"A picture is worth a thousand words." While this a good and true cliche, the opposite of this is also true: "Those same thousand words are worth many, varied pictures.

I started this because I am enjoying my time in Shadowrun: Returns (and later Dragonfall). This game has NO VOICE OVERS! None at all. This means that their descriptive texts engage my imagination. They add a lot of little texts that help the player "imagine" the character they speaking with.

"[She smiles. In love.]"

"[He pauses before answering.]"

"[You hear him mutter rhymes as you move on.]"

How do you portray these little tidbits through voice overs, or in some cases with pictures?

Check out this description of one of the NPCS:

"[Brackhaus speaks slowly with a deep, melodiuos German accent. He takes his time, accentuating each word - relishing each vowel and consonant - to string them along as if they were a delicacy.]"

After reading that description, I read his dialogue much differently than if it were missing. Pure gold, I tell ya! Pure. Gold.

Now, voice overs can be nice, and the way an actor delivers their lines can give some indication about the NPC speaking, but nothing like a few descriptive lines of text

What do you think? Are voice overs really a "must have" for today's games? They're so restrictive! Dialogue can only go so far before cost of a few extra lines outweigh the benefit of a little roleplaying

I say, bring back the descriptive text I so loved in the old RPGs!

I sometimes play a small game that′s only text based and I must say I really like the images that comes into my head when I read. No graphics or VO could ever match that.

However, I do love me some VO. It also adds a lot I think. I for one can accept both styles and love both equally. It′s the same with games in general for me; I enjoy big productions as well as small, independent games

Try watching a subtitled picture with no sounds, no sound effects to add to it, read the text and watch the facial expressions, i enjoy many Asian and European films like this especially french films, they have excellent facial expressions, and between that and the text, U.S. films not so much, its a bit like Charles Bronson one expression for everything.