@behardy24 said:
I also imagine it's a problem with space as well. New Vegas is packed in with a ton of content and though we on the PC could probably afford to download more content to the vanilla version, consoles don't have that full leisure with discs (now it seems to be getting there with next-gen system and constant updates) and they still have to think about that market since the profits there are so huge. Also, there already is a ton of dialogue recorded for that game and with a famous cast doing most of the big characters, I imagine writing and recording more would drive up the cost immensely. And like you said, the more complex the quest, the harder it is to record good fitting dialogue for that character.
Didn't know you were developer. Cool to know. Though I don't play MMOs, I salute for your work in giving joy to thousands out there. :)
Thanks! Like most game developers, I just love games and want to contribute to everyone's fun & the art form.
That's a great point about voice recording. It can take up a lot of space on a console, yes, but there are a lot of other practical development issues as well.
Voice actors and voice recording studios usually charge by the hour, with a minimum number of hours. The back end work of integrating recorded audio into the game is also most efficient if all done at once, rather than in drips and pieces. That's why most developers want to get all the voice recording done in a few big batches. Before a batch of voice recording starts, there's a big push to make sure all the written dialogue is as accurate and complete as possible. But by definition, the dialogue isn't accurate or complete until the game is nearly done. That often leads to recorded dialogue that doesn't match what the final quest NPC is saying. And as you can imagine, the more complex the quests are, the more likely a mismatch.
Buy it's still essential in many games (not all) to start plugging in the voice before the quest development is complete. There are lots of practical reasons - mostly it boils down to not 100% knowing that everything will work until you've plugged it in and playtested it, and you don't want to only start doing that when you've locked down and stopped making changes.
The really high-budget games will do multiple pickup recording sessions at the end of a development cycle to make all the voice perfect - we're talking Call of Duty budget games. Most studios do 2-4, with only one recording session at the end of development. And voice actors are rotated for each recording session, so it's unlikely you can re-record a previous actor's line.
For this reason, a lot of writers and game designers end up creating a lot of quest NPCs that don't have recorded voice. I personally think that hearing the emotion in a real person's voice is essential to pulling in a player. It's hard to care about a character when you're just reading text. I'm really glad that Fallout and New Vegas voiced as many characters as they did.
The Fallout games also have a huge number of characters, which would be a problem for most studios. I'm not entirely sure, but I'd guess they used non-Screen Actor's Guild actors. If a development studio has ties with any movie studio (e.g. WB Games, Lucasarts) then they're obligated to only use SAG actors. There's a SAG rule that basically says that a voice actor can only perform up to 3 characters in a contract, even if a character only has 1 voiceline. The moment you ask them to do 4 characters, you need to pay for a second recording session. To give context, I've been in 2 hour recording sessions where a good actor can record 200 voicelines.
Wow, I just realized a wrote a lot. I don't usually get to talk about this stuff, so I blathered on ;)
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