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f13.net  |  f13.net General Forums  |  The Gaming Graveyard  |  Game Design/Development  |  Topic: Are celebrity voice-overs important? 0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
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Author Topic: Are celebrity voice-overs important?  (Read 13310 times)
Koyasha
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Reply #35 on: July 07, 2005, 12:07:20 PM

No.

That's to answer the question in the topic.  Usually, I don't even have the patience to listen to the voices.  Maybe once.  If they're not too annoying or long.  After that...well, I read way faster than most people, and most people if they care to put half a thought into it read faster than the voice actor.  If the voice acting is good, I'll listen to it once.  Maybe a few times if it's really good.  There are very few people who's voices I would consider 'awesome' enough to actually *matter.*  James Earl Jones as mentoned earlier would count.  But all things considered, you could slap a celebrity list as big as Mars Attacks' cast on a game box, and slap 'Absolutely no voice acting whatsoever!' on the box, and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference to me one way or another.  By the time the rest of the game immersion gets to the point of whether or not I care whether I can listen to the speech or not, you probably won't even need voice actors; computers will be synthesizing the voices perfectly by then.

As for the union...  Same as most all unions now a days.  Pure greed.  They're already getting paid a lot, and for a job that's not crucial to the success of the game.  Unions for the most part are as outdated as full plate armor.  We have laws to enact the basic protections unions were formed to combat now.  Organizations spanning multiple companies are ludicrous.  If one company is treating its employees unfairly, it is logical for them to band together, but no 'entire industry' treats its employees unfairly.  Organizing all actors together just swings things too far in the other direction, giving the union way too much unfair power over the employers, while not even being that beneificial for the individual people in the union.  Same applies to any industry with a union (with possible exceptions I'm not personally aware of).

-Do you honestly think that we believe ourselves evil? My friend, we seek only good. It's just that our definitions don't quite match.-
Ailanreanter, Arcanaloth
Margalis
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Reply #36 on: July 08, 2005, 01:18:57 AM

Most voice actors in games do seem low compared to in cartoons say.

I think your attitude is true of most people. Distinctive sounds in games get repetitive and annoying quickly. It's one reason the music in games rarely have vocals, repetitive vocals get annoying fast.

Personally I could care less about voice acting, you hear it once, it sucks, then you try to find the option to turn it off. Although I will say the voice acting in GTA wasn't bad and did sort of add to the game I guess. (I don't like GTA but the voice acting in Vice City seemed ok)

Having every NPC voice stuff seems insane to me. It's one thing to have voices in the cutscenes. I don't really see the need for an NPC to say "Please protect from the evil trolls" in a real voice.
----

Off on a tangent a bit, it would be great to read a post-mortem on EQ2 sometime. It seems like the entire production side of the game (asset production - sound, graphics, etc) was terrible and it wasn't just executed terribly but was horribly conceived. I wonder how the heck that happened? You figure EQ2 of all things could afford to get some proven experts with great track-records. Although I do know that the guy who did a lot of the enemy modelling left to do Vanguard. (Milo Cooper, who was an arrogant prick but good at his job)

vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
schild
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Reply #37 on: July 08, 2005, 01:41:20 AM

Short of the character design - as in the overarching theme of art in the game - I thought the production value was the strongest point of EQ2. Everything was of the highest quality I've seen in an MMOG, it just happened to be ugly. The lead artist or whoever said "this looks good" should be fired and blacklisted by the industry for blowing that much money on high quality bad art. Unfortunately, the game had no style and was one-upped completely by a Korean studio when they started localizing the game over there. Really, it's biggest fault was simply being EQ2. There were a number of tracks on the soundtrack that I enjoyed immensely as well as a wealth of great voice acting. Given that it's really the only voice acting that's been in an MMOG, I think they did a fine job of pioneering the field.

I'd rather see a post-mortem on why the hell the designers in the EQ2 beta forums only listened to the "yes"-men and ignored the people burnt by the repetitive gameplay. Or how anyone on the development team ever found the game fun during internal testing. That should be a goddamn requirement. If there's even a single person on a dev team that doesn't think the game they're making is fun, depending on their position, they WILL bring down the final quality of the game a couple notches. Bonus points if it's purposeful sabotage because they can't believe a game that bad is being made.

That said, voice acting Good. Famous people voice acting bad (I don't like the english dubbed versions of Miyazaki's films for that very reason). Though, I'll admit, Howl's Moving Castle - Ghibli Studio's latest movie - has me torn. I love me some Takuya Kimura, but Christian Bale is doing the American voice. Kimura's delivery, which I'm pretty sure 99.9999% of the people here and 99.9999999repeating% people in America have never heard, is nearly perfect. Bale, unfortunately, recently played Batman. I don't think I'll be able to get past that.
HaemishM
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Reply #38 on: July 08, 2005, 09:44:55 AM

While the acting, and the actual technical processes of EQ2's sound design was excellent, I have to say the voiceovers for all the questing and NPC's was easily one of the most irritating aspects of the game for me. Because after about 7 levels, I just started reading the text and not listening to the voice. It took too much time, when what I wanted to do was play. Everytime I heard it, I just lamented at all the money they must have spent on voice acting that could have gone into designing a decent game that was fun to play.

Margalis
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Reply #39 on: July 08, 2005, 12:55:19 PM

I consider something that has high production value but is ugly to be poorly produced. That's what I mean by the production side of the game being screwed.

vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
Kail
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Reply #40 on: July 08, 2005, 08:33:59 PM

No.

That's to answer the question in the topic.

Well, I think it depends on what you mean by "important".  Important to the overall quality of the game, not really much, I think.  Important to the financial success of the game, I think you could argue that they do.  Games based off other properties (Movies, TV shows, etc.) especially, I think, get a fair amount of credibility from having the same guy play Gandalf or Obi-Wan or whatever.  And I don't think I've seen a single review of "Destroy all Humans" that fails to mention that the voice actor from Invader Zim is in there.  Obviously, it's not a make-or-break kind of thing, like "should the game have good graphics, yes/no" , but it probably does factor in to some people's purchasing decisions.
HaemishM
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Reply #41 on: July 11, 2005, 12:58:29 PM

Good voice acting can enhance the quality of the game, bad acting can ruin it. Aim for not sucking and anything better is just gravy.

Boutney
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Reply #42 on: September 01, 2005, 07:41:46 PM

Voice acting can make or brake a game.  A game's story is what makes me want to continue playing it.  I've completed games with sub-par controls just because I was interested in the story (Jade Empire - I'm looking your way) but I've never finished a game once I thought the story sucked.  The story is certainly seperate from the voice acting, but bad voice acting can completely distract from the story (Armies of Exigo aka WC2 - some of the worst voice acting I've heard)  I suppose the expectation is that celebreties would = good voice acting, which for the most part may be true.  But, I think that sometimes celebretie voices can be distracting.  The Final Fantasy movie is an example of this.  Every time the Baldwin guy had a line, I couldn't see it as the charater talking, I could only imagine whathisnuts Baldwin talking.  He's a celebrity, but I don't think he really lent much depth to the character.  In the Usual Suspects, he's ok.  In Final Fantasy, he's shite.  Now there are some great celebrity voice overs - Ray Liota in Vice City is an example of this.  Celebrity voices may be a boost to the marketing value of a game, but celebrity or not, if it ain't good, it ain't good.
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