Voice acting is very expensive, especially with the amount of dialogue in an RPG. Voice acting takes budget and time away from more important things, like content. In my opinion, voice acting kills the immersion in these situations, often sounding fake or robotic. This means you will often have the same voice actors voicing multiple characters, and they all start sounding the same (Oblivion players might attest). Some voice actors are pretty good, but most are not, and even if they are, RPGs have hundreds if not thousands of NPCs and they all need to be voice acted. This means that if designers decide a partially voice-acted dialogue is the way to go, the decision will be regarded negatively by many, including reviewers, especially if their previous game was fully voice acted.Īctors can't voice-act better than the player can read. As more and more games are fully voice-acted, going back to partial voice acting would be widely seen as a step back, regardless of whether or not it actually is. It may be more feasible to just forgo the new content. Well, they'd have to call the voice actor, fly him/her over, etc etc. Maybe give the player an interesting choice for some already-implemented quest. Say the designers decide to modify some of the dialogue in some part of the game that has already been made. Voice acting makes it logistically difficult to add or modify content. (I also recognize that other design choices can contribute to this limitation, but I strongly believe the cost of voice-acting has an important effect). Paying voice actors for every line of dialogue limits the creative freedom designers have to create intricate solutions to game situations. Most of the time, I find myself just choosing between one of two options. Remember in games like Fallout where there were a billion options? In newer RPGs things are often reduced to just the good way, the evil way, and sometimes the stealthy or neutral way. ![]() This makes it difficult to add a good amount of dialogue, so rather than offering an interesting story, the developers must cut down the story to a reduced form in order to stay within their budget.Īs a consequence of 1, the player has less choices. For every line of written dialogue, they must pay an actor, and the line must be rehearsed and practiced, typically going through several takes in a studio before the final product is good enough to be included in the game. Here are the reasons why I think so:ĭialogue is essential in RPGs, and voice-acting necessarily forces dialogue to be cut down. I think this is ok in many genres, but NOT in RPGs. But I feel that all games, including RPGs, are gravitating towards FULL voice acting, in which ALL dialogue is voice-acted. Personally, I think voice acting in genres like FPSs is appropriate due to their fast-paced nature, and having some voice acting can add much to the atmosphere in RPGs. ![]() After all, this is one of the biggest changes present in the newer generation of games, where dialog went from completely text-based to completely voice-acted in only a handful of years. When discussing modern gaming everyone brings up the overblown graphics or streamlined gameplay, but I rarely ever hear any mention about other drastic changes, such as voice acting.
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