Race and Voice : Fallout 4

» Sat Nov 28, 2015 1:01 am

i will get alot of flak for this but... https://youtu.be/thRooIE3p_Y grew up in japan and lived there for 16 years. does he sound asian?

» Fri Nov 27, 2015 10:55 pm

So wait.. Commander Sheppard has a static voice for male and female, and is an action RPG, but no one bats an eye. BUT Fallout does this and people are losing their Oreo Cookie's? As long as I can at least here the emotion in a dialogue selection (I.e. sarcasm, hate, sincerity, joking.) I'm OK with this. Bethesda could have kept the no voice also and I'd be fine with it too. Now please I'm really not looking to pick a fight with what I said and I apologize in advance if what I said struck a nerve.

» Sat Nov 28, 2015 1:40 am

I'm actually really happy for this change. Terms like Caucasian or Hispanic are nebulous at best, and their common use doesn't match their scientific use. One could argue that Fallout 3's system didn't accomodate Indians, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, or other ethnicities for lack of an option in the "race" section, regardless of your ability to make a character with whatever skin tone and facial features you pleased. Much better to just leave it open-ended in the first place.

Another, probably more fun fact: if you look at the Lone Wanderer's mother, Catherine, in the GECK, you see that she's black. So even if you design a Caucasian character, the Lone Wanderer is always mixed race.

I really hope you're only sharing that to talk about the guy's voice, and not the content of what he's saying. And if he learned the English language from having American parents, he would probably pick up their accent too, so that doesn't say much. My father grew up in Japan, too; his father was a soldier stationed in Japan. And he sounds just like any suburban American male.

» Fri Nov 27, 2015 11:46 pm

Ofcourse but he still learned Japanese and went to school with asian children his voice didnt become japanese from it though. So your fathers voice didnt change either having grown up in asia. doesnt that tell you something?

» Fri Nov 27, 2015 9:50 pm

Unless his Japanese peers were speaking English with a Japanese accent, and he picked up English from them instead of Americans, no. I'm sure his Japanese is more on point than someone raised in America learning it as an advlt, though.

» Sat Nov 28, 2015 10:22 am

You speak my thoughts completely. With Commander Shepard, you can change the appearance down to the skin tone and hair color but he/she will always sound like his/her voice actor. People just like to look for a reason to complain. Nothing much you can do about it.

Fallout 3 never made sense after you discover Pinkerton and can change your appearance. Even though I selected my race as Asian, I could adjust the sliders to make my Wanderer not Asian. So...what was the point of the 'choose your race' thing again? If anything else, Fallout 4 is doing what Fallout 3 should've done. The default voice is basically doing what Mass Effect and other games have done before.

This isn't something new and revolutionary, folks. We've seen this before!

» Sat Nov 28, 2015 1:33 am

So, because apart from the 4 main races which were included in FO3 and New Vegas we didnt have more races means that all races should be abrogated altogether? what about expanding the exclusivity instead of erasing it to zero?

» Sat Nov 28, 2015 11:19 am

Yes, Bethesda is clearly full of horribly racist people who want nothing more than to piss on everyone they don't like. Jesus Christ, it's like half of the people in this forum look for reasons to get upset! We're stuck with a default voice, deal with it. It's not Bethesda pissing on everyone who doesn't sound like Brian or Courtney.

» Fri Nov 27, 2015 8:06 pm

i think its the other way around. bethesda is the least "racist" by forgoing races because in this way nobody can get offended.

» Sat Nov 28, 2015 1:24 am

This. Only pitch and formant shifting is what you are mainly looking for.

It can't change the delivery of the lines, but it can change the vocal characteristics.

» Sat Nov 28, 2015 9:25 am

Because they're not erasing it to zero in the slightest? When they cycled through presets in the demo, every ethnicity that could be chosen in the prior games is represented. I don't need to pick "Asian" from a list to play as an Asian, and forgoing the list just means not having to fuss with awkward terms. The literal definition of Hispanic is anyone from a Spanish-speaking country, which includes ethnicities in Europe, and Latin America (generally anywhere the Spanish colonized). Caucasian is generally used to refer to white people, but that breaks down the further you go into Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean Sea, the Middle East, and even India; a lot of Europeans don't even consider non-Anglican/Germanic peoples like Italians or Russians as "white". I brought up that Fallout 3's system could be interpreted as non-inclusive out of facetiousness; my main gripe is that I just hate how inaccurate some of those terms are (especially race, http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Lewontin/).

Ehhh, I've never heard it done in a way that sounded natural. Generally when I hear a pitch-shifted voice, I can easily tell it's been pitch shifted. Maybe it's because I'm in school for audio engineering and sound design?

» Fri Nov 27, 2015 9:43 pm

you could redefine races from asian, black and white to biologically determined tribes like etho-germans, ethno-russians or etho-turks into races, since they all have different haplogroups from eachother it would be more precise than having broader race concepts. but this eventually leads to such grand diversity that no game would implement over 100 different racetypes.

» Sat Nov 28, 2015 9:28 am

I actually tried with a few lines from the guy using Ableton's built in warp system to see if it worked. A couple of semitones each way and some alteration to formant. With some minor eq to balance it out.

It wasn't perfect, but not too terrible.

One came out a bit more Snake Plisskin, the other like your standard issue weedy computer programmer stereotype.

I imagine if I had the raw files to play with, not just rips from YouTube it would have been better.

» Sat Nov 28, 2015 3:44 am

These race topics are strange when connected to Fallout, as the Fallout games NPCs don't care what skin colour you are playing, quite literally there is no difference between the 'races' in Fallout, perhaps because we now have actual races (ghouls and super mutants). As the E3 footages shows you can play as white, black, asian etc.

As to the voice, since it took a couple of years to record all the male and female voice acting did you really expect them to also have multiple stereotypical 'race' voices.......does a generic white, black etc voice even exist?

Or do we need.......

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_type

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soprano
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezzo-soprano
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contralto

Male

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countertenor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baritone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bass_(voice_type)

» Fri Nov 27, 2015 9:48 pm

I'm starting to lose the plot with some of this thread...

If Bethesda had two pairs of voice actors with racially stereotypical accents, you could make a case for three or four or more...

I think it's fine as it is.

» Sat Nov 28, 2015 3:22 am

This reminds me of the Saints Row voices for the male it was strange British accent, gangsta or latino (spanish speaking).

» Sat Nov 28, 2015 10:04 am

They spent over 2 years recording over 13,000 lines of dialogue. I think we're covered, and there won't be any more added, nor would I want to pay for that.

» Sat Nov 28, 2015 2:37 am

I do not think he understands what a budget is or how expensive it is to get voice-acting, especially for THAT many lines

» Sat Nov 28, 2015 12:18 am

I'm sure a good voice actor can sound black or Asian, per OPs definitions =)

» Sat Nov 28, 2015 7:17 am

And @Gizmo, yes, but we're looking for the rule, not the scant few exceptions. I was contesting whether voiced protagonists were "the standard since the late 1990s" which is evidently not true.

Most RPGs since their inception have not had voiced Protagonists. Bethesda aren't "catching up with the times" when they're putting voiced protagonists in their game, they're trying something that's arguably very risky and relatively groundbreaking, especially for an RPG of this size.

As for people arguing the Mass Effect thing, most modified Shepards of all ethnicities looked substantially worse than default. Black Shepards and the like were very rare and most people just accepted the default, including myself, and I usually customise the hell out of my characters.

To say "one voice fits all" and use Mass Effect as substantiating evidence is a bit short-sighted. I'm 99% sure, the whole game was supposed to be played as the default and the default in both genders was primarily Caucasian.

Also, to deny that voices differ depending on ethnicity is plain wrong. You need to be aware of general societal development and that a lot of people live in relatively racially specific areas. Immigrants to any nation tend to prefer to live together and this has developed over hundreds of years. As a direct by-product of that, the strong sense of culture, community and the accent are all part of growing up in any particular area, just as people from the North and South have different accents, people from Black and White communities have different accents.

Also, to deny an extensive history of racial segregation is somewhat ignorant of said history. It's only comparatively recently that all of this has changed.

People sound different the world over, and casting the huge melting pot of ethnicities in the US alone under one voice per gender is not particularly reflective of the variety within the country nor does it allow people of varying backgrounds to immerse themselves in their own self-made RPG experience. People will feel as if they're playing as someone else, as opposed to playing as a representation of themselves in the game world, and that's what a lot of players like to do.

I generally lose out though, because I want more English Protagonists. Thank goodness for Ms Croft.

» Sat Nov 28, 2015 10:57 am

:laugh:

» Sat Nov 28, 2015 4:31 am

What now? You never explain yourself.

» Sat Nov 28, 2015 5:26 am

So what's the solution?

Bethesda could record 5 different voices with different accents for each gender at enormous expense and still only match a fraction of what players might want.

Or we could just accept that it's feasible for anyone of any race to sound like a middle class American from the Boston area.

» Fri Nov 27, 2015 11:30 pm

Wasn't there also zombie?

» Sat Nov 28, 2015 7:45 am

No voiced protagonist?

It's worked for every game up to now.

And don't argue expense on their behalf. I don't know how much it costs, and I doubt you do either. Other games give you options when picking a voice, Fallout 4 gives you no choice at all. That's a bad sign right there. Either a lot of choice or no voice at all. Pick one.