A long time back I suggested having the main character be fully voiced and a moderator said they are planning on doing that and I have found some parts in the game where your character really does talk and it was amazing... But, as I have thought about it. I think it be a cool idea to keep much of the game as it is now then have key moments in the game where your character does talk, but make them less random and more important. Like have them happen during important moments of the overall story. As a way to give a subtle nod to the player that says, "Hey, this is important. You should probably try and remember this." Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
I agree, mostly because this will be less complicated for multilingual VOs. I am assuming that this thread and the idea are primarily aimed exclusively at a purely English VO?
Depending on the fact that it is to be a multilingual VO, which I would very much welcome, the text versions of the respective language would have to be correct first. There are some gross bloopers here for the German text version as far as I can tell and I've only played as far as Goblin Camp because it's also time consuming for me to find all the lines of text and check for errors and contextual inconsistencies. The voice output then becomes correspondingly poor. In many cases you can quickly recognise that a native speaker has not been hired when a poorly translated text is also set to voice 1:1...
As far as I can remember, DAI has done well, but I doubt Larian and even WotC have good quality management for multilingual text translation / voice acting. I have observed one thing with both and others of the Video Gaming Industry, which leads to quality defects in the translation: If you really want top-notch texts + VOs, then the unwritten rule applies, namely: 1. native speakers of the respective language and 2. (in this special case) who are also familiar with the DnD lore to hire. To make it as flawless as possible to ensure contextually meaningful and immersive translation for the gaming experience. And unfortunately this is usually not done for cost reasons. Some prime exceptions with multilingual voice acting that come to my mind are: DAI, SWTOR, and TESO. Neverwinter (Online), on the other hand, is absolutely awful. Mixed translations = Denglisch = German + English or no translation for certain words... A recent terrible and "halfheartedly" translated example of WotC MtG DnD Crossover is:
English Original:
https://scryfall.com/card/clb/142/ravenloft-adventurerGerman Denglish Version:
https://www.directupload.net/file/d/6581/ef9eyvm8_png.htmThey did not research the correct German Version for "Ravenloft" -->
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravenloft Actually it should be called
"Rabenhorst-Abenteurerin"...
On the other hand we have
English Original:
https://scryfall.com/card/clb/272/duke-ulder-ravengardGerman Version (correct):
https://www.directupload.net/file/d/6581/5ioyq89m_png.htmAs you can see, the word "Raven" is translated one time and not translated another time... By the way, Larian hasn't translated the German text version of "Ulder Ravengard" ingame yet...
Even with supposedly difficult 1:1 and non-literal translation challenges, there are very good sources to prevent translation mistakes, which unfortunately are not used / researched because, as I can only emphasize again and again: @ Larian pls (at least try to) hire: 1. native speakers of the respective language and 2. (in this special case) who are also familiar with the DnD Lore.
