Voice acting - More please!
- Thread starter BluWolve
- Start date
Can I get a whoop whoop when my pilot levels up?
You know getting a proper voice message from a Federation or Empire official would actually add a lot to the ranking missions. They feel very uninspiring right now.
Incidentally (for anyone interested) there are interviews with Amelia Tyler and Jay Britton who both worked on the voice acting from Josh Hawkins youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5zFNb1XPWo&t=57m40s
I've not embedded it as that strips out the time-stamp.
And Shodan and the Master of the Unity.
It would be great / more immersive for everyone if Frontier would consider perhaps inviting some players to provide further voices as the game grows. E.g. Enable greater varied voice announcements for the arrival and docking at stations, reminding the rest of us to reduce speed etc. I'm not saying invite everyone who's just got an account to contribute - maybe those who have played for a little while / will earn these soon to be ARX points etc? I.e. It could arguably be cheaper than paying actors for all those voices to improve the current album. Sure the players submitted audio would obviously need checking / editing before embedding! I think Ive heard most of the current voices now, but agree it's better than just text.
I think it was on the early PC back in the 90s there was an Elite that played video (from its install CD) of actors at stations. It would be good to have video going again here too. We have more of the technology now. Seeing the text all the time does make it kinda retro. Maybe they are now working on wireframe graphics now too! ;-)
I think it was on the early PC back in the 90s there was an Elite that played video (from its install CD) of actors at stations. It would be good to have video going again here too. We have more of the technology now. Seeing the text all the time does make it kinda retro. Maybe they are now working on wireframe graphics now too! ;-)
I'd like a "welcome Home" one for your Home Station. Must be easy to nominate a Station then get the "Hi Honey, you're home!" every time you dock there?
NPC interaction is very weak in general in this game. More voice interaction and dialogue trees, leading to different sidequests/rewards during missions is what this game desperately needs. I'd say it's as important as Space Legs. We should be able to communicate with NPC pirates, and with NPC commanders in Power Play, etc.
Like the radio chatter at outposts. Just a quiet broadcast that comes in fuzzy. It would make exploration different too, because you wouldnt hear anything.
Voice acting is nice, but it is also quite costly to implement. Arranging recording studios and a variety of voice actors is far more work than simply making text.
This is particularly important for Elite, as they don't seem to have the budget to make more than a dozen written lines for NPCs. If they can't afford to have an intern spend an afternoon throwing together a hundred more written lines, how can they afford to hire dozens of voice actors and the required recording studios?
There's also the issue of localisation. It's all well and good for us, who all presumably speak English, but for foreign language users they either have to rely on subtitled recordings or they simply miss content, unless FD are willing to dub the spoken parts into other languages too. However, they could simply run with the "multiple language" issue and actually have voice recordings in a huge variety of different languages (or even weird combinations of languages, such as the vocabulary of one but the sentence structures of another because of linguistic drift), so there's a real possibility that you will find a hidden recording that you cannot understand.
Not to say that it can't be done, some games have truly gargantuan amounts of recorded voice lines. Of note is that Divinity: Original Sin 2 has over 1 million words of recorded dialogue (or 74,000 lines if you prefer) and that was made by a small-medium studio with a fraction of the resources of what FD has at its disposal, so if FD wanted to they could quite easily put 50,000+ lines of spoken dialogue.
That being said, I'd rather have 100,000 written lines that add variety than 100 spoken lines for select circumstances. Even better, would be for communications to be more procedural, even if they are simply based on certain templates and sentence structures with minor procedural alterations. If there's a 100 initial templates for a pirate identifying you for a mission, with 6 replaceable words that each have 20 different alternatives then, with relatively little work, we would have 6.4 billion different combinations. This could be expanded further with certain factions using certain terms, linguistic roots or slang rather than just making it completely random.
This is particularly important for Elite, as they don't seem to have the budget to make more than a dozen written lines for NPCs. If they can't afford to have an intern spend an afternoon throwing together a hundred more written lines, how can they afford to hire dozens of voice actors and the required recording studios?
There's also the issue of localisation. It's all well and good for us, who all presumably speak English, but for foreign language users they either have to rely on subtitled recordings or they simply miss content, unless FD are willing to dub the spoken parts into other languages too. However, they could simply run with the "multiple language" issue and actually have voice recordings in a huge variety of different languages (or even weird combinations of languages, such as the vocabulary of one but the sentence structures of another because of linguistic drift), so there's a real possibility that you will find a hidden recording that you cannot understand.
Not to say that it can't be done, some games have truly gargantuan amounts of recorded voice lines. Of note is that Divinity: Original Sin 2 has over 1 million words of recorded dialogue (or 74,000 lines if you prefer) and that was made by a small-medium studio with a fraction of the resources of what FD has at its disposal, so if FD wanted to they could quite easily put 50,000+ lines of spoken dialogue.
That being said, I'd rather have 100,000 written lines that add variety than 100 spoken lines for select circumstances. Even better, would be for communications to be more procedural, even if they are simply based on certain templates and sentence structures with minor procedural alterations. If there's a 100 initial templates for a pirate identifying you for a mission, with 6 replaceable words that each have 20 different alternatives then, with relatively little work, we would have 6.4 billion different combinations. This could be expanded further with certain factions using certain terms, linguistic roots or slang rather than just making it completely random.
More voice acting with variety would definitely add some depth to the game.
Actually that's not necessarily required. GalNet audio is a text-to-speech system, extending that for more voice variety could save a lot as no real person is needed for voice acting. Yes, it's still quite robotic, but that's ok for start, I think. Make it better, more natural sounding in time.