Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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.
Comments
Good voice acting is damn hard to manage for a game, mostly because the actors portraying the characters almost never have the full story of the characters they are portraying. They simply get lines to repeat.
Then you have the random NPC's in games that always repeat the same damn lines over and over. I'd just rather not have them at all. I mean, this kind of thing has been a meme at least as far back as taking an arrow to the knee - games are better off not having this kind of repetitive line imo.
I like voice acting, but they don’t need to blow their budget on it.
-Boss fights / mobs with short one sentence dialogue.
-Greetings and goodbyes
-Cutscenes
-Citizens in major cities speaking rumours / gossip
-Triggered events in the world
In quests it does not matter. People skip dialogue to complete quests faster, or read the text faster / slower than what's spoken. Additionally, having the same voice actor speak lines for different NPCs ruins immersion.
For all other "speech" I would like to see something akin to the "sims speak" perhaps they could come up with a clever way of generating that from an algorithm to mix up the sound. For me just the pitch/tone/emphasis is enough to add to the character I can they take the written words and the brain super-imposes the two.
Perhaps a system that has some basic modulators on the underlying sims speach engine. So you can switch between grumpy dwarf / happy elf / excited human / depressed elemental.
A good game without voice acting is better than a bad game with state of the art voice acting.
Hearing the same actor spread across different characters isn't great. Characters excluded from voice acting will have a relative and more hollow impact. Quality of the acting of course matters.
I think it'd be great if Intrepid, following success for their game, would add voice acting post-release! Even if it's gradual. But at the very least, since this MMO is so heavily focused on player interactions, the immersion plays more into that than even the lore itself. I think so at least.
I’ve got no idea how some people can play a game that’s completely unvoiced. May as well be reading quest info off plaques. There’s no such thing as a memorable unvoiced NPC
Imagination. The vast majority of stories in this world aren’t voiced, and while the author can provide some guide, it’s ultimately up to you as a reader to give a voice to a character. I just apply that same principle to games when I have the opportunity.
So for me, there are many more memorable unvoiced NPCs than voiced NPCs.
I’ll voice act for just an A2 key ! Send the scripts!
I’ve been told my voice is like a combination of Fergy and Jesus.
I would like to see voice acting for your own character as well, for the bigger story related quests. I feel it makes your character feel alive vs not speaking at all. They do not need to be cutscenes (I really despise cutscenes unless it's the intro or final story quest + they are costly). Guild Wars 2 used to do cutscenes on story quests, but dropped them later on. And now it's just your character and the main story NPC having a conversation, but you can still walk/look around while they are having the conversation. It works better with roleplaying in my opinion as well.
Books are not an audio-visual medium. Video games are. If I have to imagine the tone of a character when I’m looking at their face, then the medium is not communicating effectively.
The only way for a character to be memorable if they have no voice is if they’re in a flamboyant aesthetic (a la mimes), which is tacky. FFXIV is like that where none of the characters made any impact on me at all, to point where I was convinced my game’s audio was bugged. It was that lifeless. The characters have no soul for 99% of the game. And the tiniest portion of cutscenes where they’re voiced don’t even attempt to align their lips to the words.
It’s horrendous.
But again, this is entirely subjective.
Some VA for coming-of-age developments, like class quests, would be nice. The less VA elements there are, the more they'll stand out and be memorable.
That's the same reason I don't watch many of the videos posted here, reading posts is much more efficient.
Not very, if at all. But, I enjoy reading, so I'm able to voice the text in my head.
Much love ❤️
It could be funny, although it would probably get old pretty fast, if there was fake speech, the kind of gibberish adults sound like in Charlie Brown. Just enough to give a sense of what some races sounds like. It would have to be rather quiet by default with the option to turn it off.
Waaah woah wa woa.
That said, I think there could be a happy medium where NPC's have general lines (shop keeps, ambient, etc) without having to fill the game with tons of lines of dialogue. I am also curious how they intend to tell their main story/narrative without voice acting in a way that doesn't feel outdated, though.
Albion Online has some good quality fx, is a small game but when you go to a repair shop, for example, the repair guy says a little randomized line like "Let me fix that" or something to that effect. If you kill bosses they will scream out, etc. I think this would be a good way for AoC to approach voice acting.
maybe we could have at very least some of it in starting areas and those "story based" instanced dungeons?
However, I will say something fun I enjoyed during my last time playing WoW was the addition of voice acted lines from main characters in primary quest chains. Especially if they have something they need to say while I'm fighting off a bunch of baddies or trying to tackle some sort of technical challenge and they aren't right next to me in order for me to read their speech bubble. If there's a story heavy quest that really affects some main lore characters story arc, having a good voice actor around to express those major moments of defeat, victory, insight, or fear can be really immersive. They don't have to record every line of quest text either, just introductions, summaries, and key points during action/drama heavy interactions. It can function as a way for the story to still be told properly for those players who would normally skip over the TL;DR text windows and infuse some additional depth for those who don't.
At the end of the day, this game has been a long time coming, and things like quest/character-progression VA are fluff imho. Actiblizzard can pull it off because they've got Daddy Warbucks around to toss a few pennies in the pond for the common rabble to fight over, but in our case, we've got a game that doesn't even really exist yet and millions of dollars already invested pre-beta for the studio's launch title. Let's get the core content out there in great shape first and think about this kind of stuff for future expansions.
"We're watching you, scum..."
And if Ashes is going to have voice acting, plz either use good voice acting or NO voice acting at all.
That's the tricky bit though. High quality voice actors cost a lot of money, and bad voice acting is in some ways worse than no voice acting at all. ESO is notorious for these. They wanted all the quests to be fully voice acted, but didn't have the money (or inclination) to pay for good quality voice acting for all the quests.
The result is that the main story line is very well voice acted and sounds fantastic, but the minor side quests are very poorly voice acted (we're talking Oblivion town guard bad voice acting here). It's a real shame because when I played ESO, I enjoyed the side quests a lot more than the main story, but the terrible voice acting in the side quests ruined it for me.