"Oh it's been 200 years and everyone I have ever known and loved is dead? Meh, whatever."

I agree that when you get news like that, he kind of sounds like he's under reacting. Of course, I have been against the entire voiced protagonist, so I'm probably just being biased.

Piper voice is fine in that short clip. It's the SS voice. He sound like he don't care.

Out of the little we've seen I'm really disappointed from everyone we've heard so far. Pretty bland and sounds a little forced. The facial animations have me worried too, after seeing piper http://webmshare.com/YLrJ5 , I mean I know modeling and animations have never been their strong suit but this looks way too janky, even for them. Maybe L.A Noire and Until Dawn have spoiled me, I dunno.

To be fair that was one of four possible dialogue choices there

Yeah, this. My opinion on the voice acting so far is "it exists."

I hate the "too early to tell" argument. That's true if you see the script leaks and don't know how the lines are said. That's true if you see the cast list but haven't heard their performances. It's not true after you've heard their performances. You don't need to watch the entire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bangt7d9vGA to know that this game's voice acting is atrocious, let alone play the entire game. I'm neutral to positive about most of the performances in Fallout 4 so far. But everything we've heard from Delaney so far sounds awful to me. Maybe an actual good performance is hiding behind the curtain, but that won't change the fact that the lines that we've heard him say so far sound awful.

Is it too early to write off the voice acting in the game overall? Absolutely. Too early to tell if what we've heard so far is good or bad? Absolutely not.

All I've heard so far is two lines (the start and end of the Combat trailer) - I've deliberately avoided any of the story bits/playthroughs/etc. And I haven't heard anything from the female Sole Survivor.

So yeah, I can't tell yet.

In RPGs like these, I actually tend to like it if the main protagonists voice actor/actress is fairly... neutral in his/her expression of emotion. The more neutral the voice acting is, the less restricted I feel with my choices. If my character totally sounds like some happy and friendly nice-guy then I would never ever make him do evil stuff because it would be out of character... And I'm the one who's supposed to create this character, right!? Nothing is supposed to feel out of character by default.

Just look at Geralt from The Witcher. I [censored] love Geralt. He is the perfect RPG protagonist, if you ask me. Morally and emotionally neutral 99,9% of the time. No choice is wrong or right. His voice actor actually acts as though Geralt has no emotions - which he hasn't according to Witcher lore! Makes most choices a lot more interesting. Even though Geralt is not a character I've created, I still feel like I can shape his story and character ark any way I want. Fallout is different, but the same principles should still be relevant.

I like Male Shepard for the same reason. If you're going to give your RPG protagonist a voice, make him sound neutral! However, that makes it even more important to give all the other characters around you a good and interesting voices. Define them. Give them emotions, morals, principles and such.

Its funny how people always manage to demand bigger, better, more block buster.

Have a look at some movies that are in the range of 5-20 years old now.

Not every flick has been amazing.

Disagree.

Male SS - seems kind of bland from the 4 lines we've heard so far out of thousands upon thousands that we haven't

Female SS - no idea yet

Preston - fine

Codsworth - on point

Piper - impressive

So far I've rather liked it, aside from the main guy... which I won't be playing, and which is still way better than the main character's voice acting in Fallout 3.

Dragon Age 2 - every time I pick the "angry" response, Hawke's accent gets much Britisher. Consistency would be nice.

There's a difference between that and arguing that people in general can't be forming opinions from the content that Bethesda's provided them that they've seen. It's the difference between going "I've purposefully avoided ever learning about the living conditions of the moon so I can't tell if it's like Disneyland" and going "I've purposefully avoided ever learning about the living conditions of the moon so you can't tell if it's like Disneyland" to someone who has learned about it.

We haven't seen much of gamplay and even less of dialogue, i think it's better to just wait and play the game before saying what is good or bad. I swear, it's like people are desperately trying to find flaws on a game that isn't even released. As for the voice acting..........yea, the Piper clip wasn't anything amazing , but it's just two lines in a 110 000 !

Piper's voice is nice. Codsworth is well a robot so his voice is nice for a robot I guess. Preston's voice is fine. The male SS's voice is alright. Still wish to hear more of the female SS's voice.

If I'm not mistaken I vaguely remember the voice director for Fallout 4 saying this kind of thinking was the reason they went with the direction with Delaney.

It's too early, because other than the intro, you don't know the context in which said lines were spoken. Additionally, I have strong reasons to suspect that FO4 will have multiple voicesets (ie. same lines spoken differently depending on a number of factors). One of those reasons is that someone straight up asked Kal-el (voice-over director) if the game would have multiple voicesets and he was defensive, saying that there were some things that even he was not privy to. And remember, these guys recorded for years, which is unheard of. I refuse to believe that a studio with BGS's resources, with that much time afforded to the protagonist's voice actors, would allow poor results.

It's not unheard of. Large projects usually take quite a while to record. Main characters in Disney movies typically record their lines over the course of two or three years. That's partially due to the volume of the work, partially due to scheduling, and partially to facilitate rewrites. A lot of the commentaries for the films in the Disney Renaissance have the directors talk about how nervous they were at various times because they were afraid a child actor's voice would start to change due to puberty between the recording sessions.

Which to me runs counter to their stated reasoning for including voiced protagonists: to hit the emotional beats of the story better. If the performance is deliberately deadpan and expressionless so we can project or own feelings into it, why not leave it to text boxes, which already had the ability to let us project our own feelings without burdening us with a boring, flat, lifeless performance? The boring, flat, lifeless performance won't hit the emotional beats anyway, because it's boring, flat, and lifeless.

Very VERY much this. From what little we've heard this is how the SS is being portrayed. Mostly neutral towards everything, lest the player be biased into playing the emotions portrayed in the voice acting, instead of their own choices. I think part of why people rag on this so much is because they view the player character as something other than the typical "RPG Superhero" and see the SS as more of a person. That is NOT the case. The SS is a hero and does not have the concerns of everyday survival in mind like other in the wasteland. Hence the detached and distant voice fits.

Or to put it another way (as far as voice is concerned) Fallout = Book of Eli, Rust = The Road.

That is just your view on it. Others see that same continual lack of emotion as the expression of emotion. The best examples I can think of are in movies like The Expendables or Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen. The lack of a huge amount (but still some) of emotion in voice indicates how much emotion is going on inside the mind that they aren't expressing. This is great for video games as people can then role play in their head and express how they want to express with the actions the character then makes.

Knowing Bethesda and their storyteling/voice acting capabilities, my expectations are not very high. Therefore, as long as it's not criminally bad, I'm fine with it.

If my interpretation of how the SS's dialogue will work then we've only seen the "Neutral response" in everything shown so far rather than the positive or negative. That neutral response stuff reminds me of the voice acting we usually see outside the big name VA's in Bethesda games. Skyrim is the only one that I think avoided the slightly brain dead delivery on all of the VA's they didn't splash a lot of money for, and New Vegas had a fair bit of high tier voice actors who delivered quite a good performance for some of the bigger characters.

Piper sounds great though, which makes me hopeful that the non-neutral responses have some emotion to them. Just wish we could see some more of it.

I don't know, I just think the character feels more human if he/she actually has a voice. It makes it easier to relate to the character, thus making it easier for the player himself to get emotional over whatever is happening in the game. If done well, characters like Geralt could potentially still make you cry and laugh (cried and laughed multiple times when playing The Witcher 3, for example). Specially if the supporting characters are well done! Also: If the dialogue itself is well written, and well directed, and well acted (yes, I think its possible to portray neutral characters in an engaging way) I think its entirely possible to make us care about our character and his story.

But yeah, I get what you're saying! But I think this can turn out very well if Bethesda know what they're doing

We've heard far too little dialogue so far to form a valid context.

I can't recall the exact source, but on one of the various podcasts I heard Voice Director Kal-El Bogdanove

talking about the process.

He would direct the voice actors sometimes to 'turn down' the intensity of some lines because in a game

with 111,000 lines, you would not be able to bear dialogue delivered at intensity all the time.

We're focusing on one line in a conversation,

it was never intended to bear this level of scrutiny.

Honestly, what Bethesda showed us should've been ''flawless'' parts of the game, for obvious reasons.

So...maybe that means the voice acting we've seen if the best of the best they can offer for Fallout 4?

Don'ttakemeseriouslyit'sjustspeculationalsoifyoumanagedtoreadthiswithoutbigissuesthenyou'rereallygoodatenglish.

Well, knowing the female protag's voice actress' work, I have no doubt that Courtenay did a good job.

I like Brian T. Delaney's voice acting so far. Only va I like more is Laura Bailey, I hope she makes a return in Fallout 4.