Voice Acting in RPGs May Be More Trouble Than It’s Worth

Inspired by a comment made by veteran Wizardry designer Brenda Brathwaite, Rowan Kaisen has penned a Chris Avellone quotes-laden article on the opportunity of having full voice acting in role-playing titles for his latest Joystiq weekly column. In truth, he mostly seems to echo Avellone’s opinions, who is hardly enthusiastic about having to work on fully voice-acted, cinematic titles:

On the personal level, Avellone says, “Often, conversations where the player is voice-acted detracts from my experience (I want to imagine what my character sounds like, not what a voice actor puts in my mouth).” Now, I don’t entirely share this belief, although I do dislike it when a game, especially a role-playing game, makes the character who is supposed to represent “me” sound ridiculous (see the infamous Final Fantasy X scene above for the most notorious, if over-hated, example).

However, I do find that voice acting often disrupts the pacing of the games to their detriment. I tend to read much faster than people speak, especially people trying to enunciate clearly for a recorded story. The slower pacing can be grating, especially if the writing and the voice acting aren’t done well.

That’s one of Avellone’s main points as well: “RPG cinematic conversations are incredibly labor-intensive and something that only a few studios excel at.” He cites BioWare specifically, saying that they succeed where so many others fail. “BioWare is good at cinematic dialogue because they have the resources, skilled personnel (and the resources to hire specialized personnel as well), and a pipeline built and established from iterations of a conversation system across several similar titles, which is a damn smart way to do things.”

In fact, Avellone isn’t even sure that the rewards are worth the effort and hassle: “I am questioning whether developers should ever try to that, as I don’t feel there’s any value in playing catch-up to someone who’s already got it down unless you’re adding some new mechanic to the experience.” This seems a little extreme to me The Witcher’s use of voice acting struck me as surprisingly effective but I’m likewise unsure if the rewards match the hassle.