Loving the game, really wish more text was narrated

[goodcigar]

I'm really loving this game. The universe is really cool and it's immersive. But one big thing is bothering me and that's the lack of audio narration for 90% of text. It's just so disappointing and non-immersive to have 90% of the text in the game be unnarrated. Are there any mods that address this?

 

[Kereminde]

I'm really loving this game. The universe is really cool and it's immersive. But one big thing is bothering me and that's the lack of audio narration for 90% of text. It's just so disappointing and non-immersive to have 90% of the text in the game be unnarrated. Are there any mods that address this?

Sadly, full voice acting can be a big thing to tackle for a small studio. Not the expense of it, just having to make sure it all matches properly.

 

[Thorqemada]

I know that there is software that reads text out loud - but i have no clue if you can apply that to ingame text.
Also the emotion would probably not be within...

 

[Aotrs Commander]

I know that there is software that reads text out loud - but i have no clue if you can apply that to ingame text.
Also the emotion would probably not be within...

Having seen youtube videos of games that do that... Unless you like having your text read by your Sat-nav, it's very much worse than no voice at all.

Like with everything else, as games have got more complicated and standards have gotten higher, it means its much harder to do stuff decently, so voice acting is, I suspect, increasingly expensive to do a job which is not as bad as the previously mentioned sat-nav voice. Bad voice acting is worse than none, too, I suspect.



(Personally, I'd have vastly preferred having two or three times more mechwarrior voice sets than fully voiced dialogue for the missions and cut-scenes.)

 

[Kereminde]

Like with everything else, as games have got more complicated and standards have gotten higher, it means its much harder to do stuff decently, so voice acting is, I suspect, increasingly expensive to do a job which is not as bad as the previously mentioned sat-nav voice. Bad voice acting is worse than none, too, I suspect.

I lived through an era where adding voice acting was a case of "go find people in the office who don't sound terrible and have them line-read". "King's Quest V" on CD-Rom was one of the cases in mind...

(They did so much better for the next one.)

Worse off was 'Stonekeep' which wound up being just cheesy enough to be tolerable.

But, yes. Good voice acting hinges on not just finding good actors... and affording them. (Note: this does not mean you need BIG NAMES, only people who can do the part. See also: Matt Shimkus as "Sokolov, the Space Russian" on Death From Above... versus Sam Riegel as "Shamrock".) It also means having a good voice director. Talent doesn't matter if the director is dropping the ball on some cases (most early English Dubs for anime - the actors can make it work, but the direction was bad).

It's a small peeve of mine (not a pet, this one's practically feral) about people expecting voice acting to be present and awesome all the time - even in smaller-studio games. For every one of those which had point-on voice work (hi 'Hades') there's others where it didn't work out so well... but I've had conversations with friends who know "the industry" of voice acting and pointed out repeatedly how it's NOT as simple as "hire people, hand script, get quality". It's not that it's necessarily expensive (up front) but it is time-consuming... (which makes it more expensive over time).

 

[Harmon Ward]

Like so many other things, this is up to us as the consumer of the product. Personally, I would pay more for a game with more and better human voice actors. The game producers part is to start making the best ones stars and paying them appropriately. Now that the sale of Blizzard Entertainment has shown that computer games are valued many times what Hollywood is, we need to see the talent connected with the price we pay.

 

[Kereminde]

Like so many other things, this is up to us as the consumer of the product. Personally, I would pay more for a game with more and better human voice actors. The game producers part is to start making the best ones stars and paying them appropriately. Now that the sale of Blizzard Entertainment has shown that computer games are valued many times what Hollywood is, we need to see the talent connected with the price we pay.

I suppose this is true, however...

Raising the price of voice actors will put them outside the budget of studios like HBS, and thus they won't do it... and since we're paying for games with better voice actors or more voice actors (or both)... HBS won't get anywhere and will fail.

I don't see this as a solution worth pursuing. Much like pursuing "better graphics" was so wonderful a pursuit when the perfection of NetHack has yet to be matched.