Have RPGs on the PS3 and/or the XBox 360 progressed to the point that it's entirely voice, no text? If not, why not? With the 360 is DVD and the PS3 is BlueRay they have plenty of space. :/ Would it just cost too much to bring in voice actors to do a game entirely voice? Thoughts? =Hugh
Personally, I prefer little to no voice in RPGs. It works for some games, but for most the voice acting is just embarrassing. Also I like to imagine how their voices sound in my head. Then again I rarely play RPGs these days, as there's hardly any with turn based fighting.
Why would you want a voice driven RPG? text is a must when it comes to RPGs. Something like Shemue which is years old now is a very good example of a perfect balance between voice and text. It's the style of an RPG to have text. One without just wouldn't be the same. Yakumo
Cost of voice acting aside, I WANT a subtitle option. While a lot of games do have individual sound mixing levels, quite frankly I found the sound levels (music/effects/voice) to be very badly mixed in RPG's and makes actually hearing voiceovers difficult. This is an easy one: let the player decide whether or not to use a subtitle option, don't decide for them.
This is exactly what I was going to write, honest. :-0 I think RPG's get their feel from all those walls of text anyway. Plus its much more simple to read through it and being able to skim through it quickly. Imagine any long RPG game you love, would the story still be interesting if you had someone speaking slower than you could read it? I think I would lose interest quickly.
I can see your point. I never thought about that aspect of playing an RPG. They are not turn based any more? I think I would enjoy a RPG done though voice, it would be more realistic, then reading a wall of text. Hell I come from a time when RPGs where games that you go in a dungeon fight a bunch of stuff to level up your characters, with no text other then 'You hit xmonster for xpoints'. I think I'm ready for the next level in RPGs. :/ As for Shemue, I've never played it. I think I have it, I'm not sure. I have all my Dreamcast stuff packed away, and don't remember what exactly what I have. The I know I have PSO, but I'm not sure if I have Shemue. :/ =Hugh
I can't recall, but I think Final Fantasy XIII you can turn subtitles off. I think there's still a little bit of text you have to read though.
+1 There is no quicker way to ruin a good game than with bad voice acting, and it's amazing that in this day and age the voice acting in games is still routinely terrible. I don't know why RPGs have it so bad (I guess the actors do their "children's cartoon" routines) but I literally won't play if the game doesn't allow me to change the dub language away from English. Ideally I'll take the respective language of the country the game was made in, but the most important thing is that I don't have to listen to bad English acting. What really bothers me is when a game offers alternative languages for voices but won't let you select English subs, or worse, when the non-default dub only applies to cutscenes etc. I was playing Disgaea a while back and couldn't believe that they used the English voices in battle (i.e. where you spend 99% of your time) regardless of which language you choose. How do you fuck that up?
i enjoy gaming at night in a small condo, i dont want to wake people up, so you should give me that option for subtitles. yes its cinematic without them, but truth be told, its a game... not a film. you arent drawn into it as much as a movie, knowing that you will have to spring into action in a bit.
I know I was asking about complete voice in a RPG on the PS3 or X-Box 360. But I cam across a title on the PS1 that is entire voice and done very well. Legacy Of Kain (spelled right?) is 90% voice, I don't remember if 2 game (no the soul reaver) on the PS2 was mostly voice or not. I only got the play the game for a week. It got stolen, and haven't got around of getting a replacement. I want a copy where every thing is in good shape with the box and books. So I think it's possible to make a RPG with voice. I really liked Legacy of Kain. I remember it took me 3 weeks to finish it. (I didn't have a guide to help me, so there were times I just ran around not knowing what to do. LOL) =Hugh
The legacy of kain games i wouldnt say are RPGs however at least from Soul reaver onwards the voice acting was spectacular in the main cast, seriously some of my all-time favourite game voices. The nearest you're going to come are the Mass Effect games but i'm assuming they're not the RPGs you're after. I would say very few RPGs have managed heavy voice acting and remained good as the writing in RPGs usually doesn't work very well when spoken. Voice actor talent aside the main culpret for any issues is the writing., the voice actors i feel are often the victims lol. However some managed to squeeze through, Shenmue and Panzer Dragoon Saga are very speech heavy and are both spectacular games. Even tho they ham it up, i love the English voices, battle quotes and brief bits of voice acting in games like Grandia 1, Grandia 2 and Skies of Arcadia. Games like that need their tiny voice samples haha (Valykeria chronicles i felt made a nice middleground) FFXIII i felt was wonderfully voice acted in english and the voices fitted the characters perfectly, its just a shame it wasn't especially well written and characters were either annoying or bland lol much like the game itself. FFXII's voice acting is also rather impressive. In a purely masochistic endeavour i played through the whole of star ocean 4(OH GOD WHY), all i can say is voice acting made an already awful game worse (In both languages) badly acted anime clique, a lack of direction or pacing and some spectacularly bad writing and direction in terms of VA performance and in-game animation lol. Edit - why not Having everything fully voice acted would end up costing an arm and a leg to do, you're essentially hiring and recording talent, editors and everyone else attached a VA project for what could be a 10-20 hour CG film/cartoon so your overheads will be HUGE. (Also to this very day due to this many games cant have re-records and everything is booked in advance, so at times the quality is bad because that's their 1st time seeing the lines and they won't get a chance to try them again and quite often they won't know beyond the most basic info as to whats going on at the time in-game) Even then you cant be sure about quality and fan reaction as people are fickle and will find any excuse to complain be it a true valid excuse or the rantings of 12 year old Japanophile, any way about it you'll be losing some potential sales. I'd say there's something good in taking your time and having the nice clunky text boxes in an RPG tho, there's been many a time when after a 3 hour trawl through some dungeon my brain probably isn't at its best for data retrieval too lol
What are the stats for ADR work in the United States now? Union rate for a voice actor is $45 an hour, but they're limited to four hours of work a day. One hour of recording may result in ten minutes of usable audio material if you're lucky. It's nearly impossible to coordinate schedules (since most voice actors have to do additional standard acting or other day jobs to pay rent in Los Angeles and Manhattan) so in a lot of cases everyone is recorded solo and edited together. I'm hesitant to be critical of voice actors, because they never get to have the preparation that would be needed for convincing acting in a game. They don't get to see character models or screen shots, and all they have in hand is a paper script. When voice acting is terrible, it's usually because the director doesn't have a clear idea what the game is supposed to be communicating with those voices. It's very interesting to hear bad voice work in a terrible game, and then see exactly the same actors in another game giving an excellent performance by comparison.
It reminds me of text to speech. I think the Japanese language they used in the second and subtitles was better
haha the english dub of shenmue is unique lol... I mean Ryo was perfect at portraying the his two emotions of constipated and angry. But shenmue managed to be amazing despite and in some ways due to its dub lol Granted i didn't miss hearing him say "I SEEEEEEEEE" at everything but even so Quality aside it feels good that it was there.
