Voicing Baldur's Gate

nioniosbbbb

I dont really know where to put this discussion but i think this is the place. Alright... i believe that the voicing in baldur's gate is incomplete and by incomplete i mean that important npcs that we all love and like to hear their voices more have most of their dialogues half voiced after 2 lines you no longer hear the rest. My question is now this... isnt it unfair that the villains of the game like Irenicus and Bodhi get most attention? I can understand for one the inability to voice the main character but not the npcs which have a stable voice. Hith Ledger probably got voiced with the help of a computer with his after-death scenes cant something similar be done here? Because i know that many of the voice actors are surely unavailable right now. Just asking

ajwz

Fully voiced or even heavily voiced npc's in games is actually quite a controversial issue.
A lot of people dislike it - it make's modding or bugfixing dialogue lines a lot harder or makes or seem less professional, since they could be the only unvoiced lines a for a character or even in the entire game.
It also makes adding new content potentially more problematic - you can read the tweets made about tracking down the old voice actors for minsc and co to add new lines of dialogue to the enhanced edition as an example.

For this reason, I think the partial voiced bg and bg2 is probably the best way to go about doing things.
Some people love it though, and think a fully voiced game is more immersive and professional

I could write pages on this issue, I think it's an interesting meta discussion about game design.

Cheesebelly

As I see it, it was a matter of budget at that time. Look at the amount of dialogue the game contained! Now, I realize you are just pointing at the more important NPCs in the game and I agree I'd like to hear more from them, but I think that the developers really got the right lines to be voiced. Some can be still "acted" by us, at least partially

Although I would like to have many lines acted, I don't think that Overhaul can possess either the technology or the budget to make it happen.

On a side note : Warner's voice acting of Irenicus is awesome, I could easily listen to it as a good night song XD

Corvino

Hmm. Crowdsourcing is FOTM at the moment. If Overhaul needs additional sounds for "extra" characters then I'm sure we in the community could oblige.

Naturally, more involved characters will need a professional voice set. But for additional "Halfling villager 5", I'd consider us a resource.

Baldur

I disagree. The voice-acting isn't incomplete. It's ROLEPLAY-based. Here's a fun fact: One of the reasons games today require 10GB+ worth of disc space? Roughly 70-80% of that is sound files. Most of which is voice-acting. I'd rather have a game with only certain characters who MATTER having a few lines of voiced dialogue where it's relevant, or to give me an idea of what those characters sound like, and have enough room for a full-on, epic adventure, instead of the 'beat the game in a day, but wasn't the Hollywood voice-cast amazing?' bollocks that we have to put up with in gaming today.

Games like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and especially Planescape: Torment, were all made for one particular group of people: Roleplayers. Those of us who read BOOKS and love to picture a world in our minds, and come to our own conclusions rather than have it spelled out for us in black and white. That's why the game only gives you an 'example' of what the character should sound like or how (s)he speaks, and then you use your imagination to play it out the rest of the way. Like you do when you ROLEPLAY.

Majoca

well at least Xzar has a famous voice actor, they should easily get him back on board

nioniosbbbb

Cheesebelly said:

As I see it, it was a matter of budget at that time. Look at the amount of dialogue the game contained! Now, I realize you are just pointing at the more important NPCs in the game and I agree I'd like to hear more from them, but I think that the developers really got the right lines to be voiced. Some can be still "acted" by us, at least partially

Although I would like to have many lines acted, I don't think that Overhaul can possess either the technology or the budget to make it happen.

On a side note : Warner's voice acting of Irenicus is awesome, I could easily listen to it as a good night song XD

I am not suggesting a complete voicing because as you said it makes modidying the dialogues pretty hard but perhaps just the romance dialogues how about that? I shouldnt be that much right?

nioniosbbbb

Baldur said:

I disagree. The voice-acting isn't incomplete. It's ROLEPLAY-based. Here's a fun fact: One of the reasons games today require 10GB+ worth of disc space? Roughly 70-80% of that is sound files. Most of which is voice-acting. I'd rather have a game with only certain characters who MATTER having a few lines of voiced dialogue where it's relevant, or to give me an idea of what those characters sound like, and have enough room for a full-on, epic adventure, instead of the 'beat the game in a day, but wasn't the Hollywood voice-cast amazing?' bollocks that we have to put up with in gaming today.

As i said i only would like the joinable npcs to get that attention. This started from romance and yes i do agree it helps roleplaying but is too much for me to ask a romance that is fully voiced? I mean roleplay isnt so seriously affected by voicing, mass effect roleplaying is by its own really big and great. whatever i believe when it comes to things like romance you shouldnt be lazy or anything.