Voice vs Choice @ Twenty Sided

Shamus Young has penned an interesting editorial, talking about the "dumbing down" of modern games - but he blames a specific element. First, the lengthy setup:

A classic RPG quest setup: You need to get the Knickknack of Awesome, which is in the hands of King Bob. In exchange for the Knickknack, Bob wants you to rescue Princess Nancy from another kingdom. Because he'd rather not start a war, he'd prefer if you didn't kill a bunch of prison guards in the process. So we have a quest with loot, risk, travel, and optional goals. If this were an old-school RPG like Fallout or Planescape Torment, then we'd probably have many, many ways we could approach this challenge:
1) Sneak or scam your way into prison and free Nancy, claim the knickknack.
2) Murder your way into prison and free Nancy, claim the knickknack.
3) Swipe the knickknack outright.
4) Kill King Bob, then take the knickknack.
5) Get Nancy killed (or kill her yourself) and then end up having to obtain the knickknack some other way.
6) Kill Bob, take the knickknack, but later rescue Nancy anyway.
7) Kill Bob, take the knickknack, enter prison, kill Nancy.
8) Free Nancy on your own, then meet Bob for the first time and get the knickknack.
9) Bribe Bob for the knickknack with a huge sum of money.
That's a lot of options, and players can have a lot of fun running through the game again and again, experimenting with different actions and seeing what the NPC's have to say. Roleplayers will approach the quest by asking themselves, "What would my character do?" Other players will just do whatever sounds like fun. "Stealth mission? Awesome!" And others will just look for whatever route gives them the greatest mechanical advantage. "If I wipe out the guards, I can make a fortune looting them!" The game is able to appeal to a lot of different play styles and moods.
But if we were talking about a more modern RPG like Oblivion or Fallout 3, then this quest is likely going to be a lot less flexible. On the back of the box the game might brag about how you'll have all kinds of choices to solve problems the way you want, but in the end your options will boil down to:
1) Sneak into prison and free Nancy, claim the knickknack.
2) Murder your way into prison, free Nancy, claim the knickknack.

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The cause? He suggests full voice over.

More information.

I happen to agree with him and the article. I much prefer a little VO and then can skip the rest (like he pointed out in Planescape, Morrowind, etc.). Not to say I don't like it exactly. It did make DAO pretty cool with all the speaking.

But I don't think it is worth the price. I think it limits future carry over (what happens if they can't get the same person, they die, or some other issue? or they don't want to spend the money, etc.). It also really limits flexibility. I think you can see it in DLC and some other issues. It is harder to incorporate quests and content after the fact because of limitations with VO.

I would rather see all that money and time spent on VO go to enhancing games in other ways - more options, more paths to try, deeper stories.

Fantastic article. One of the most enjoyable pieces I've read on the net about gaming in general since, well, since about when the internet was invented.

But here is the kicker: Watch anyone play these fully-voiced RPG's, and you'll see they click right through the voice acting. People can read a lot faster than they can talk, and so players end up hearing just the first six words of every sentence. Unless the actor is Patrick Stewart or Liam Neeson, people aren't going to sit still while an NPC rattles on. We've lost so much in the way of freedom and depth, and in return we've gained voice acting that everyone is in a hurry to skip.

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Amen to that, and so true.

One thing I've always been interested in is text-to-voice technologies and have always wondered if these technologies would ever get refined enough to implement in a computer RPG. A sort of audio version of tweaking varoius aspects of a face as done in Oblivion.

With such a technology, game developers could get out of some of the trappings (and costs) of a Hollywood style production, and get back to making games with true freedom of choice.

Just like designers use development tools to craft NPCs graphically from head to toe, they could use a text-to-voice technology to craft an NPC's voice - possibly giving far more variation in voices than we see in today's games - which seems limited to anywhere between half a dozen to a dozen.

Developers could still have real voice actors for pivitol moments in their game, but the rest of the voice could come from text-to-voice technology. Then, when someone discovers that 18th way of doing a quest, you could return to the simplicity of adding a few lines of text that is based on the voice parameters of the NPC in question.

I'd really like to see this kind of technology, it could re-open that door to more free-form play styles.

That seems about right to me... though I suppose it's only the most obvious sign of a wider issue: I think it's pretty sad how technological advances in general seem to be used to impose strict limits - Games today look and feel a lot more like each other than they did more than a decade ago... people were more creative despite (or maybe because of) the limited technology of the time - I supposed they were simply not so terrified.

I don't think the cost of voice acting is the cause at all. Almost all of the choices above are done through actions, not words, and can share the same small set of dialogue.

At most you would need three sets of lines:
1. Bribery solutions to solve quest early:
1a. King Bob accepts your bribe (quest complete)
1b. the prison guard accepts your bribe (if that's an option)
2. Reporting back to King Bob after all solutions other than 1a:
2a. King Bob thanks you for delivering Nancy safely
2b. King Bob reacts to news of her death
3. King Bob finishes up by commenting on your actions during this quest:
3a. King Bob is glad you did it without bloodshed
3b. King Bob is disappointed that you killed the guards

Note that no matter what choices you made during the quest King Bob only needs to have two pairs of binary responses—four lines in total—which are then arranged appropriately to accurately describe what you chose to do. All possible choices during the quest, including killing King Bob/the prison guards, sneaking into the prison, etc. are done through actions and need no special dialogue at all (besides maybe some Thief-style "what was that noise?" comments from the guards while sneaking—lines which can be reused elsewhere in the game for any other generic guard so don't add to the cost of this one quest).

Yow - pretty hefty exaggeration going on there. Over four times as as many options in old games? Not to my recolection. I would say double the number at most. Not even that many if you are just talking about viable options. (Most of the time, King Bob will one-hit you right back to the Load Game screen if you dare attack him.)

And what's this talk about how NOBODY listens to NPC chat!? I listen. Even on a second playthrough with bad acting, I listen. Subtitles annoy the behoovies out of me because I try to listen and read at the same time.

That said, he's right that voice-overs will tend to cut down on choices. Spending a lot of money on development of a path that 95% of players will never see is risky at best. If a game designer wanted to drop the voice acting and just display text, that works fine for me. Heck, just having the ability to name my character what I want and have the game use my name would be nice.

A good contradiction to this article is Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines which was fully voiced and also had multiple choices on how to go through the quests. The above reminded me of a quest in VTMB. You are hired to take care of a Russian Mafia boss that is trying to get his money back from the owner of a club. There are many ways to complete the quest and even another quest that you can get to kill the club owner for the Mafia boss.

Voice acting is part of it, although I wouldn't link it neccasarily with less choice. In Morrowind I don't miss the voice acting, because all inhabitants could tell me about an encyclopedia of knowledge those NPC would probably know about their surroundings and culture, it doesn't matter that written dialogue is shared among NPCs with the same occupation, faction and locale. After all in real life ANY baker can explain you the basics of baking bread. Ofcourse the accent may be different, but for written dialogue I prefer it to be accent neutral so that was not a problem for me. Not all characters have to be unique, after all in TV and Film, and even in life, there are extras (background actors).

In Oblivion I really found it a shame that non-quest related NPCs had so few subjects they could talk about. They were fully voiced, but the amount of dialogue per NPC went down.

On a related note, quality of user-made mods suffered. In my opinion Morrowind Quest mods could compete with the Developer made quests. On account of Oblivion mod quest needing voice acting to be on par with dev created ones. I don't see it happening, also if new quests were added to an existing NPC, even with good amateur voice actors and pro-equipment the voice would be different from the official voice actor.

Anyway, more pertinent to less choice in modern games is probably the difficulty in keeping the games bug-free. This is another layer of possibility of bugs on top of the engine problems. I have a feeling they have trimmed down on choice simply to avoid making alot of bugs. It's either lazyness or the whole technical-graphical side of developing Oblivion/Fallout 3 takes up most of the developers time. Sometimes I hope the gaming industry would stop for a while with the graphic progress and deepen the gameplay and complexity of the games in the established graphic levels. But often at the moment they really start to understand an engine they have to begin work on the engine for the next game. Problem is, if devs would bring out multiple games on the same engine they might be accused of milking the franchise. Personally I wouldn't have a problem with 'milking' the graphics engine as long as they improve on questwriting and NPC Behavior/AI.

I have had in some games that I was send on a quest and by the second stage I had figured out who had killed a certain character. Sadly the game would not allow me to confront the person, but instead forces you to go undercover and go through another 3 stages before finally being able to do something with the hunch you had. Sometimes I wish developers would consider that if they leave clues in the gameworld they allow the player to act on them instead of forcing them in the rigid bureaucratic questwriting we see in games.

I think there is a kernel of truth but I believe its far more complicated than that. Part of the restriction is dialog must be completed earlier because it has to be proofread more thoroughly and to add dialog late in the process is going to be more difficult as vo needs to be redone or scheduled. Developers/designers can't just keep adding text until release date.

Really though I think he is comparing sandbox vs scripting development strategies. I believe companies lean toward scripting over sandbox to make it easier (and therefore cheaper) to do QA and this is synergistic with full VO. With sandbox, the open ended nature leads to unexpected bugs and all sorts of headaches in QA which can hurt the companies reputation. If there is only 2 ways to get the knickknack then its easier to test and provide consistant experience. Most of the games that have a lot of sandbox behavior where you have this flexibility (Fallout 2, Morrowind) can also be somewhat buggy or have unexpected behavior. I think this is a bigger driving force than the VO aspect.

Regarding computer voices, I love my British TomTom navigator, Kate, but she would drive me crazy in a game. They are getting really much better though and are starting to get inflection correct in computer voice software but I think this in games is still at least 5-10 years off. Search on "Roger Ebert computer voice" to hear a respectable representation of the critics voice computerized but still you can easily tell.

Anyway, I still prefer sandbox games, bugs and all, over the railroad scripting we tend to get today but respect the difficulties in doing it and understand why more companies do not go there.

Only those of us who grew up playing games like Planescape or Arcanum will agree with this. Judging by the replies this article has received (wherever I have seen it posted), we are a dying breed.

You know what that means? Tax exemption.

Agree with ortucis.

If you don't have close-ups of people talking then you don't need voiced dialogue in my opinion. I would also be happy having just a few lines with VO for central characters. It seems like VO costs more than it adds to the experience.

Games that I've played recently without voice acting are Mount & Balde, Kings Bounty and King Arthur tRPWG. All those games had great gameplay but didn't focus as much on telling a story.

On the other hand, Dragon Age had pretty poor gameplay but focused a lot more on involving the player in the story. There I feel that voice acting was a really good thing. I found myself rushing through combat because I wanted to advance the story.

I hate full voice acting. It adds too much cost to the game, which usually means it has to cater to a wider audience, which usually means it'll be the same as every other game out there. I do skip all the voice acting, just read through the text.

Arcanum was also very buggy with mediocre graphics and poor gameplay, all of which is a price to pay for its extreme complexity. Don't get me wrong - I love Arcanum, but I hardly think the lack of voice is the main reason for such complexity; the price is much, much higher than that.

I certainly don't consider fully voiced characters to be a must in any game, but I have to admit it was something of a revelation when I first played Gothic 1 - the atmosphere hit me like a sledgehammer: Wow! The possibilities! The random banter by the NPCs ("aah, a new day and nothing has changed"), the interesting conversations here and there. It was amazing.

Whether or not it's worth the price probably depends on the game. I don't think it would've added a whole lot to Baldur's Gate, but I can't imagine playing Gothic without it.

Apparently I'm not anyone either since I never skip spoken dialogue (unless I've already heard it).

While I think he is at least somewhat correct in his assumption regarding the effect of voice acting, I don't agree that it is a bad thing. On the contrary. An important aspect that I think he is missing is that in the olden days RPG was played almost exclusively by PnP roleplayers whom, if not necessarily having actual DM experience themselves, at least had a thorough understanding of what was required to create a RPG session. As such many players already knew the ropes when it came to inventing your own solutions and stories. This is no longer the case. CRPGs today don't exclusively cater to PnP players and thus they can't expect the customer to be able to (or even to want to) create their own solutions to ingame situations.

Besides, give the player free reigns and it won't be long before the following situation occurs: "What?!? You killed King Bob? But I told you not to … Damn, King Bob was supposed to play a major role in chapter 4 and you went ahead and killed him in chapter 2. Crap, that's a third of the game going right down the drain because you couldn't keep you homicidal urges in check. Thanks a bunch … Git!" :lol:

I always skip the voice acting as well. Unless I'm eating at the same time

The scripts are usually horrible and the pacing of the conversation slow and artificial. It's like listening to the conversations in cheesy action flicks, except they are less entertaining. I prefer to continue playing the game.

Game playing or movie watching. You choose.

Heh, ok even in voiceless games like the old Ultimas we didn't have that many choices. Surely we had more, but I am not so sure they were really connected to voice overs. Ok characters really got less to say with voice overs, that much I agree. The sheer amount of stuff any single character in Ultima VII had to say was never ever reached by any VO game.

Definitely one of the most enlighting gaming related articles I've read in years.

The guy is just so on the spot. We really lost something when full time voice acting became a norm in rpgs. Voice acting costs money and it restricts designers and writers. Most of all it narrows down our own imagination while we're playing these games. We gained a more cinematic experience but with a heavy price.

Likely full voice acting is just one of the many reasons why games are being dumbed down, but its certainly a notable cause.

Only a tiny fraction of quests in a handful of older games had lots of options. Most were just "kill all the bad guys".

This reminds me of those arguments I have with some of my older relatives who remember some mythical glorious golden age in the past when everyone was honest and things were great.