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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.
Hay Steve, have you seen this?
nanfoodle
Member, Founder, Kickstarter, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJaMGRXfvisWho here would love to see this be an option for Ashes? I know I would. AI Voice Over can be done cheaply and well. This would add so much depth for people who love story and voice acting.
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Comments
AI voice not needed.
I agree that it adds a lot, but the issue is cost.
Star Wars; The Old Republic spent $150,000,000 on it's voice acting. Ashes has less than that to spend on everything.
This is why the suggestion was AI voice acting, but that isn't going to be as easy as suggested, would result in voice acting that is not as good as actual voice actors, and just isn't actually necessary.
This
Especially for Ashes.
They're already going to give us the core systems..
So all they need to do is nail their class, combat, and AI. Which are usually underwhelming in the genre.
There are a few MMOs that have some top notch classes, but none that have stellar combat to go with it.
And AI is a meme.
Hopefully Ashes can nail all of it.
The actual final budget for the game ended up being about $250,000,000 (no, I dont have sources).
The $150,000,000 was for all sounds, to be fair, not just voice. However, voice was the bulk of it.
$150,000,000 was the initial budget for the entire game, just as an fyi. My understanding is that they opted to go full voice acting part way through development, which is why the budget blew out so much. Further, my understanding (which I am as happy to assume is wrong as is right) is that there was an amount of mismanagement involved.
That said, if you look in to how much it cost to hire a top end recording studio, what the pace of work is for voice acting, work out how much dialogue a game like that has, start factoring in rewrites, and you'll fairly quickly see how this could be.
Edit to add; my "source" for this is someone in the recording industry, rather than someone in game development (which is usual for me), and was worked out over a few beers and based on market rates of time spent in session (we looked back over the numbers without a few beers, they were accurate).
It is possible EA may have negotiated a cheaper rate, however since this discussion is about Intrepid adding voice to Ashes, and since Intrepid wont be able to negotiate that same rate, the going rate is the appropriate number in this discussion.
For me the AI voice over idea, presents a solution where you can create a lot of value with relatively low effort.
When someone can create a good ai voice over plugin for curse on a hobby level, like the WoW plugin guy that made the plugin mentioned in the video, i can see Intrepid building something really solid.
Especially b.c. AoC is still years out and ai tech moves fast atm.
We know Intrepid has not got the resoures for extensive voice acting. I would be really surprised if intrepid passes on beeing a first mover on this one, it would be a strategic blunder imo, as it perfectly fits their strategic environment and the timing.
And i think its actually good, right now.
My final point - it would definitely be cool to see if it could do the work. But I am personally the kind of person that reads all of the quests (... yeah. [: ) so I am a bit in the camp of "idm either way." :]
One concern is that regardless of "oh this is so little effort, cost efficient and all that", if it would delay the game by... Well, anything really (?) - then I'd probably pass. At least until after A2 launch.
It could do well as one of the A2 patches - and I would very much recommend Intrepid to let the A2 players scan through these ingame to catch any weirdness. :]
As far as I can tell, Intrepid has 3 options:
A) Full AI voice acting (with potentially "real" voice acting here and there)
C) No voice acting. Just wall of texts. (aka, continue as planned.)
I am used to all 3, so I seriously do not mind either way.
I have made a post before about adding TTS as a basic accessibility feature for people who have a hard time reading, due to some level of vision impairment or dyslexia or something. Other people have made similar posts asking for something like this.
We already get other accessibility options for people in the game, like customizable UI and various color-blindness settings. Adding accessibility features for people who have a hard time reading is not unreasonable.
It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be accurate enough to be understood. The AI speech in the video was great for that. Make it a toggle so people who prefer not to have it can get their way too of course.
It's MUCH, much cheaper than hiring real people, and there are no continuity issues down the line.
That's like commiting money to be thrown into the fire
But maybe in the future AI voice over will sound even better than what we have today, maybe AI voice will be a thing
I think this is the thing. It really does not need to be perfect. For myself. I am dyslexic. I have a rare form where letters move around and its very hard to read. If I am tried it get worse. So having this as an option, I will get much more of the lore. Would be cool if they also added this for any documents or books added to the game. This would be a dream for me.
I think they can go a bit of both here, major story lines and thing a good VA will be worth the price, all the little side quests/less important quests though the AI might be a better way of going about it so it doesnt cost a shit load :P
i do think it better to have voiced quests than just text since it makes thing more immersion and people less likely to skip though everything and not know whats happening. You can do the whole thing Ai and have the option to disable it then it be voice actored by AI or text like were gona get anyway
I think u go profession voice acting for main story line and important quests and thing but AI for side story or less important ones to keep costs down.
Yes Please!
I did not think it was 100% the best thing ever, but compared to just having text quests it makes the game light years better. For anyone who has not tried it, I highly recommend you try it on wow classic before you rule it out. It is quite good.
One guy on his own set up the AI Voice Acting for all off Classic WoW and it turned out really well. AI does most of the heavy lifting.
There are cases going on right now to determine if what can not be protected by copyright is the entire work, or just the AI generated part of it,but regardless of how these cases go, if Intrepid use AI voice, they hold no copyright at all over the voices of the characters in their game (that is the best case scenario without significant changes world wide to copyright law).
To me, this would be enough to nope right out of the idea.
Or, you know, just not have voice acting of text.
If Intrepid doesn't launch with this technology in 2026, they'll be behind every other MMORPG at that point. Hell, even indie projects will probably have some cheap 3rd party software they use for it, that's how much a game changer this technology is.
Most people I've seen against this technology pretend the voice acting is unbearable or bad, when it's actually amazing quality compared to the last 10 years of computer-generated voices. Other people I've seen against it are the "AI bad" crowd. This technology isn't even really stealing jobs, MMOs simply don't hire voice actors to have all their quests voiced. SWTOR paid an unbelievable price to get everything voiced. And Intrepid could still hire real voice actors to have the main quest and the Gods voiced.
Really there's nothing to lose with using this technology to have every piece of dialogue voiced. It will also go a very long way for accessibility which should be important for Intrepid. It's perfect for an innovative game like Ashes of Creation.
Nobody cares about not having the copyright to the voice of some random NPC. They'll hire real voice actors for any important lines and voices they care about.
Thats a really good point. If you are trying to be a AAA MMO and indy studios are putting out fully voiced games with AI and you launch without that feature. It could cause blow back and bad reviews. IS did a great thing jumping on UE5 and this would be a mistake to miss out on a big upgrade for the game with relatively low time and money needed to roll out.
Watched the video.. that is pretty sweet! I thought it was really good, I've heard MUCH worse VOs.
I'm a more story focused player but even I'll skip text walls.
I wholeheartedly support this quest!
the examples in the video sound pretty good. I don't know exactly how it works, but if there's a way for them to generate these voices, modify them and/or leave out the ones that sound bad, it would be an incredibly useful tool for game development. I'm sure it will only get better from here. It's come a long way
Yes, you can explore the world, but the idea is to stay in close proximity of an area unless you travel far away. So VA does'n't do much to improve immersion