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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
How important is voice acting for YOUR immersion?
Adelissa
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Hey everyone!
How important do you think voice acting is for your immersion? For me I think its important for major questlines or dungeons to be voice acted if they use humanoid characters. I understand AoC is dynamic and built by the players so this is not a theme park but I feel voice acting is still important when it comes to NPC interaction, especially in the starting areas, as you progress further into a game with a non linear story and custom node systems with their own questlines I can understand that not really being feasible, but when we're exiting that gate for the first time I'd like some voice acting to pull me initially into the story of Vera. What are your thoughts? Do you not like voice acting in games? Do you think its a vital component?
How important do you think voice acting is for your immersion? For me I think its important for major questlines or dungeons to be voice acted if they use humanoid characters. I understand AoC is dynamic and built by the players so this is not a theme park but I feel voice acting is still important when it comes to NPC interaction, especially in the starting areas, as you progress further into a game with a non linear story and custom node systems with their own questlines I can understand that not really being feasible, but when we're exiting that gate for the first time I'd like some voice acting to pull me initially into the story of Vera. What are your thoughts? Do you not like voice acting in games? Do you think its a vital component?
Adelissa | Guild Master | Heathen Lords
3
Comments
If a game does have voice acting, it needs to be good voice acting, not SOLO or LA tier.
For me, if every character is voiced, then the main character also has to be voiced. For example, I fucking hate how FF14 does it where every character speaks but your character moves his mouth while saying nothing. That is really shit. I like how SWTOR did it where you can pick options and your character will actually talk.
BUT I know all the american kids love anime dubbing, so it needs to be done I guess
Music is most important imo.
Having no voice acting is not an issue for me.
If there is voice acting - it needs to sound pretty good.
If a character is fighting, being hit, or considering something, I will accept 'battle cries', 'hmm', and maybe key signature phrases so that I 'have a mental model of what they sound like' to use for everything I read 'in their voice'.
Other than that, it generally breaks my immersion even if it is above average, because it's so hard for most voice actors to stay in character or understand the full scope of their character for an MMO, I guess.
If I had the option to turn off voiced cutscenes but leave 'battle cries', that's what I'd do always.
If it is not very good then I prefer to read, but if it is very good then I will enjoy it.
It also depends a lot on the style of video game that uses that voice, if it is an MMO with a narrative style where they tell you a well structured story then the voice will always be necessary but if it is an MMO where the story is in the background and other things matter more then the voice would not be so necessary.
I particularly like the narration of a 3 person narrating the events, I think that would be a good addition and could save a lot of voice acting.
So, given realistic costs of writers to voice acting (and the steep engineering costs), I'd rather read great writing and have the investment avoided from voice acting to go into other parts of the game.
It could be cost efficient tho and would fit the idea of a dynamic world.
Aren't we all sinners?
But it is by no means necessary in my book. I'd much rather the team focus their funds and energy on other aspects of the game, as it is quite expensive to get extensive voice acting in big games like MMORPG's. Perhaps having cutscenes VA'ed would be a great place to start!
So I think that if the writing is good enough, and it's not all walls of text (think how GW2 splits text into smaller bite sized paragraphs) - that kind of delivery is better and might make people less likely to spam through the writing!
Now imagine proximity voice chat where players talk to NPC's to pick up the first quest in a starter area, and the NPC responding with "Hey hey, not all at once, who was first?"
It's then FAR worse if you have my own character speak. Unless you manage a voice I can consider my own, and then match my feelings, tone, inflection, it is going to immediately shift me out of phase with my own character, and push me out of the game stronger than anything else can, ripping me away and isolating me from the moments that are supposed to most immerse and engage me, and create actual emotional connection to the story and the world. If nothing else, please, please don't do THIS.
I'll happily take battle cries and the like if you give me some varied choice of voices on the character selection screen, and this works well in every game I've played, but telling me that some stories are important, and by contrast reminding me that others that I might care quite a bit about, are not, will never really work out.
If you want clear emotional engagement and context in cutscenes? Use music. Music can shift players' emotional states very strongly and clearly, keep them on-beat as things shift, and give that solid background connection without any of the downsides of voice acting. I fully admit it can be done poorly, but it's also far more flexible, and becomes more potent, not less, when a well-chosen set of music is consistently reused and judiciously applied to the proper emotional spaces. The pure simplicity of this makes it a cheap and effective option that can be applied over far more than just "main story" cutscenes, and when done properly, you don't really even miss it when it's not used.
Music, not voice acting, is the way to go to enhance immersion and strengthen experiences, without requiring the extreme precision and high costs and luck that voice acting requires to function well as a baseline.
"Time is money, friend!"
Something that I think is the most important to my immersion when it comes to voice acting in mmos is ambient dialogues and phrases from npc's.
I rather see the money go to this so they can give the npc's a broad repertoire of dialogues and phrases so it won't be too repetitive hearing the same thing over and over again.
I would love to stumble upon some npc's sitting by a campfire and telling interesting stories from the area.