How important is voice acting for YOUR immersion?

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?

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Merek

No voice acting unless it's a cutscene, better yet, none at all. It's unnecessary workload, plus, it usually falls flat.

AidanKD

My main experience was with WoW, and they had some decent voice acting but it was still mostly "filler" for majority of your playtime, i.e. small snips when interacting with an NPC, or more in main story/cutscenes.

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!

ClintHardwood

If you can't perfect the voice acting, just leave it out imo.

Shoelid

Absolutely no voice acting is a bit jarring IMO. Filler lines like greetings, grunts and yells go a long way to help my immersion. Some bosses should definitely have VA. I'd prefer "main story characters" didn't have voice acting in AOC.

Sjelden

Chat based communication feels out of place in modern games. I am not expecting to be able to talk to the NPC's (yet), but I would at least expect them to talk to me.

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?"

Ferryman

Voice acting is not a mandatory and there can be less or a lot depending of the game in question and available resources. However, good voice acting makes the overall experience better but bad acting decreases the value. Voice acting can raise characters to a whole new level and make them more compaling and interesting. For example, Bwomsandi and Sire Denathrius characters truely came alive in WoW because of the great voice acting. And because players like those so much they were written more to the story later.

SongRune

It's normally negative, to me. It creates jarring transitions between the interactions that have it, and the ones that don't. It's not feasible to give it to shops, or every minor quest or in game interaction to try to offset this, and the quality requirement for it not to feel strange is high.

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.

Craiken

I think old school WoW did a great job with voice acting. Greetings and goodbyes are plenty for me.

"Time is money, friend!"

HiddenDaggerInn

Not at all, usually good voice acting takes a lot of money from a budget, would rather see that on Devs.

Zahie

Voice acted questlines can add alot to my immersion, but only if it's really good and sounds natural otherwise it will kill it for me.

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.

Noaani

I personally prefer no voice acting.

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.

Vulp

I might be a minority here, but voice acting isn't important to me at all in MMO's. All I care about is fun gameplay and the actual content I can participate in.

Grizz_Lee_Chadams

I enjoy good voice acting but it isn't super important for my overall enjoyment, personally. I am not big into the story lines, which devalues the impact of voice overs for me. It's not a main priority in my mind but it does instill a sense of quality and thoughtfulness in a game.

Solvryn

Adelissa wrote: »

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?

I like voice acting, but they don’t need to blow their budget on it.

Burnzey

Voice acting where it matters:

-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.

NoMadder

I do prefer it but understand it is a nice to have and I am quite capable of immersing myself without it. Voice acting for the main story line (cut scenes) is a must of course.

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.

BaSkA_9x2

Cool, but not important at all.

A good game without voice acting is better than a bad game with state of the art voice acting.

Alacrite

In the ideal world, voice acting would be best. Realistically, there are too many limitations; and when regarding immersion, having any voice acting can also be negatively impactful.

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.

Caeryl

It’s extremely important for my immersion in the world. Without voices, the entire place feels dead and lifeless. I’m willing to give Ashes a chance though.

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

Chime

I like voice acting for the main stories like in GW2 with the Living Story, but other than that my sound is always off because I'm watching/listening to something else on my second monitor.

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