If you know me, you know I'd probably be the last person on earth confusing KOTOR and SW:TOR. But yeah, it was 200 million, not 100. Also noticed how with the dialogue wheel each BW game gets less and less choice-rich, gets less and less dialogue?
As for AAA+ games, 15million sounds pretty low actually. So under I would venture definitely not.
VO for ME and stuff is pretty much done in batches. They aren't shipping out VO actors for every single DLC. They do one recording for all content now and in the future and that's it. As said, content lock. It would definitely be bad business practice to actually order them per DLC as you state in above post.
True, content locks have to be done at some point (feature complete, alpha, well you know the works). But as we saw with D:OS they could infact write all the way to release date. They threw out a quest on the beta, we found it jarring? Sometime missing? They can just rewrite it a bit, add stuff, maybe take away. As far as locking content goes, text is really one of the, if not the, latest. Simply because it's the easiest to do (anyone can just open text and write something), sure, for it to be good you probably need a skillset, but having the option is there, once it needs to be voiced, that's gone. There's been so many mods I couldn't make due to 'no VO'... so many people complained about VO quality (can't really do anything about that as a free crew), things I want to change but simply can't due to the VO restrictions set upon. While I can update to my leisure for any unvoiced characters or instances. Seriously, getting a VO actor to do some more lines shouldn't be such a "thank god" moment as it turns out to be... but sadly, that's just the fact of it.
Also I don't quite see the artist/quest example, it would sooner be programmer/writer/quest designer than that. Also the difference with VO is that the programmer can still actually do add/remove/alter a function if the need arises at any point. With voiced VO, at some point you're just "stuck" with it. Usually the level design artists move on first
No, really, I can guarantee you the hardlock VO can put on you can be worse than any engine-related limitations that someone's banging there head on.
Not sure if you know about the development of a game but voice acting is the last thing to be done and implemented..
Funny... where does that put lipsync?
Also just putting down work, do VO, then rest would generally be the worst possible thing to do. Aside from not functioning lipsync it appears your game is just RIDDLED with bugs, a lot related to the VO implementation. If only QA would also still work after VO. And programmers. And... and...
Also your cutscenes... well, let's not begin on how bad they would be if you just based made them without VO and then add it in later, magically hoping the flow is exactly what you imagined.
