Drakensang Drakensang not fully voice acted?

:-/ 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.
 
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It's ridiculous that a low budget game like Gothic was full voice acted and DS is not.

The first Gothic was quite an expensive game in its time. The graphics were great in March 2001, and PB spent like forever working on the game. I wouldn't be surprised if Gothic had a bigger budget than DraSa. And don't forget there's ca. 8 years of rising budgets between them. 2-3M EUR now is hardly as much as 4-6M DM back then.


I'm quite happy with this compromise. The writers had more freedom because they didn't have to write in a voice acting friendly way. Voice was mostly cut. Okay for me. I can live with that.

But of course I'm also somebody who still watches silent moves once or twice a year. ;)
 
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The lack of full voice acting was brought up as a 'is something wrong' question in the GameSpot forums ... personally I am fine with that since I tend to mute things half teh time so as not to annoy the family.
 
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Nowadays, where full voices are quite a standard now, NOT full voiceacting definitively will be considered as "something is wrong".

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.
 
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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.

Beyond Divinity
 
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If I need choose between the same game with a good voice acting or with none, the version with voice acting wins easily.

From what I heard voice acting for a video game is something like 3 intense days very organized. It wouldn't cost so much if you consider it's this cost perhaps multiply by 5 people. The problem is probably more for other countries that haven't such organization and a large pool of professional voice actors that cost much much less than actors.

I haven't tried yet Drakensang but I feel its choice totally weird. First sentence with voices will be a constant reminder of the lack of voices, yes you can cut the voices (I hope) but then it's such a waste of money and time.
 
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For a game like Drakensang, voice acting would take much longer than three days. I was working at the place where they did voice-vers for the Spanish version of Halo 2, which certainly has less dialogue. The recordings took at least a week. Actors are often paid per hour, then there is the director, technicians etc. This is an expensive decision.

Also, countries which dub a lot of movies (most of them American) usually have quite good studios and networks. Germany is among these countries. I don't know about the current state of the industry, but for a long time it was the American industry that wasn't very strong, simply because most products were English.

The problem is that most German games don't sell that much. As noted in the news posts, 100,000 sold units makes your title a blockbuster in Germany. German games have less international exposure than US games (with a few exceptions), so sales will be naturally lower.
 
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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.
 
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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.

And to tell you the truth, it's hard to find a game where everybody agrees voice acting was good (unless really AAA games with millions and millions in budget and professional voice actors), and the % of people for which it really doesn't matter is high. Considering RPG games are specially heavy in the dialog aspect, voice acting is an extra (and high) expense for each localization. Besides, when you translate from the original language you're introducing one level of potential failure (nobody gives extra points to a game for it's good translation, but if it's bad, heavens save you), add to that an extra layer of people actually speaking those translated words, and it's a second layer of potential problems.
I'm perfectly fine with what they did.
 
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I have tried a bit the English demo and it makes me see it differently, that is working anyway despite the strange choice. It's not the first sentence but the first talk of a dialog with a NPC. I suppose this choice has been done to save time and money and still be able to feature voices for helping sells, plus the first talk of a dialog can be enough to contribute to setup the mood of a NPC.

But in fact this choice is very ambitious because most if not all NPC with a dialog get a voice acting. That will probably result in many secondary NPC sharing the same voice. I'm sure that a good voice actor can use few different natural voices but well not that many.
 
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Yep - same voice for different NPCs.
Well in English I didn't notice but in my native language I know I'll notice.

About price of such stuff I search a little through the net and found the convention they agreed in my country:

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).

And to get an idea of more detailed numbers taken from dub for movies:
4 hours is 90 lines maximum I quote this but this limit is only for movies not video games. I saw at TV an extract of a take for a video game, it was quite amazing to see the rate of recording and quite different than takes I saw for movies or cartoon.

But yes that also means to pay location of a professional recording studio, a director, technicians. I don't think video games yet get a lips/voice synchronization work meaning a lot of work before to prepare it.

That said I'm not sure it is so significant when you compare few weeks of this to years of an army of developers, graphist, and so on. It's still not free and requires additional organization plus quite a problem in case of bug fix with dialogs.
 
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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.
 
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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.
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.
 
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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).

The idea behind this is the separation of work and rights. The 200€ are compensation for the work. The price for the rights depend on the project, and they are often limited to 12 months. For example a local radio commercial is relatively cheap, a national radio commercial much more expensive.

200€ for 4 hours is the low end. Everybody who has something of a name (read: a well known voice) costs more. I know about one reasonably well known TV actor and top 5 voice actor (he speaks Bruce Willis, among others), who asks for 5000€ per day - and he is in high demand. All prices plus expenses of course, and certain minimum orders have to be reached.

Another problem I see:
An expensive loca is a negative aspect when negotiating with international publishers. Another reason to shrink the dialogs if you want full voice-overs.
 
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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.
 
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We'll see what they do in DraSa 2. They should have a relatively bigger budged because the product is now proven and all the technology can be recycled.
 
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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.
Thing is,that if you don't like voice acting you can just mute the sound and listen to music.
If there is absolutely no voice acting or what is in DraSa then the only option is to read all those dialogs and watch a game which is like silent movie.

Since it's been quite a while since a game was localized in Greece I play only English games and I tend to forget about other localizations.
Maybe voice acting for 4 languages in an RPG would be very expensive and have a negative effect on gameplay,but English only would be good enough for me.
 
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