*sigh* I believe you, as much as I don't want to... That's really disappointing about PoE. The dev thought process, I mean..
I mean, it made the sequel better, so...
I've been playing RPGs for the largest part of my 42 years of life, probably since the late '80s...And frankly I'm way past the point of thinking that acting super-elitist gives me a tone and pretending decent voice acting doesn't add to the game's overall feeling. And these days it's not even a big limiting factor in terms of options... As long as the player is reasonable and doesn't expect to have full voice over for all the seventy-two possible permutations of his main character. In fact if your title is any good I'd say it's basically a feature that most of the times repays itself with the additional audience it brings.
Like I said above, I don't hate cinematics, I don't think voice acting (if it's good) is detrimental to games on its own. It also depends on the type of the game. Fixed protagonist, like in TW3? By all means, full voice acting. It does add a lot. But games (mostly RPGs) with custom protagonists and lots of player freedom? It would be unrealistic to say full voice acting doesn't impact writing, both in quantity and quality, there's a massive gap in work between tweaking a text file and rerecording a line (and possibly a mocapped scene). Of course, there's the question of "would the dev really expand dialogue if the resources wouldn't be used on voice acting?".
Why are you saying it's not a big limiting factor in terms of options? (Not dismissing you, genuinely asking.)
Even if we assume voice acting only impacts "flavour" of what a character says and the pool of NPC reactions is the same, it imo still changes a lot. I'm not a heavy RPer, but I'm annoyed when games only give me a handful of options of which none sound like something that could be said by my character. At the same time, I greatly enjoyed some of the "weirder"/funnier/non-obvious dialogue choices in RPGs that give your character the guise of having personality. But those require there to be a lot of dialogue options, since distinct personality means it won't fit most characters.
Originally Posted by Bukke
FWIW the video is interesting if you have the time to watch it. It's always interesting to see game devs look back at what they've made and talk about the processes that led to the game becoming whatever it ended up being.
Ah, thank you. I'll certainly watch it, though I'll save it for when I finish PoE2.
