Kostas
Dormant Watcher
It just feels lifeless to me,I'd prefer much worse graphics than soundless dialogs.NPCs keep moving their lips and hands yet I hear nothing,it's just awkward.
It's ridiculous that a low budget game like Gothic was full voice acted and DS is not.
Well, I dislike nearly all voice acting in games, so I'm happy with the decision. Where would you rather their limited budget be spent, voices, or gameplay? For me the choice is obvious!!
On the other hand, it sheds some light on how foreigners might feel who got their full voiceacting axed because of localization costs.
I have vaguely at least one game in mind (don't remember the title, though), which was fully voiceacted, but that was cut for the German version of it.
If I need choose between the same game with a good voice acting or with none, the version with voice acting wins easily.
Dialogs are not necessarily identical if they are voice acted. If every single take costs money for actor, studio, technician and director it's only natural to cut the costs where it's most efficient: in the script editing process before the recordings. This can have both positive and negative effects. In a game like Drakensang I want long, detailed dialogs though. I can only guess how much dialog would have had to be recorded. Gothic 2 had 9 hours. Drakensang is much bigger. The chance is slim it would have gone through without serious cuts.
Also, by far not all voice acting is good, and good voice actors can be expensive.
Well in English I didn't notice but in my native language I know I'll notice.Yep - same voice for different NPCs.
And don't forget, most of the money used is valid for all versions of the game. For example, whatever they spend in the engine, the same engine will be used in all localizations of the game. Same with the terrain and environments, 3d models and animations, music, sound effects, etc. Not only will they be exactly the same (i.e. no extra investment) for all versions, but they can be reused in sequels/expansions. Voice acting is a separate investment for each localization, and not reusable.Based on your numbers, let's look at the costs of vice over recording.
Fallout 3 has 40,000 lines of dialogue. Let's assume that recording video game dialogue goes twice as fast as film dialogue. That would be 180 lines in four hours. A little more than 222 blocks of four hours. With a 200 Euro salary per block, we'd be looking at about 45,000 Euros for the voiceover. With a budget of 2.5 Million Euros, that's 1.8%. This is only the acting, and does not include studio rental, technicians etc.
It would be nice to have someone from the industry comment on this issue.
The minimum salary for dub of video game is: 200€ for 4 hours of work but also 670€ from the rights of the sells (no detail about this).
Thing is,that if you don't like voice acting you can just mute the sound and listen to music.If it's not done right, it can ruin the feeling of a game:
- bad acting
- reused voices for different characters
- inappropriate voices (like silly accents in beyond divinity)
- bad translations
- trimmed down dialog - (see the original Witcher for an example...)
As said above, to do it all right costs a lot of money. If that's available, fine. If not, it should not even be attempted, because it will devalue the product.