FuLl VoIcEs

Post » Sat May 28, 2011 3:35 am

Regardless of what Bethesda does, some better dialog filtering and race-specifice variation is sorely needed. It's just not immersive when you've got a merchant telling you "rumors" about themselves in third-person, or an Altmer describing problems "in the land of the Altmer". If Bethesda is going to record different tracks of a particular comment anyway for all 8 (or however many) races and 2 sixes of each race, then they might as well put a few minor variations into it. Having one say "making my way to....", another say "heading for...", and another word it as "getting my [censored] over to..." is less repetitive, and doesn't make everything sound like a constant repeat of the same tired phrases in different voices. Some of the voices could use a flatter tone, because the subject wouldn't really pertain to them, while others could be more emotional about it, as it would be directly related to their race or profession.

By limiting who says what, Bethesda doesn't need to record 16 variations of every line of "general" dialog, and you can bet that you'll still have no problem hearing most comments 20 times a day. Make slightly different "versions" for each of several races, with their own slightly different "viewpoints" on the subject by race or six, or use similar but different subjects instead. It takes the same amount of storage space and recording time and the same expense to voice act as if it's all the same line, so why not "change it up" a little bit?

In both games, there were a lot of repetitive "rumors" and other "constant" topics that got tiring to wade through, with a distinct shortage of "meat" in between. The lack of unique dialog in OB was worse, because there was far less of it to begin with. MW's topic lists gradually grew as you "unlocked" new topics, until many of the NPCs became little short of walking encyclopedias, which was a bit excessive at times (although very appropriate for speaking with the few Savants in the game), whereas OB's NPCs mostly had nothing relevant to say, and not much irrelevant either.

Oh, this time, can we have a voice actor who doesn't call the dark elves "Dumbner"? (Same actor, same issue, in both MW and OB)


I never noticed that actor saying "Dumbner" maybe it is just the audio or more likely you . . .

They need additional voice actors this time though, variation is a must especially when it comes to old and young NPC's.
User avatar
chloe hampson
 
Posts: 3493
Joined: Sun Jun 25, 2006 12:15 pm

Post » Fri May 27, 2011 11:48 pm

I never noticed that actor saying "Dumbner" maybe it is just the audio or more likely you . . .

They need additional voice actors this time though, variation is a must especially when it comes to old and young NPC's.

They had it in Fallout 3. :nod:

I think the voice acting in Fallout 3 was great, I don't recall ever hearing the same voice twice with characters that you could talk to and get to know.

Then again, I only played it for a week. I'll probably play TES:V for... years, perhaps?
User avatar
Maddy Paul
 
Posts: 3430
Joined: Wed Feb 14, 2007 4:20 pm

Post » Sat May 28, 2011 4:42 am

They had it in Fallout 3. :nod:

I think the voice acting in Fallout 3 was great, I don't recall ever hearing the same voice twice with characters that you could talk to and get to know.

Then again, I only played it for a week. I'll probably play TES:V for... years, perhaps?


Fallout only had two races with the capacity for verbal communication being humans and ghouls so it is cheaper and easier to voice cover games in that series. I agree though, I played Fallout 3 for a few weeks but I never felt that it was anything more than running around and shooting things, it didn't seem as meaningful as Oblivion was. I think the fallout series will be aimed at the more casual gamer whilst the elder scrolls will always appeal to the more devoted player.

In fact whilst this is irrelevant to voice cover, I felt that fallout was literally oblivion with guns with very few unique features.
User avatar
Ashley Tamen
 
Posts: 3477
Joined: Sun Apr 08, 2007 6:17 am

Post » Fri May 27, 2011 11:02 pm

So? It might not be quest-essential, but it is "necessary" in terms of immersion and learning the world around you. You can either just be the Player Character who runs around killing things to get to the next quest goal. Or, you can interact with the world in the game, learn its culture and politics and people. I always enjoyed asking NPCs all the questions I could, because I'd gather up at least a half-dozen different responses that were all informative in their own manner. Some where only slightly different, some were very different.


That just kills me. Sure its cool to learn about the world and the culture and everything, and sure I guess text interaction wouldn't be that bad if their were many options to interact and stuff, but Morrowind did not get text interaction right.

When almost every NPC is a walking encyclopedia of lore (like in Morrowind), but can't be interacted much with (other than admired, bribed, taunted, or intimidated), it kills the "immersion" for me. Just kills it. Plus it was mostly the NPC talking at you. You ask about one little thing and get a speech. They player never did much 'interacting.' I'd rather learn more about the world from books, then from average peasants with encyclopedic brains...

But I could deal with mostly text dialogue if there was more interaction to be had. But, to be fair, Oblivion didn't have much in the way of 'interacting.' Fallout 3 does this better though.


But hmm, that's odd...

Our confabulation is lacking in a certain recreational piece...

A conglomeration of a certain causatum variety...

Haven't you heard?

Spoiler
MASS EFFECT 1 & 2!!!!!!!!!1 (is the word)

User avatar
Sheila Reyes
 
Posts: 3386
Joined: Thu Dec 28, 2006 7:40 am

Post » Sat May 28, 2011 5:10 am

Input: "Morrowind's NPCs are walking encyclopedias."

Initializing Commands.
Processing... Please Wait.

Output: "Oblivion's NPCs are the exact same walking encyclopedias with 19/20ths of the content omitted."



Seriously. Oblivion used literally the exact same dialogue filtration methods as Morrowind. The only difference, the only reason that they don't often get the label of "Walking Wikipedia," is because they have almost no information to convey by comparison. An argument that a system is more tolerable because it actually imparts less substance doesn't sit well, to be honest.

If Morrowind's text conversations seemed a bit dry, then I don't know how to respond. A lot of people found them veritable gold-mines of information, and they also found them passably realistic. If I'm to ask someone about their world, and I only get a shallow one-liner from everyone regarding it, then I quickly develop the impression that no NPC in the game actually knows anything or has anything to say about their environment at all. Morrowind's giant text blocks may be somewhat intimidating, but at least I don't feel that their NPCs are one-line slinging sock-puppets.

The Mass Effect comment is somewhat laughable, as most everyone in this thread has pointed out how unlikely it will be for Bethesda to even partially adopt Bioware's dialogue structures without ridiculously sacrificing the number of NPCs in the game.
User avatar
Tyrone Haywood
 
Posts: 3472
Joined: Sun Apr 29, 2007 7:10 am

Post » Sat May 28, 2011 3:52 am

This is one that bugs me, greatly. Because ideally, yes, everyone should talk. Obviously.

But hemorrhaging funds and filling DVDs with poorly edited voiceovers is not an answer. Oblivion was horrendous in this! Often times the voices from one NPC varied so much that you thought they were schizophrenic! Sometimes they didn't even seem to stay within a single racial profile! Long speeches made by one NPC would often vary in emotion and intensity from one segment to the next that you couldn't possibly take them seriously. Most of the time, NPCs were ridiculously stupid because the only dialog that they could say is what was voiced for them, which was minuscule compared to, say, Morrowind. It was a very dumbed-down world. And then there was the creepy way in which everyone sounded alike. Clearly, this was not the right way to go.

Yet I can't see anyone going back to silent movies either. It's one of the very few parts of Morrowind which seem flat compared to Oblivion.

So how can you fill a game with speech without wasting tons of money on recording and editing voice acting and a million DVDs to store it all? Simple. Put a text-to-speech (TTS) engine in the game. There are some great ones out there now. The voices don't sound like Stephen Hawking anymore. (Heck, they haven't sounded that robotic for at least a decade.) With as much as Bethesda (and every game company really) invests into engines for different aspects of a game, what's one more engine in the mix? You could easily define racial profiles to achieve what you got in Oblivion. Heck, you could easily add minor random variations for each NPC to their racial profiles so that everyone in the entire game world had a unique voice. And then just save the true human voice acting for the few NPCs that really matter for pushing the plot along with emphasis and verve.

And let's face it, TTS engines are so simple to run that they're pretty much in every little GPS box with their tiny computer processors. So you wouldn't have to worry about if people have systems powerful enough to generate the TTS.

It'd save money. It'd save time. It'd save disk space. And it'd be much better for game immersion. It's like win-win-win-win!

Plus it'd have the added benefit for mod developers to have an easy speech solution for their NPCs.
User avatar
Natalie Taylor
 
Posts: 3301
Joined: Mon Sep 11, 2006 7:54 pm

Post » Sat May 28, 2011 12:49 am

And let's face it, TTS engines are so simple to run that they're pretty much in every little GPS box with their tiny computer processors. So you wouldn't have to worry about if people have systems powerful enough to generate the TTS.

It'd save money. It'd save time. It'd save disk space. And it'd be much better for game immersion. It's like win-win-win-win!

Plus it'd have the added benefit for mod developers to have an easy speech solution for their NPCs.

I think you misunderstand how it would work, for a high quality tts engine Bethesda would have to acquire a license for it's use for development. they would generate the audio and package it with the game data just like a recording. As their license would almost certainly not cover distribution of the tts engine which would leave us with all the problems we already have minus the annoyance of real voiced audio being sub standard.
User avatar
He got the
 
Posts: 3399
Joined: Sat Nov 17, 2007 12:19 pm

Post » Sat May 28, 2011 10:07 am

I think you misunderstand how it would work, for a high quality tts engine Bethesda would have to acquire a license for it's use for development. they would generate the audio and package it with the game data just like a recording. As their license would almost certainly not cover distribution of the tts engine which would leave us with all the problems we already have minus the annoyance of real voiced audio being sub standard.

You clearly have never used a GPS device, have you? Suppose they've pre-recorded every single possible street name to ever exist, do you?

Or for that matter have you been in or know about any part of the software development of a video game. Like, TES IV: Oblivion for example. Havok for physics. SpeedTree for rendering rocks and flora. Sound in any way familiar? Engines are licensed and distributed with games all the time. Good ones. Why, there's a whole market for it in fact. So including an engine, like a TTS engine, would not be an exception to the norms of game development. It would be the rule.
User avatar
Eddie Howe
 
Posts: 3448
Joined: Sat Jun 30, 2007 6:06 am

Post » Sat May 28, 2011 4:09 am

Except that GPS voices still sound like insincere robots, even though they lack that unique "Microsoft Sam" charm. There's zero variance in tone when identical words are spoken in the same sentence, several words sound like the audio has been somewhat stitched together in the middle, and despite their more human pretense, they don't sound convincingly human.

Care to link some demos of voice synth software that you feel would be a suitable replacement for a voice actor?
User avatar
Lindsay Dunn
 
Posts: 3247
Joined: Sun Sep 10, 2006 9:34 am

Post » Fri May 27, 2011 8:59 pm

Input: "Morrowind's NPCs are walking encyclopedias."

Initializing Commands.
Processing... Please Wait.

Output: "Oblivion's NPCs are the exact same walking encyclopedias with 19/20ths of the content omitted."

Seriously. Oblivion used literally the exact same dialogue filtration methods as Morrowind. The only difference, the only reason that they don't often get the label of "Walking Wikipedia," is because they have almost no information to convey by comparison. An argument that a system is more tolerable because it actually imparts less substance doesn't sit well, to be honest.


I didn't say Oblivion did dialogue much better...
But, to be fair, Oblivion didn't have much in the way of 'interacting.'



If Morrowind's text conversations seemed a bit dry, then I don't know how to respond. A lot of people found them veritable gold-mines of information, and they also found them passably realistic. If I'm to ask someone about their world, and I only get a shallow one-liner from everyone regarding it, then I quickly develop the impression that no NPC in the game actually knows anything or has anything to say about their environment at all. Morrowind's giant text blocks may be somewhat intimidating, but at least I don't feel that their NPCs are one-line slinging sock-puppets.


I didn't find them all dry. I liked the ones with more important characters like Caius Cosades and other people. They were pretty good. Of course, it wasn't much a conversation, just 'select topic' and 'receive information + personality.' But the ones with generic NPCs felt pretty dry.

The Mass Effect comment is somewhat laughable, as most everyone in this thread has pointed out how unlikely it will be for Bethesda to even partially adopt Bioware's dialogue structures without ridiculously sacrificing the number of NPCs in the game.


It was meant to be laughable, parodying a scene from Family Guy, so thank you. :D

But as to Mass Effect, this could be accomplished in TES by making a few in-depth main characters which the player can deeply interact with, and then making other NPCs with varying degrees of interaction or less dialogue or more text dialogue. I don't need everyone to be fully voiced, like the original poster of this thread, but I would like several main and supporting characters to be fully voiced and to be able to have deeper levels of interaction with.

As to "most everyone," they can think whatever they want.

The main problem with Oblivion is that there still wasn't much interaction going on. I'd rather have full text dialogue with tons of interaction, conversation trees and forks, and all that good stuff, then just fully voiced dialogue with nothing. :meh:

My biggest beef is the interaction thing, something that was largely absent from Oblivion and Morrowind.
User avatar
Cagla Cali
 
Posts: 3431
Joined: Tue Apr 10, 2007 8:36 am

Post » Fri May 27, 2011 6:20 pm

You clearly have never used a GPS device, have you? Suppose they've pre-recorded every single possible street name to ever exist, do you?

Or for that matter have you been in or know about any part of the software development of a video game. Like, TES IV: Oblivion for example. Havok for physics. SpeedTree for rendering rocks and flora. Sound in any way familiar? Engines are licensed and distributed with games all the time. Good ones. Why, there's a whole market for it in fact. So including an engine, like a TTS engine, would not be an exception to the norms of game development. It would be the rule.

See ThatOneGuy's reply for the point I said high quality voices not ones that are flat toned and obviously robotic a la gps additionally we as the consumer pay a large amount for mainly the voice software in those devices would you like tesv to cost ?30 more than a generic game?
Edit: the other option of course is they cover the cost of the extra privileges license by sacrificing their budget for other game elements

But as to Mass Effect, this could be accomplished in TES by making a few in-depth main characters which the player can deeply interact with, and then making other NPCs with varying degrees of interaction or less dialogue or more text dialogue. I don't need everyone to be fully voiced, like the original poster of this thread, but I would like several main and supporting characters to be fully voiced and to be able to have deeper levels of interaction with.

Thats exactly what Bioware do, a few characters with a lot of potential dialog, and the cost of such a system means theres not much money left to spend on maintaining and developing a huge sprawling world, a system with wide choices (other than dialog choices) or other of the myriad things that define TES as TES. Admittedly they have an extensive system of dry information in the way of galactic codex entries; however this is a far cry from writing acutal dialog, the two disciplines are very different and I would posit that the latter is more costly per word.


The main problem with Oblivion is that there still wasn't much interaction going on. I'd rather have full text dialogue with tons of interaction, conversation trees and forks, and all that good stuff, then just fully voiced dialogue with nothing. :meh:

My biggest beef is the interaction thing, something that was largely absent from Oblivion and Morrowind.

The main problem people have been highlighting that shifting to a fully text system would be seen as inferior and thus a regression on the part of Bethesda.
User avatar
Katie Pollard
 
Posts: 3460
Joined: Thu Nov 09, 2006 11:23 pm

Post » Sat May 28, 2011 10:17 am

Except that GPS voices still sound like insincere robots, even though they lack that unique "Microsoft Sam" charm. There's zero variance in tone when identical words are spoken in the same sentence, several words sound like the audio has been somewhat stitched together in the middle, and despite their more human pretense, they don't sound convincingly human.

Care to link some demos of voice synth software that you feel would be a suitable replacement for a voice actor?

I won't argue about the perfection of a TTS engine's ability to speak. But compared to hemorrhaging funds on voice actors and editing, TTS is downright cheap. And on-the-fly TTS means not filling DVDs with recorded voice. You can have Morrowind's depth of NPC conversations, but without the silence. It's not perfect, but given Oblivion and Morrowind, I'd certainly call using a TTS engine for all unimportant NPCs and saving the voice acting for only the ones that matter the lesser of three evils.

I mean with TTS, you can literally have the NPCs say as much as you can possibly imagine. Endless trees of conversations. They just have to be written. Heck, they don't all even necessarily need to be explicitly written. Some of the conversations could be generated with some kind of bayesian AI even, which is something you can't do at all with voice acting.

Besides, what we usually see in TTS is plain text being read. Where as most engines are, in fact, capable of using markup language to do things like increase speed or octave. And words that are rendered poorly can be replaced with phonetics. So with a simple markup system a programmer could easily put in the text that appears on the screen and notes for the TTS engine to fix up that text to be read much more human. No one bothers with a GPS to fix the phonetics of street names, or to make turning left highly dramatic, but a game programmer certainly would.

And some links to show that the technology has come a long way since Microsoft Sam:
http://www.neospeech.com/
http://www.sitepal.com/text-to-speech
http://www.naturalreaders.com/

I'm not saying that these would be my best solutions. I only dug them up in a minute with Google. I would assume that should Bethesda intend to use a TTS engine in their games, they would do the research far better than I. :biglaugh: At least I would hope!

I'm just saying, better than nothing in Morrowind, cheaper and more loquacious than full voice acting in Oblivion as well as allowing focus on getting the human voice acting done right, why wouldn't a game designer like Bethesda consider using a TTS engine?
User avatar
how solid
 
Posts: 3434
Joined: Mon Apr 23, 2007 5:27 am

Post » Sat May 28, 2011 12:32 am

See ThatOneGuy's reply for the point I said high quality voices not ones that are flat toned and obviously robotic a la gps additionally we as the consumer pay a large amount for mainly the voice software in those devices would you like tesv to cost ?30 more than a generic game?
Edit: the other option of course is they cover the cost of the extra privileges license by sacrificing their budget for other game elements

First of all, consumers do not pay a large amount for the voice software in GPS devices. I don't even know where you get that idea. If you're going to try debating this, at least try doing it with facts.

And second of all, the cost to cover what cost there would be for a TTS engine would be more than covered by the savings from not hiring voice actors for every single word said by every last NPC. Not to mention the studio recording time, the editing, etc. They would save money by switching, not pay more for it. Their "sacrificing" would be having more money and time to do much better voice acting for the important NPCs.

I mean did you even listen to the voice acting done in Oblivion? And the horrible editing job from one speech clip to the next? They obviously bit off way more than they could chew trying to do that much voice acting. It was an ambitious gamble, but ultimately one with a very limited success.
User avatar
Shianne Donato
 
Posts: 3422
Joined: Sat Aug 11, 2007 5:55 am

Post » Fri May 27, 2011 7:50 pm

Nvm, didn't see posts above.

Well, if they can do it, then I'm more than down for it. They most certainly will save money and recording time, as well as gain immense freedom for writing ability.
User avatar
Louise Dennis
 
Posts: 3489
Joined: Fri Mar 02, 2007 9:23 pm

Post » Sat May 28, 2011 1:55 am

Have you played Mass Effect 1 & 2?


Yes, I have. And I've seen the endless back and forth on their forums "Mark Meer is a terrible voice for my Shepard" "No he isn't, you are an idiot for thinking that", and "Jennifer Hale svcks at voicing Shepard" "You must be brain dead- she is fantastic" followed by threads of suggestions as to who would have been better.

I hope the pc is unvoiced.
User avatar
Emmanuel Morales
 
Posts: 3433
Joined: Sat Oct 06, 2007 2:03 pm

Post » Fri May 27, 2011 11:30 pm

Yes, I have. And I've seen the endless back and forth on their forums "Mark Meer is a terrible voice for my Shepard" "No he isn't, you are an idiot for thinking that", and "Jennifer Hale svcks at voicing Shepard" "You must be brain dead- she is fantastic" followed by threads of suggestions as to who would have been better.

I hope the pc is unvoiced.

Ditto.
User avatar
ashleigh bryden
 
Posts: 3446
Joined: Thu Jun 29, 2006 5:43 am

Post » Sat May 28, 2011 10:59 am

Everyone should be voiced except the PC.
I like to be able to imagine how my character sounds like, and what he/she says.
User avatar
Nathan Risch
 
Posts: 3313
Joined: Sun Aug 05, 2007 10:15 pm

Post » Sat May 28, 2011 12:25 am

I like the text-based because it means NPCs can use my character's name. I like that, it seems really cool. I know, it's the oldest trick in the scripting book, but it still feels neat that an NPC will use whatever I type and respond with it. Kind of like those old DOS adventure games, or Scribblenauts (I've not played it first hand, only watched my sister play it). It adds a level of interaction, and even a level of humanity to the NPCs. Wouldn't you call someone by their name? That way, I don't feel like the nameless voiceless hero that the in-game history books record my character as.
User avatar
jennie xhx
 
Posts: 3429
Joined: Wed Jun 21, 2006 10:28 am

Post » Sat May 28, 2011 6:53 am

Almost NO voice acting PLEASE! Do it like morrowind with a bazillion topics to talk about.
User avatar
Charleigh Anderson
 
Posts: 3398
Joined: Fri Feb 02, 2007 5:17 am

Post » Fri May 27, 2011 6:27 pm

If Bethesda's development team finds themselves saying things like, "Hey, this would be a great feature to have in the game ... but we'd have to sacrifice full voice acting to have it", then I would say no, I don't want full voice acting. Otherwise, go for it. It probably doesn't matter if voice acting can't cover as many dialog topics as text alone, because any topics that aren't covered by dialog can be expounded in letters, in books, or in cave drawings.

However, I never want to hear my own character's voice, please, because odds are it won't be the voice I imagined for him.
User avatar
Del Arte
 
Posts: 3543
Joined: Tue Aug 01, 2006 8:40 pm

Post » Sat May 28, 2011 2:09 am

I didn't mind Morrowind not having voices, though there was an unnecessary amount of topics each NPC had. Despite this, I feel that there is no way that they can just get rid of much of it. Once you take the step of the line, I feel there is no going back.
User avatar
Rex Help
 
Posts: 3380
Joined: Mon Jun 18, 2007 6:52 pm

Post » Sat May 28, 2011 10:44 am

I think we can almost certaintly expect an improvement in TES: V from Oblivion concering voice acting. Since they made it much better in FO3 I should think they'll be incorporating the same, if not a better voices and voice acting.
User avatar
Claire Vaux
 
Posts: 3485
Joined: Sun Aug 06, 2006 6:56 am

Post » Sat May 28, 2011 9:15 am

I didn't mind Morrowind not having voices, though there was an unnecessary amount of topics each NPC had. Despite this, I feel that there is no way that they can just get rid of much of it. Once you take the step of the line, I feel there is no going back.

Not necessarily. As has been pointed out, TES: Redguard had full voice acting, but the next game, TESIII, had only partial VAing (idle dialog, etc).

It would be foolish to consider text-based as less advanced. It is just a different method, but no less a powerful one for communication. It reminds of me of the folly of pride, where you'd cut off your nose to spite your face, refuse to admit mistakes even if it meant your downfall. In this instance, it would be unwise to simply dismiss text-based/partial VAing simply because it isn't what most game dev's are doing right now. Find out why people prefer full VAing - maybe players like the emotion that comes across in VA'ed dialog. Then, try to offer the same experience with text-based dialog by finding ways to incorporate cues for emotion, tone, pitch, etc.
User avatar
Gemma Flanagan
 
Posts: 3432
Joined: Sun Aug 13, 2006 6:34 pm

Post » Fri May 27, 2011 7:07 pm

Not necessarily. As has been pointed out, TES: Redguard had full voice acting, but the next game, TESIII, had only partial VAing (idle dialog, etc).

It would be foolish to consider text-based as less advanced. It is just a different method, but no less a powerful one for communication. It reminds of me of the folly of pride, where you'd cut off your nose to spite your face, refuse to admit mistakes even if it meant your downfall. In this instance, it would be unwise to simply dismiss text-based/partial VAing simply because it isn't what most game dev's are doing right now. Find out why people prefer full VAing - maybe players like the emotion that comes across in VA'ed dialog. Then, try to offer the same experience with text-based dialog by finding ways to incorporate cues for emotion, tone, pitch, etc.


Redguard was a lot smaller than Morrowind and therefore it was possible to have voice acting in the game.

Overall text based dialogue does seem a little old especially after oblivions vocie acting and instead of going back technology wise they should improve on the current dialogue system or create a new better one.
User avatar
Music Show
 
Posts: 3512
Joined: Sun Sep 09, 2007 10:53 am

Post » Sat May 28, 2011 7:23 am

Yes, because once again, using a medium that allows you to actually put content in your dialogue system is totally a step back. All that extra content and substance it provides is totally meaningless, and Oblivion wasn't at all a giant step back for culling it out.

Aside from the TTS engines brought up earlier, there is no such thing as getting more content out of voice by optimizing or better designing the dialogue system. The only way there is going to be more believability and content with full voice is to spend money hiring 2x or 3x more voice actors to read aloud 10-20x the lines. And either they'll have to cull the number of NPCs to the extreme, or they'll have to pull money from other places in design, making other mechanics more shallow at the expense of more voice acting.
User avatar
Stu Clarke
 
Posts: 3326
Joined: Fri Jun 22, 2007 1:45 pm

PreviousNext

Return to The Elder Scrolls Series Discussion