Another excellent interview has surfaced at Tapped-Repeatadly. This interview is with lead writer Bobby Stein during and extensively covers the voice acting process. Have a read!
What I personally found interesting is this:
Quote:
Tap: Do you consider using voice actors more restrictive creatively in comparison to written text? Especially considering the writing talent within ArenaNet�
Bobby: It�s restrictive in a positive sense. If you give writers a blank page, they�re inclined to fill it with a lot of potentially unnecessary information. By putting some guidelines into place about where and when voice can and should be used, and the average length of a line, it forces us to be more deliberate in context. If you watch a film or television show with closed captioning, you see a distinct difference in how dialogue is delivered compared to a game that relies heavily on text. Lines are shorter and more impactful, and characters often build off a previous statement rather than reiterate it.
The reason I find this interesting is that there seems to be a slight difference in philosophy of VO between GW2 and SW:TOR. My initial impressions are that the "cut-scene dialogues" are much longer in SW:TOR than GW2. Is this difference in philosophy born out of different budget requirements? Which philosophy will work out better in real game-play? I have no answers to these questions, but I find them very intriguing.
Source: http://tap-repeatedly.com/2011/05/07...s-bobby-stein/|||Quote:
The reason I find this interesting is that there seems to be a slight difference in philosophy of VO between GW2 and SW:TOR. My initial impressions are that the "cut-scene dialogues" are much longer in SW:TOR than GW2. Is this difference in philosophy born out of different budget requirements? Which philosophy will work out better in real game-play? I have no answers to these questions, but I find them very intriguing.
Budget requirements seems a plausible assumption. Lucas could finance "The Wookie Diaries" (as a television series you watch in-game somewhere (new episode each week)) if he wanted to for the hell of it.
Something he seems crazy enough to do nowadays even.|||I think fans talking about what everything could mean is more important than what is actually meant.
Yes it saves on budgets but it also saves us from hearing the same thing repeated 5 times because some idiots are too used to telly telling then how to think.
All in all I'm glad that big firms are taking a more adult stance as to how video games are received, or at least perceived.
-Art|||I've always felt that the length of cut scenes, dialog, and even text all depends on how important the information is, and is better if it doesn't reiterate something that the person already knows, or has already heard in the same show, book, or game. Reiterating = filler, and is in bad form. As long as the information is new though, it can be good even if it lasts for hours... but that brings me to the next issue. Even if it's good, entertaining, and informative... doesn't mean people are going to listen to it all if it's too long.
People play video games to play them, not watch them (or at least I do, and many people I know do as well). There gets to be a point where the person just wants to hit the skip button. There is a reason why when pugging in gw, groups basically agree to hit the skip button as soon as it pops up. Give them a book with the same information and most will read it with no complaint.
I do not feel like putting story into a video game is necessarily going to make people skip that information, but it's more likely than when it's in book/movie form. This is why I think that keeping the information short and to the point is a good idea, and why I think star wars is on the wrong track. I tried watching one of their cut-scenes and frankly, I got bored. Same as I did with kotor and kotor 2.
Yes there are fanboys, and ToR will do well because of them. They may even do very well if there are skip buttons on the cut-scenes and if the gameplay is good. I just think that long cut-scenes are a bad style as it bores the player, and it becomes easier to fall into the trap of restating the same information.
Tldr: "Tld read/watch" in video games are bad, and will cause people to skip content if possible, or quit playing if it is not. Even if the content is good, which is quite possible.|||Quote:
Tap: Have you personally had an active role in auditoning and hiring actors and if there was an audition process, who determined their quality and how was this measured? The quality of a persons acting is obviously very subjective…
Bobby: Yes, absolutely. I, along with Jeff, Ree, Eric, Colin, and Ben, reviewed casting submissions for every voice role in the game. As you can imagine, we’ve had a lot of actor interest so I wouldn’t be surprised if we listened to nearly a thousand different actors over the past few years. We don’t always agree on a particular actor, and we’ve had to recast certain roles when the voice talent didn’t quite work for a particular character. Thankfully, we have the time and resources to fix those mistakes throughout production. Just because you’ve heard a particular actor in a convention demo does not mean that person will be delivering those lines in the final shipped game.
This is perhaps the most important part in the article to me because; as we all remember one of the biggest concerns back at gamescom was how almost everything was great, except certain voice acting and animation for said voice acting. There was a lot of discussion whether or not this was something Arenanet could actually fix considering they'd had to bring in new voice actors, but as they confirm in this article they can do that I'm even more excited and hopeful that they will bring it up to the same level of quality as the rest of the game!|||I'm ashamed to admit it, but up to this point, I just assumed the Jeff Grubb being mentioned was not the D&D "old timer" (not sure how I would think that name was common enough for 2 writters / creators in this genre to have it...*shrug*).
I looked up his wikipedia profile and if he ever does a biography, it has to be named, "Roll these...we need a Cleric".
Curse of the Azure Bonds was always one of my CRPGs....damn I'm old....
Oh...great interview, thanks for posting the link.
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