Just watching through the beginning of the Josh Sawyer talk. He mentions how they felt they had to go to everything being voiced because of DOS2 and streamers. ugh. it kills me that streamers, who are the equivalent of someone who only wants to "read" picture books had any effect at all in developing a crpg.
It makes perfect sense, when you think about it. Did you ever watch someone attempting to play an all-text game for an audience? They are some of the most miserable bastards on the planet.
It always starts with the cheerful, jolly streamer telling to his/her audience "WE ARE PLAYING THIS AWESOME RPG! So, SO AWESOME! Hehe, you can't imagine how awesome it is!" ...and then fifteen minutes into the gaming session, while reading every single line aloud, you star feeling the tiredness and exasperation in their voice as they begin to realize what they got into, exactly. The day after (or two days later if they are incredibly stubborn) they dropped the game and moved to something else that doesn't consume their vocal cords. If they chose to NOT read aloud? Even worse. They spend minute glaring at the screen with dead eyes while reading in silence and the audience starts to complain that it's boring to watch and leave the channel.
Incidentally the day I started to notice this trend is when I realized that all that old school whine about "voicing dialogues being a waste of money" is tragically outdated. These days it's something expected as a baseline. And frankly unless your game bombs for plenty of other reasons it's something basically that repays itself, for how it expands your user base.
See, I'm fine with VO, but I'd much rather it be a partial thing, like Pathfinder did, or even the Yakuza series (ya ya, laugh at me). Josh even said that they started with only partial VO but he was overridden by the owners. With how expensive it is to fully voice tens of thousands of lines, it's simply an impossible reality for most studios that don't have almost unlimited budgets. Also, i will always hate the idea that we're creating games based on how many streamers would like to play it. I don't blame the streamers, it would be super awkward to try to keep a chat entertained while you're sitting there reading dialogue quietly, but I don't have to like it.
