As humans we are able to distinguishes between what, about 200-300 different facial appearances? (e.g. "you look just like <insert famous actor X>!") before everything starts to blur.
And around 30 different voice "appearances" (like what the Fach scheme tries to differentiate in opera) before everything starts to blur. This is beyond what we typically get in games, which is more like "you sound just like <insert regional dialect or national accent X>!" I mean like distinct voices/cadences within a given regional dialect or accent.
Usually I see like 4 regional dialects or national accents, across 4 basic tenors, in both genders for games like these. The games that use the barks concept I mean. For the tenors its typically not like the big 4 in Opera, but divided more into generic emotions. So maybe like Caustic, Reserved, Exuberant, Seductive maybe. This just going off what I've seen in various RPGs that included voice barks.
There's sort of a standard for it now that I think BG helped create, but baseline you're going to need like at least a dozen or more voices in each gender to really do it justice. To make it fully convincing you probably need a set closer to two or three dozen.
That's different voices, not just the same actors doing different performances. Unless they are very good voice actors they will still have the same telltale registers, even if attempting a different "accent" for their next trick. Good voice actors who can do more than 1 voice convincingly are very talented and rare to find. Same thing with a good radio voice. I think they could easily achieve something that most players would find satisfying though, they just need to cast a much wider net.
A fully developed bark scheme would probably be easiest to achieve if it was crowdsourced with amateurs, like out of a beta or ea opt in to record custom barks. BG1 actually had that capability in 1998 which was another thing that made it novel. The key there is just to pick like 24-36 basic barks with riffs on each and then farm it out until you find exemplars with enough variety to really carry it. Pick one or two sets for each gender that is fully voiced if you like (probably many people would be happy with 1 British and 1 Not British set for each gender), but then have the rest be Bark oriented. That way people who like a fully voiced protagonist can have one, or to experience on the first play through, but that doesn't suck up all the zots, which would be better spent recording more voices than more lines in the same voice, if that makes sense.
Last edited by Black_Elk; 10/09/21 12:33 AM.
