LOL.
Yes, i think it depends on the game, I would personally not enjoy voice acting in in a legend of Zelda game as Link is how i imagine him and having voice acting would ruin the personality i have made in my mind for him over the years.
I like the Baldur’s Gate / Warcraft compromise, where characters say a short generic line when you click on them but the rest of the dialogue is text. That lets you have a little voice acting to give the characters some personality but you can still do most of your work with plain text.
THIS , its about your budget , that 4k spent on voice acting can be used on artwork , level design , etc .
Actually, unless you have a huge amount of dialogue to do, you can get very decent voice acting for far less than this. Hire actors from the local theater, or work with the theater program at your local college. You’ll be amazed how much good voice talent is out there. Of course, that still leaves the cost of equipment, though frankly, you can set up a completely decent voice over kit for around $600 assuming you already own a computer capable of running Unity. It won’t be the same as a $20k professional sound studio, but frankly, the difference is unlikely to be significant enough to be noticable for this type of work.
That leaves the question of scale, and to me this is the most serious of the questions. Is it realistic for you to make a game that will require voice acting, or will that large a project never see the light of day and just turn into a waste of time and money? There’s the real crux of the matter. Of course, that answer will depend on the individual developer.
I like the way Legend Of Zelda does it. No voice acting as such, but subtitles, sounds, and brilliant animation still make it believable.
If not, I’d say go for text dialogue. I’m not a fan of voice acting in most cases, depending on the game.
Depends on the game. There are some games where you sit there saying “I wish this was voice acted” and some where it doesn’t matter.
But if it has no voice then don’t throw text blocks at people if they are important to the story. Don’t want ADD to kick in while they’re reading.
If you can get a hold of decent voice actors, it’s generally better, but that can be hard for an indie company (though not impossible) I’d use text if I couldn’t find any decent voice actors. Bad VA can make a game unintentionally funny, and just ruin the game for a lot of people…
There is probably a whole other dimension to consider here. Regardless of if text or voice is used, if the dialogue is boring and drags on and on the player will want to skip it.
With text a player can read the dialogue at their own pace where with a voice they have to sit through it. If you are going to have a lot of dialogue and use voice acting to be like mass effect or something, then you better make sure the dialogue is interesting or the player will want the character to please just ST#U.
It’s probably best for text and voice that you keep dialogue short and sweet, but text probably gives you more flexibility for length, which could make text a better choice for heavy dialogue games. And having short sound bytes like war-craft could still be used also. I think this is the direction I am going to go for my game, although it’s a FPS, there will be a very in depth story and a lot of dialogue from NPCs, I think voice acting for all of it would be cumbersome, but I still intend to do voice acting for the pre-rendered cut scenes.
Thanks for the feedback peoplez.
Text is easy to change. Voice? Not so much.
Less text, no voice. Think smaller, finish your game, release it! Repeat until you are skilled.
Gigi.
That would be ideal for an indie developer, but not every game is the same. That approach doesn’t work for my kind of game, although I will try to minimize the dialogue as much as possible.
Even if a person has reached the point where they have “mad skillz” and the like, this issue may still arise for them.
Also, back to the main discussion - there’s also the consideration in regard to size. Is your game being downloaded, installed via media, etc…?
Another thing to consider as well, are you going to be aiming for lip sync - maintaining that framerate, etc, etc…?
So many fun things to consider.
well i decided to only use voice acting only in cut scenes for my RPG i will have the chaters speak gibberish and let the subtitles translate similar to ICO , Banjo kazooie and the Sims. this will help the games localization into other regions and preserve the voices. but is the really a good idea for not?
text is good for indies, IMHO… bad voice actin can ruin a game’s overall rating
all the better reason to make the voice acting only in the cut-scenes and only speak gibberish
I feel it depends on the amount of dialogue and the type of game. A lot of the older RPGs, and J-RPGs (before voice acting game along) had hundreds, sometimes thousands of pages of dialogue and they cut down considerably in games that involved full voice acting which is a shame really as some of them had dialogue and story writing that could have been published in a book.
I personally prefer plain text for bulk dialogue because it offers the ability to edit easily at a later date, you can translate it into other languages if you can come across a translator that can do it.
It also doesn’t add much to a game I personally feel, it’s never given me a lot of immersion and if anything made it worse considering a lot of games have horrible voice actors.
what you think i shouldn’t use Voice acting in gibberish with subtitles
Depends. The Gibberish in Magicka was quite comical.
well the game im making is a turned based RPG but the characters aren’t deigned with a anime look but with a American toon look. but the gibberish voices will help with the localization to other regions because there would be no need to dub over another language and reprogramming the mouth moments to that language.
Here’s my general rule for ALL aspects of design.
If you can do something well, do it. If you can’t do it well, don’t do it at all.
Voice acting can add a lot to a game, but, as an indie, its tough to pull off. If you attempt to use voice acting, and it comes out mediocre, you’ll do more harm than good.
thanks for the advice even gibberish needs a great performance