Solution: Invent a natural sounding computer generated text to voice function!

I tend to hear how voice acting is one of the greater evils of this game, ever since Oblivion really...
Then the cries about "immersion" appear and it all becomes really ironic.

Written dialog is not at all inherently better, it's a different medium overall. Written things don't have acting, you cannot measure the tone certain sentences are said, there are no accents, no emotion, no hidden meaning unless the text itself tells you about it.
And it's not even true how text is more "dynamic" or how voiced dialog is limited to the one recorded, because written dialog is limited to what is actually written. You won't get better directions in written form if the person moves away from the original spot, and you cannot create long text dynamically without making it sound unnatural even in text. At most they could do is to say "it's east/west/north/south/wherever from here" and these can be even recorded.
Only big difference that text can mention your name, whoopie-doo...

I think the mods should ban the words "complex" and "complexity" from these boards. :whistling:

Excellent post OP.

However, I think this guy says it right there:



I think that's precisely because of being a different medium that they should aim for a balance between the two; they offer different possibilites and complement each other very well.

I think Baldur's Gate II did it right. You'd get the initial lines voiced and the rest was all text. The result was long dialogues with lots of nuances, but with a good ammount of dialogue, both casual-banter and plot-essential ones, resulting in everlasting dialogues, memmes, etc. ("Go for the eyes Boo!"; "Luck be a Lady" etc.). Look at Jim Cummings (Minsc's voice in BG), the guy is all over Skyrim and a voice like that adds up to the immersion.

Curiously enough, I think Skyrim would be a good game for a system like that. I agree with the others that said a game of this magnitude in terms of graphic immersion would be weird, to say the least, without VA dialogues. I think if they focused on the initial lines - to get us going, sort of like setting the tone for that NPC - we would do the rest with our minds.

Written things don't have acting
Written things can have any kind of acting the reader imagines.

you cannot measure the tone certain sentences are said
Conveying tone and context is job of the writer or is it your opinion that all literature is devoid of context, presence and tone? In addition video games may supplement the written word through the use of visual and audible elements.

there are no accents, no emotion, no hidden meaning unless the text itself tells you about it.
See above.

You won't get better directions in written form if the person moves away from the original spot
"West of the main Riften gate..."
"From the ruined tower south of Whiterun, I'll mark it on your map, turn East and ...."
"Let me mark it on your map"

Are examples of directions which are independent of NPC location :shrug:

Never going to happen.Not only does it help immersion, somewhat, it is also the best form of communication available

yes you can be very verbose with written language, however it is unnatural, especially in a game.

And hearing the same voice over and over is hardly any different than seeing the same text without any change over and over...

AusGamers: Yeah, but RPGs are big business now. And back in the day, they were almost closet in themselves. You had your kind of core audience and now they’ve reached this mainstream saturation point. Surely people can take that kind of risk factor, like “let’s just put this out there and see what happens”.

Ken: Ah no, because what the audience wants is a polished product, and it turns out that if you wanted to make an experimental role-playing game, you could not make a modern looking one or a modern feeling one. For example: let’s talk in the abstract about the worst thing that ever happened to role-playing games is recorded audio for dialogue. I happen to believe that was the death of my joy. Because that limits… that causes production things… the content has to be nailed down at a certain point.

So [voiced] text is not easily revisable. As I play, text is easily revisable; audio isn’t. As I play, I want to make tiny little changes to the tone, to the feel of things, but you can’t do that when you have all this audio — oh my god, all the audio that we have to record! So what I’m going to say is: for what the audience wants, we are forced to create these things that are very brittle, that cannot be revised.

Whereas in the happy old days of Baldurs Gate and things like that, I thought you had the best of both worlds. You could have a little snippet of dialogue that would give character, but then you would get in text trees which you could easily scan and click through. For page, that’s the important thing; dialogue pace. In a good old-fashioned role-playing game, the user controls the pace, where unfortunately in both video and recorded audio, you can’t scan it and you can’t backtrack in it.

Written things don't have acting, you cannot measure the tone certain sentences are said, there are no accents, no emotion, no hidden meaning unless the text itself tells you about it.
And it's not even true how text is more "dynamic" or how voiced dialog is limited to the one recorded, because written dialog is limited to what is actually written. You won't get better directions in written form if the person moves away from the original spot, and you cannot create long text dynamically without making it sound unnatural even in text. At most they could do is to say "it's east/west/north/south/wherever from here" and these can be even recorded.
Only big difference that text can mention your name, whoopie-doo...

Here's what Ken Rolston (ex-Bethesda dev, lead designer for Morrowind and Oblivion) had to say about voice acting in an interview with AusGamers.

Have you ever read a good book?

If not then I can understand why you posted that nonsense.

I see no point for having written text with no voice acting unless you want Morrowind's "everyone is an encyclopedia" approach. We just need more voice actors and more recorded lines for a game of Skyrim's size.

Games are far from good books.


And no, good books are not better than good movies either.

...And yet you would expect any character to have knowledge of lots of things yes? You seem to suggest having text dialogue will make people too knowledgeable, and the solution is to transfer that knowledge into voice acting. I cannot see the logic there

A hybrid system would be awesome. At least until the hardware/software catches up to the designer's vision.

And yes, the gaming world will be light years ahead once a text to computer generated speech that sounds good and can do accents/dialects is invented properly. Sorry voice actors, I'm kind of rooting for the day you aren't needed.

... IF you only wish to communicate one single thing per voice sample.



Disagree completely. Games continue to this day to have text dialogue and sell very well. I doubt that text based dialogue would cause any significant drop in sales, however it would create a much more impressive, flexible, immersive environment for a game that boasts openness. It does however represent more work for developers.

And no, good books are not better than good movies either.