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Taking a cue from Brenda Brathwaite's and Chris Avellone's thoughts on voice acting, Joystiq's Rowan Kaiser has penned a rather interesting piece on voice acting in role-playing games. Aside from a few exceptions he seems convinced that the obsession with full voice-acting hasn't been beneficial to the genre, and I find it difficult to disagree with him and Avellone:<blockquote>Avellone described three main issues: first, that it disrupts his design process; second, his personal preference in terms of role-playing; and third, that their hard work that may not bear fruit.
In the first case, he says: "...on the resource end, the flexibility for fixing and editing voice-acted speech often interferes with the later stages of production as well – working on Alpha Protocol vs. Fallout 2, for example, were much different experiences, and I enjoyed F2 more." This aligns him with Braithwaite's experiences.
When I asked him if he had any particular example, he couldn't pick just one, saying, "My best example of voice inflexibility is just about any game I've worked on that was fully VO'd. Whether Alpha Protocol or [Knights of the Old Republic 2], the recording and localization must be done much earlier than the end product. If a quest is edited, changed, a character dropped, a mission removed, an error found, then you spend a lot of time editing lines and trying to work with the story cohesion."
Having played Knights of the Old Republic 2, a game with tremendous potential but one which was clearly hampered by lack of development time, I could sympathize. Huge swaths of that game were removed, rendering the original end of the game an incoherent mess. Modders have patched in parts that were removed, but they lack much of the polish of the original game. The amount of time spent fixing the issues of recorded dialogue must have played a part in the lack of time available to meet the publisher's release date demands.
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In the first case, he says: "...on the resource end, the flexibility for fixing and editing voice-acted speech often interferes with the later stages of production as well – working on Alpha Protocol vs. Fallout 2, for example, were much different experiences, and I enjoyed F2 more." This aligns him with Braithwaite's experiences.
When I asked him if he had any particular example, he couldn't pick just one, saying, "My best example of voice inflexibility is just about any game I've worked on that was fully VO'd. Whether Alpha Protocol or [Knights of the Old Republic 2], the recording and localization must be done much earlier than the end product. If a quest is edited, changed, a character dropped, a mission removed, an error found, then you spend a lot of time editing lines and trying to work with the story cohesion."
Having played Knights of the Old Republic 2, a game with tremendous potential but one which was clearly hampered by lack of development time, I could sympathize. Huge swaths of that game were removed, rendering the original end of the game an incoherent mess. Modders have patched in parts that were removed, but they lack much of the polish of the original game. The amount of time spent fixing the issues of recorded dialogue must have played a part in the lack of time available to meet the publisher's release date demands.
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