Larian Studios Forums Divinity General Discussion Please add German voice acting to the game

As a German player who is fluent in English, I sometimes still have trouble with the English voice acting.
I set the text to German, but then unfortunately have to turn off the excellent voice acting, because it’s extremely confusing when the text is in German and the voice acting is in English.

I realize, of course, that this isn’t a simple request, but I can immerse myself much better in the game world if the voice acting were in German. I also understand that it’s not possible to provide native-language voice acting for every language, but the German-speaking world isn’t that small, and many (role-playing) games do offer German voice acting (e.g., Kingdom Come: Deliverance).

I hope that you will at least consider whether a German voiceover for the game can be added later.

I understand the desire. But German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic etc..... they're all important languages, and that would be a lot of voice actors to find and pay.

For movies, I think the local distributors create and fund he dubbing in local languages, not the movie producer directly. Perhaps something like that could be foreseen. The possibility for local distributors to add language packs. Either bought separately by the player or funded as a part of the distribution budget.

Maybe there are games that already do this. I don't know. But as games get more and more cinematic with real actors and real vouce acting, I suppose the demand for localised voice dub will become stronger as well.

Is there none in BG3 ? I honestly dont know because I only play my games in English.

And as far as I'm concerned, I'd be perfectly happy with partial voice acting, like in Baldurs Gate 1 and 2.

German voice acting would be awesome!

I know that it’s hard to pull off, but it would be great.

And with the current conflict between German voice actors and Netflix, there may actually be far more talented people available to hire than usual.

I’m usually comfortable playing games in English, but many people I want to play with are not. And the voice acting really adds a lot to the game.

It couldn't be German voice acting alone, they had then to do it in other languages too. My main concern would be the lip phasing. I could not endure the German voiced text in Starfield for example because it was so different from the lip movement. Only with the AI mod for German Lip Synchronisation I can switch to the German language.

Honestly, if full voice acting is too big of a budget sink, I'd completely settle for a compromise like the old-school RPGs used to do. Just give us fully localized voices for the main companion intros, key story cutscenes, and combat barks.
Leaving the standard exploration dialogue to text-only with just a few atmospheric grunts makes it way less jarring than hearing an entirely different language than the subtitles you are trying to read. Plus, it would save Larian a ton on studio time while still giving the localized versions some much-needed flavor.

I couldn't disagree more.
Not only I got to the point where I actively dislike the "Just few barks and your first lines are voiced" you are suggesting here as a cheap-ass solution and I certainly wouldn't want to REGRESS to that point for games that can afford to be fully voiced (which is a lot of them, these days, since you can basically write off the expense as something that "repays itself" with the increase in sales that it brings), but I also disagree in general with your statement that listening voice acting in a foreign language is a problem in itself and "jarring".

I'm already into the habit of watching american/english movies in english, Hong Kong cinema in Chinese, Japanese stuff in Japanese and so on... And I wouldn't have it in any other way.
Hell, I even played Archolos in full Polish VO and that sounds basically as an alien language to me. Intonation goes a long way to convey meaning.

I generally prefer the originally-intended voice acting to watching/playing something dubbed in my native language (italian, for the record) in the 99% of cases.

P.S. And for context Italian is even one of the few lucky cases where the average quality of dubbing tends generally to be on the high end of the production value.

An overwhelming amount of the work of lip-syncing these days is done through automated software solutions rather than manual fine-tuning of the animations.

That said, given that not long ago even just the notion of having a CRPG fully voiced was already considered prohibitively expensive (and just recently we started to move toward a market where it's considered a necessary cost that more or less repays itself) any expectations of having it done in multiple languages is more than just a bit naive.

That doesnt automatically mean you're right though.

I find full voice acting highly overrated.

I absolutely miss nothing when playing BG1 and BG2 with "only" partial voice acting.

Plus I can read much faster than the voice acting can talk anyway.

And that doens't mean I have to care about what you think and even less that I have agree with it, on the other hand.

I used to be a grumpy young moron who disliked voice acting in RPGS as well, for the record.
That was in the early 2000s when the feature was too costly and (in my judgment at the time) it came with compromises too heavy on the quality or flexibility of a game.

We are WAY past that point now in the modern market.
Games like DOS 1 and 2, BG3, Deadfire, Disco Elysium and plenty more (including everything Owlcat will release from now on, apparently) are here to conclusively prove that point.
Games that at no point ever made me think "You know what? It's a shame that these are voiced, because they would benefit from having multiple times this amount of text to read".

If anything stuff like POE 1 and Kingmaker/Wrath of the Righteous made me realize the opposite:
"These are games that could definitely benefit from some restrain on being so gratuitously verbose. Voice acting would probably help a lot to rein it in".

ANYONE who's even barely literate can, so that's a pretty weak bragging point.

And as an argument it misses the mark by a landlside, almost to a comical degree, since the benefit of a good voice performance is bringing life and personality to a character, not how fast one could speedrun through a conversation with the help of weaponized autism.

P.S. I'll tell you this: No one remembers Vampire Bloodlines for how quick they could go through dialogues.