all creepy.

Talents

There's no plans for voice acting for quests except maybe during big storyline points since it is way too expensive (SWTOR for example spent a 1/3 of their budget on voice acting).

Bad voice acting is worse than no voice acting so I disagree with letting the community chip in. I'd just prefer none tbh.

BlackBrony

I don't understand the need/want for voice acting.
Most of us will do the quests once, maybe 5 times, but then it's gone. Also unless they're always epic quests, they end up being a chore.
I honestly HATED ESO voice acting. Like they speak 1 word/min, freaking slow.

Also, bugdet. No need for voice acting when most of the population will just skip

McShave

I was playing another mmorpg that had voice acting. i found it cool at first, but when i got to the later levels i was just skipping everything. I think a good way to get us interested in the quests is to have memorable npcs that we care about. If the story has memorable characters and situations, i would be more likely to read the quest texts.

Jxshuwu

People will skip it anyways in the end and it will just leave sentences unfinished.
People who care for the lore, will read it, people who dont, wont no matter if theres voices or not and immersion can still be created just by text and emotion.

Jahlon

So voice acting is expensive. Very expensive. Just under 25% of SWTORs budget was for voice acting.

Getting the community members to do the voice acting doesn't get rid of the cost, it only gets rid of a very small part of it. You still have all the audio engineering that has to happen.

Intrepid will no doubt have some voice acting, but you don't need every NPC to read quest text to you.

Noaani

Jahlon wrote: »

Getting the community members to do the voice acting doesn't get rid of the cost, it only gets rid of a very small part of it. You still have all the audio engineering that has to happen.

Basically this.

It's almost like we have had this thread a half dozen times, and many of us know more about it than we would like.

If Intrepid had voiced NPC's, it would be irresponsible from Intrepids perspective if those voices were not consistent in terms of quality of acting, but also in terms of recording.

You simply can't just have people record lines at home and expect to have a sound across multiple NPC's that comes across as consistent. If you want a consistent (and thus professional) sounding experience in regards to voice acting, then all voices need to be recorded in a similar studio, with similar equipment. The only reasonable way to do this is to hire a recording studio and record the voice actors in it.

If this is what is being done, it will be more expensive to use non-professional voice talent than it would be to hire professional talent. This is because the cost of hiring the studio per day is significantly higher than the cost of a voice actor for that same amount of time. Since a professional voice actor knows they need to get in, nail things on their first try and then leave, whereas a non-professional would need multiple takes to get things right (think the Simpsons episode where Lisa is recording for a doll, and Krusty comes in).

This means that in terms of voiced NPC's, developers have the option of going all in and spending tens of millions of dollars, having an amateur/half job done, or not doing it at all.

Yagre

Regardless of the cost, voice acting is a pretty big part of creating an immersive experience. Couldn't they at least go half-way and include something akin to a Zelda game? Give us some expressive grunting and gesticulations.

Or am I just misinformed here? Are they going to include general voice-acting such as saying hello, goodbye, etc.?

maouw

Yagre wrote: »

Regardless of the cost, voice acting is a pretty big part of creating an immersive experience. Couldn't they at least go half-way and include something akin to a Zelda game? Give us some expressive grunting and gesticulations.

Or am I just misinformed here? Are they going to include general voice-acting such as saying hello, goodbye, etc.?

I like this.

The other option is to go old-school and have syllabic sounds - like harvest moon or animal crossing (animal crossing is more complex - they tried to have a sound byte for each letter. Still comes across as gibberish though.)

Edit: I still think no voice lines is fine. Just throwing in suggestions.

Noaani

Yagre wrote: »

Regardless of the cost, voice acting is a pretty big part of creating an immersive experience. Couldn't they at least go half-way and include something akin to a Zelda game? Give us some expressive grunting and gesticulations.

Or am I just misinformed here? Are they going to include general voice-acting such as saying hello, goodbye, etc.?

This is something that is likely to happen, though if it does it won't be until the last few months of development.

That said, I don't consider these kinds of noises to be any more immersive than not having them. Developers have to chose what to add in and what to not add in to their games, and as players, we need to accept that.

To that end, a game that doesn't include character voices should be no less immersive than a game that doesn't include toilets. Both are things we know should be present, and we have to make a decision whether we accept their absence or not (and it IS a decision).

Vhaeyne

I ain't gonna listen to no NPC tell me about nothing.

Even the DEVs were skipping the quests in the stream.
They joked about it. That is how much of a waste quests are in general.

I don't want to have to mute y'alls over acting on top of it.

No thanks.

Jxshuwu

Vhaeyne wrote: »

I ain't gonna listen to no NPC tell me about nothing.

Even the DEVs were skipping the quests in the stream.
They joked about it. That is how much of a waste quests are in general.

I don't want to have to mute y'alls over acting on top of it.

No thanks.

I agree but, there's people who genuinely enjoy dialogue from NPCs. Take them into account also, not just yourself.

Noaani

Jxshuwu wrote: »

Vhaeyne wrote: »

I ain't gonna listen to no NPC tell me about nothing.

Even the DEVs were skipping the quests in the stream.
They joked about it. That is how much of a waste quests are in general.

I don't want to have to mute y'alls over acting on top of it.

No thanks.

I agree but, there's people who genuinely enjoy dialogue from NPCs. Take them into account also, not just yourself.

This is a valid argument for things that don't cost 8 figures.

When things get that expensive, you kind of want everyone to use them.

Jxshuwu

Noaani wrote: »

Jxshuwu wrote: »

Vhaeyne wrote: »

I ain't gonna listen to no NPC tell me about nothing.

Even the DEVs were skipping the quests in the stream.
They joked about it. That is how much of a waste quests are in general.

I don't want to have to mute y'alls over acting on top of it.

No thanks.

I agree but, there's people who genuinely enjoy dialogue from NPCs. Take them into account also, not just yourself.

This is a valid argument for things that don't cost 8 figures.

When things get that expensive, you kind of want everyone to use them.

I know, it isn't argument against or for the voiced dialogue, but moreso against his comment which to me sounded selfish lol. I read ''I dont wanna this, i dont wanna that'' which weren't good arguments taking all parties into account.

Vhaeyne

Jxshuwu wrote: »

I agree but, there's people who genuinely enjoy dialogue from NPCs. Take them into account also, not just yourself.

If they enjoy dialog more than any other content in the game, than I worry they are spending their time in the wrong genre. Literally any other area of the game can be improved with the man hours and money spent on voice acting.

When there are whole other genres and medias out there that specializes in content that is centered around voice acting and immersion. It is very hard for me to advocate for any voice acting at all. We need to be realistic with our expectations of MMOs. VA is not going to magically set the immersion/story telling over the top and make or break this game. It would be icing on the cake for a handful of people in its best implementation.

What I take into account when considering opposing ideas is not what other people want. It is how their ideas will effect the game if implemented. In the case of VA, I see a part of a finite budget getting redirected to give a slight benefit to a minority of people. People who will likely quite when WOW or FFXIVs next patch comes out and they can get their next hit of bad MMO story telling. When they could just read any number of fantasy novels and have a better time.

Jxshuwu

Vhaeyne wrote: »

Jxshuwu wrote: »

I agree but, there's people who genuinely enjoy dialogue from NPCs. Take them into account also, not just yourself.

If they enjoy dialog more than any other content in the game, than I worry they are spending their time in the wrong genre. Literally any other area of the game can be improved with the man hours and money spent on voice acting.

When there are whole other genres and medias out there that specializes in content that is centered around voice acting and immersion. It is very hard for me to advocate for any voice acting at all. We need to be realistic with our expectations of MMOs. VA is not going to magically set the immersion/story telling over the top and make or break this game. It would be icing on the cake for a handful of people in its best implementation.

What I take into account when considering opposing ideas is not what other people want. It is how their ideas will effect the game if implemented. In the case of VA, I see a part of a finite budget getting redirected to give a slight benefit to a minority of people. People who will likely quite when WOW or FFXIVs next patch comes out and they can get their next hit of bad MMO story telling. When they could just read any number of fantasy novels and have a better time.

Would like for you to quote where i mentioned that there's people who enjoy dialogue more than anything else in the game. I was just saying, there's people who DO enjoy voiced dialogue ((((no, not more than anything else)))) and i was saying you didnt take them into account with your comment is all.

If you scroll up a little bit, i literally mentioned that i also think it isn't a good idea, idk how many more times i have to mention it for you to understand but my comment wasn't FOR or AGAINST voiced dialogue, literally in a previous comment i said its prob not a good idea.

Vhaeyne

Jxshuwu wrote: »

Would like for you to quote where i mentioned that there's people who enjoy dialogue more than anything else in the game. I was just saying, there's people who DO enjoy voiced dialogue ((((no, not more than anything else)))) and i was saying you didnt take them into account with your comment is all.

If you scroll up a little bit, i literally mentioned that i also think it isn't a good idea, idk how many more times i have to mention it for you to understand but my comment wasn't FOR or AGAINST voiced dialogue, literally in a previous comment i said its prob not a good idea.

That is fine, I just gave you a complete run down of my thoughts on the subject so that we don't have any confusion if you want to move forward with any more dialog. If you are on the fence about yourself that makes no difference to me. What is important to me is that people understand that I am against any VA and why.

You asked me to take other people who enjoy VA into account. I feel that I clearly explained my feelings on VA and the type of player that enjoys it without targeting anyone specifically.

When talking to a single person on a public forum I know there are a number of people reading what I write. I want my words to be as persuasive to as many people as they can be.

Enigmatic Sage

honestly, i'm one of those who enjoys reading/listening through a majority of quests (if not all) at least once.

Wow had some really funny quests if you read through them. someone did get paid to write and script them all. I know most people just accept, skip and speed through to where their addons tell them to go for what would develop into an empty shell of questing.

add-ons..... ugh

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