Please for the love of all things good, add voice acting to your next RPG game. At least pay one voice actor to narrate all the text if you can't afford voice actors. The least you can do is start a kick starter for a voice actors for your next game. I repeat, start a kickstarter for your next RPG game called, "give us money for voice actors" and let us donate to it.

I don't want to play another one of your games and have to read a god damn book.

Voice acting is really, really expensive. Adding voiced acting to everything inevitably means that quests will have to be simplified, choices removed and a general overall decrease in quality for the game.

I will say that the limited voice-acting budget for the next game should be spent on the main plot scenes and definitely not on "Halibut, Sheep's Cheese, Tomatoes..."

They should make a "recording mode" that you can turn on. When you speak to an NPC, you can turn on "record mode" and speak out the npc's words. Then it will save these voice files and you can share it with the community.

There you go problem solved.

If Larian can't afford voice actors, at least put a built in record feature that lets players record the voice acting themselves then just upload it and share it with other players.

There are about ten different, clever ways to fix the issue of "no voice acting", but Larian doesn't have the innovation to figure out such a simple god damn problem. You know why? Because they're stuck in the past.

No. The entire voice-acting budget should be spent on the cheese merchant. And a comedian to make up more cheese-related puns.

Possibly.

Oh alright, I kinda like voiced dialogue but I think it'd be quite frustrating if absolutely everything was voiced. Maybe it's just me being OCD-ish about listening to the dialogue even though I've already read it in less than half the time.

Yes, Larian should spend a bunch of time and effort to let people add and integrate very poor-quality voice acting into their game. That sure seems worthwhile.

As has been said, add voice acting and you ultimately end up with the dreaded dialogue wheel and less choices.

There are many mods for Skyrim that have custom voiced npc's by the fans. I'd rather have them do the voice acting than have to read all that frickin text.

Imagine being able to immediately record voice files for that "Shell" on the seashore, then being able to share that voice pack with everyone. Voice Acting problem solved.

Skyrim's a totally different puppy. Plot almost nonexistent, sidequests, fetch and fetch again.

I'd rather read "frickin" text than have another watered down game.

It can go both ways really. Yes, if you have a tight development budget and pop a large percent into professional voice acting, the story and dialog can take a good hit, but I have played games with no voice acting and the amount of text was extreme.

For example, although I really enjoyed a game called Inquisitor (not the Dragon Age game mind you) each NPC dialog tree was literally a chapter in a book, no joke.

Personally, I think the way it was done in D:OS was just fine, it gave the towns some additional atmosphere and is on par with how voice and dialog has been done on games like D:OS in the past (and future, Tides and Pillars will have the same partial voice)

But I suppose, in the end, no one has as many friends as the man with many cheeses.

Well, can you at least read the game manual?...lol...;) I hope so, for your sake. Judging by your attitude expressed when having to read more than a sound byte or two, I'd imagine your library card (if you have one) doesn't get a lot of use...do you know *how* to read? (You posted so I'll assume you do and that you didn't dictate for someone else to post for you...:D)

Anyway, I think that would be a terrible mistake for any game...I like enough spoken words to flesh out the characters and add atmosphere to the game, but no more than that. It's because I read much faster than a narrator recites, so I don't have to sit through interminable, boring minutes and listen to someone slowly enunciate & read text I've already absorbed. If you aren't handicapped in some fashion--or maybe just need glasses to correct your vision--or maybe you need to use larger fonts for the game resolution you choose--then I'd suggest that you bone up on your reading skills because life can be a real drag without them. (The game strikes a great balance between voice & acting & reading, imo.)

There are a lot of audible clues in the game that come through subtle use of sound effects--that you cannot hear if some faceless voice is droning on in your ear, jabbering through text you've already read, etc. I also greatly enjoy the environment sounds (which I think are very well done.) I like listening to them and hearing them.

But for handicapped people who can't read but who can otherwise see the screen and correctly interpret what they see there, you've got a point. If there's some way an option that turns on the Windows narrator for game text could be added to the game, that might be something affordable and convenient for the developers. True, the incessant drone of the narrator voice might ruin the game in the eyes of people who can read, but if a person can't read it might make all of the difference, but I don't think overall it would sound much worse than a seasoned voice actor droning on in my ear...;) I wanted to add that I've heard voice acting in games that is so bad the Windows narrator sounds great by comparison...;)

That's an interesting idea of letting players seamlessly be able to record voice overs for text they read, and let people quickly rank the best voice overs for particular dialogs on the workshop or somewhere. Unfortunately, 99% of people don't have the equipment or the voice skills to deliver high quality voice overs, so it'd probably be a flop for the most part. Voice overs are really hard, and it's easy to sound completely ridiculous or out of role or fail to enunciate correctly. Imagine having to curate all the garbage people record on their laptop mics. You'd probably get a handful of decent amateur voice actors and that's it, but maybe those handful of people could really flesh the game out.

Quality voice acting is nice, but good writing with lots of choices is better. And terrible voice acting is worse than having none at all. You're playing a cRPG, so expect to read. There really isn't even that much writing in D:OS.

I'm inclined to agree with that. As both a fairly prolific user of player-made mods elsewhere and a creator of the same myself, voice acting is always the weak link as it's probably the hardest part to do well. It's a very specific talent, and probably one of the rarest, and then there's the aspect of actually recording it properly: a poor recording complete with background noise sounds awful.

I'm probably coming across as sounding overly negative, but voice acting is just so hard to actually get right and can absolutely ruin a mod, and by extension the game it belongs to. Much better to have a dialogue system that supports both voice and text as we have at the moment, I think.

Divine Divinity & Divinity II DKS both have nice voice acting parts !
Well done and just for some memorable moments gaming !

I still love to hear Zixzax speaking in DD or DKS, I still love the movie parts in DD, especially when the Dragon Rider comes to kill you walking in the woods from Aleroth to the Farmlands !
Each, Zandalor & the Dragon Rider have a great voice and is very well spoken .

Also DKS have memorable movie parts with fantastic voice acting, but not always that great ...
Creating "Memorable Moments" with voice acting asks for just "here & there" ... in DKS ... too much moments hearing voices, so not memorable anymore, sorry ... .

To be honest : I miss that a little bit in D:OS, especially because I miss the "funny spoken words" like in DD or DKS, BUT ...
like said before : the Quality of a game is more important than trying to give every NPC a voice ... (quantity)

NO

You want voice acting/actorship/drama, go to the Bioware forums. You'd love it there!
You want someone to help you overcome the difficulties of your ADHD? Your Asperger perhaps? Almost touching, but..almost;

I am just fine watching them spend the money on aspects of actual import. Like gameplay. Of the type i just don't quite get to enjoy anymore.
Because 'consumers' like you request that the budget be wasted on fluff. Each and every god damn time;

And i am being 101% honest in stating this is me putting it kindly

I agree with this. Sure, if you get Patrick Stewart and half a dozen other equally talented thespians to act out your totally brilliant script that took you five years to perfect, voice acting is good. But half baked it can be crigeworthy, your own imagination works better.

The other big issue is expense and QA constraints. Once you've cut the dialogs it's really hard and prohibitively expensive to edit them to fix bugs, so you have to design the game to minimise possible bugs (usually by simplifying the plot lines so they can't go wrong) and in general vast chunks of the budget get sunk in doing the voice acting production.

Which means less game content and simpler game content, pure and simple. DoS is long, involved and (relatively) difficult because without voice acting it *could* be long, involved and difficult. Note that the length of DoS is not achieved by spamming copy/paste meaningless boring kill this/fetch that side quests into a relatively short story line (like many other games I could mention) but with real content. That it is a text based game is one of the main reasons they could do that.

Voice acting? No thanks! Just give something like Dos, please, and I'll be very happy.

I'm sorry to say this guys, but I'm not interested in listening to fan-recorded voice acting. You wouldn't be interested in hearing my voice-overs either, believe me. If there's a professional staff to create them, awesome. If no, then I know how to read.

Oh I know you want a good laugh, come on now, can't fool us.

I'm reminded of the voice acting on Ultima VI. Although I never had the "pleasure" of playing that version myself, I did see a lets play of it on You Tube and I have to say A+ top notch stuff right there!

Haha Yeah, those are exactly the ones I'd like to avoid.

The problem is, bad voice acting can definitely kill a game for me. A wall of text cannot, even though it's less immersive than listening to good actors.

Yes, it's obviously such a problem that's lead to horrible sales....oh, wait.

What I meant was that obviously no one wants such an old-school RPG anymore....oh, wait.



Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the ADD generation.

I suppose someone has to mention Two Worlds at this point, and I also suppose that person may as well be me.

Actually, the awfulness of the voice acting is often overstated, and I'd say it's in "so bad it's good" territory, as opposed to a lot of amateur voice acting which is simply very bad (I don't want to dis' amateur voice acting altogether, though: there's some amazing talent out there which can match the professionals. But it is quite rare.)

It's a pity that TW is mostly (in)famous for its novelty voice acting as it's actually a really nice game. And better than its successor, IMHO.

I keep meaning to play Two Worlds one of these days, but I always get started and then something in RL distracts me and I forget about it for 6 months to a year. By the time I get back to it, I decide to start over again from scratch, and the cycle repeats, heh.

Forsooth! I think thee correct!

Yea, it was actually a good touch, even as campy as the VA of the main char was it was fun and added a little "we ain't in Kansas no more" atmosphere. However the monotone whispering of no flair of the main char in TW II got on my nerves quick.

Games like Div:II, TW (The Witcher or two Worlds), DA, ES, etc. seem to translate better with full voice acting. D:OS, BG, Torment etc. seem to work better with the partial VA.

Haven't quite pinpointed why it seems that way, maybe cause of the mechanics of said game.

Skyrim seemed to have a good ratio of text being spoken (as far as the length of lines spoken), yes you could read faster than what was being spoken, but I usually just ignored the text and listened.

Now if a story rich NPC heavy narrative driven game was fully VA'd you would be sitting there for quite some time as the NPC would essentially be reading you a bedtime story.

Voice-acting is
1) Restrictive (no changing errors or adding additional content after the recording)
2) Expensive
3) Generally worse than imagination

I was rather sad D:OS got Voice-acting, and as many have stated it rarely added anything to the gameworld. I wish they used that money for other purposes, and I have the same mindset for any future games.

Voice acting while nice, is low on my list of things I care about especially if it constricts the game, much rather have a longer higher content game than voices. I love to read and dont mind large amounts of text.

Jito463...LOL roger that man, ADD generation ruining good intelligent gameplay, those types would never play a Baldurs Gate or Icewind Dale or Fallout...who needs em, let em play angrybirds, candycrunch and FPS shooters, anything so long as they dont ruin intelligent games.

I personally prefer the past so happy to be stuck in it with Larian. Keep up the great work Larian and I will kepp buying your games.

Er, speaking as someone who's actually diagnosed with ADD, can we not keep implying that I'm ruining "intelligent gaming"? :p Actually, I find long sequences of voiced dialogue harder to concentrate on than text.

D:OS has a nice balance of text and voiced lines for me personally, but I consider it to be a matter of personal taste more than anything else.

sorry Vometia, no offense to you intended, please pardon my indiscretion.

Haha, no worries, I was just having a grumpy day! I think it was due to me being awake.

LOL...completely understandable, I always expect the worst, I am rarely disapointed.