Voice acting in RPGs may be more trouble than it’s worth
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on “Western” role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. Jennifer Hale, Nolan North and Troy Baker, among others, have become video game celebrities for their voice acting – deservedly so, given how entertaining they can be as characters like Commander Shepard or Nathan Drake. Recorded speech has become a significant component of most all games, notably RPGs, having grown steadily since the shift to CD-ROM games in the mid-1990s. Yet their importance isn’t always apparent.
I, for one, didn’t realize their impact on games until just a year or two ago, when I commented on game designer Brenda Brathwaite’s blog about how an RPG could be done cheaper and faster without many modern components, which included recorded speech. Brathwaite responded specifically to the voice acting component, saying that once her company started making RPGs with voice acting, they discovered that their writing and editing process had to be completed well in advance of what they were used to, with the actor’s recording of his or her lines “baking” the narrative section in place much earlier than normal.
“Great ideas were left sitting on the bench because the time to record them (or render graphics) wasn’t available,” she said in her reply.Continue reading Voice acting in RPGs may be more trouble than it’s worthVoice acting in RPGs may be more trouble than it’s worth originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 06 Jul 2012 19:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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