What do you think of Partial Voice-Acting in Games?

[Rosstin]

What do you guys think of using partial voice-acting in a game? Where characters only have certain noises recorded like grunts, shudders, yells, and the like? We did that for Queer Catboy Love Triangle Disaster (http://rosstin.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/kitty-love-3/) and I'm considering doing it for Queen At Arms (http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=24668).

For King's Ascent (http://www.kongregate.com/games/shoosein/kings-ascent) we did full voice acting. That was really the only option for that game, because there was too much action to read the text, but thankfully there were only a few thousand lines in that game.

I can't think of examples off the top of my head, but I know there are a lot of games that have partial voice acting. Lots of RPGs, right? And even 3D Zelda games.

[Closet_Skeleton]

Baldur's Gate 2 only had voice acting for some of the lines and is still a benchmark for character and dialogue that Bioware's later fully voiced acted games rarely meet so I don't think its that important.

[Rodin]

I actually prefer partial voice acting as long as it's well done, because you get SO much more dialogue. Another sterling example of this is the difference between Morrowind and Oblivion. Morrowind - partially voice acted, tons of unique NPCs. Oblivion - fully voice acted, world of clones.

Basically, full voice acting is great only if you aren't sacrificing words to save money.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

I thought it worked just fine for Recettear, and like Rodin says, it lets you fit in more dialogue options, which is a great thing. It's a nice way to add some emotional nuance, and sometimes--it can lead to better emotional nuance. (Fully voice-acted lines are sometimes awkward and oddly expressive.)

[IthilanorStPete]

I actually prefer partial voice acting as long as it's well done, because you get SO much more dialogue. Another sterling example of this is the difference between Morrowind and Oblivion. Morrowind - partially voice acted, tons of unique NPCs. Oblivion - fully voice acted, world of clones.

Basically, full voice acting is great only if you aren't sacrificing words to save money.

Agreed with this. Having to voice act every bit of dialogue puts a limit on how much dialogue you can have; as long as there's some basic voice effects, I'm fine. Having important dialogue fully voice acted is an added bonus, I don't need it for every last dialogue tree in the game.

[Craft (Cheese)]

Honestly? It really depends on the game and the way you want to tell your story. Imagine Bastion without the narration and just the subtitles. Imagine if they tried to do all the dialogue in Planescape: Torment with nothing but those silly 3D animated scenes.

My main worry about partial voice acting would be consistency. I actually didn't like the partial voice acting in the IE games because it felt like it was kinda random: The most memorable (to me) lines in those games weren't the voiced ones, and those lines were so rare that it sort of took me out of the experience when one showed up. I'd have preferred it if they kept the voices to the "barks" characters say when you interact with them.

[Rosstin]

Thanks guys! This is so helpful!

I guess our main options right now for Queen At Arms are partial voice-acting and no voice-acting. I'm helping my buddy Sundown work on his script for Icebound (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1290825134/icebound-a-visual-novel) and it's a NIGHTMARE. I can't even tell you. There are over 7000 lines of dialog in Icebound and, aside from having to get them acted, we have to meticulously script each sound file to the correct lines. Attaching each of the 7000 files to the 7000 lines is... awful. Just awful. I helped him do about 4 hours of it and I wanted to shoot myself. Much worse than King's Ascent. However, the VA for Icebound was AMAZING so I'm sure it will be worth it.

Queen At Arms, though, has way more dialog. We're approaching 100,000 words and will probably end up with about 200,000 before we apply the Razor of Cutting. Plus, I can't imagine ever finalizing the script. I'll probably be making adjustments up until release day...

But if we go partial voice-acting, I'll have to get that taken care of eventually. I guess it's something I could do in the month before release. I have to figure out exactly what to get acted, though, and then get professional quality VAs. I need at least 3 or 4 male VAs with sexy voices.... @_@

I know one professional male voice actor who I've worked with before. He did the male voices for King's Ascent and people really liked his work (but disliked our female VA, poor thing.) Then we have 3 men who work on Queen At Arms (although the 2 besides me are very auxiliary members, not really the "main" team.) And 4 female team members who comprise the main team, although I'm not sure if any of them will be willing to provide voices, they're mostly pretty shy. I'm having to beg them to do voice-over for our Kickstarter video, sigh.

Problem is that all my VAs are scattered across the United States. For both King's Ascent and Queer Catboy, I was able to drag everyone into a fancy-pants professional recording studio and do the recordings locally, then give the files which were all recorded in a single place to my sound engineer. But now that everyone is graduated and scattered to the winds, it's a lot harder... if we have everyone record their own VA, I shudder to think what it will be like for the sound engineer to level everything.

Perhaps, if I was exceedingly clever, I could get all of our voice-acting done at GDC 2014? I could get my sound engineer to tape everyone.... that actually sounds really fun! I'm a genius!! Oh man! That would totally work!!!

[Rosstin]

By the way, guys-- that totally worked. I'm already interviewing voice actor candidates who will be at GDC2014 or live in SF. Thanks for helping me brainstorm.

[Airk]

The only time partial voice acting bothers me is when it seems random and arbitrary. Like "This one cutscene is deemed 'important' so we recorded full voices for it, but this other cutscene thirty seconds later isn't 'important' so it's just text." (Lookin' at you, Tales of Vesperia.)

Games that just use occasional interjections like Recettear uses are great.

[GungHo]

While I prefer voiced dialog, I think full voice acting backs some games into corners, especially large RPGs and MMOs. Best example I have on that is SWTOR. They essentially cannot advance the class storylines because of the expense of a fully voiced script and they are unwilling to break away from the model because of how jarring that would be in tone.