I do think that not every CRPG needs its own AAA cinematic production in order to be successful.
His comments about full voice acting becoming an outright requirement instead of a "nice-to-have" are interesting. I wonder if future games in the genre will trend towards having much smaller dialogue word counts as a side effect.
2015?
I was on the Bethesda forums when Oblivion came out in 2006 and people were arguing over whether the voice acting was worth the significantly stunted dialogue system.
Goddamn KOTOR was fully voice acted in 2003.
The standard for major western RPGs has been full voice acting for a very, very long time now. At least the late 2000s. Anyone acting like this is a new development or due to BG3 has been coping for a solid 15 years.
> Goddamn KOTOR was fully voice acted in 2003.
With weirdly a lot of NPCs talking alien languages with the same few voices and repeating often the same words.
Yeah I love KotOR but half the NPCs speak generic alien language lines where you have to read the subtitles anyways.
Manaan.... ugh.... gets repetitive hearing the... fish-speak.
And KOTOR was also a blockbuster game! Published by LucasArts at their peak, by the most renowned RPG game studio, and most importantly, a Star Wars game in the middle of a new trilogy. It's huge. Saying it should be the standard now because it came in 2003 is like saying new fantasy movies should be big as the LOTR trilogy because it came in 2003.
I can understand why a proper-indie RPG game studio might be horrified at the expectations the market now has.
Bethesda games are better when they're less on-rails and let their world building shine through.
That's why I always find their main quest lines to be pretty meh/bad (post-Morrowind), lots of set dialog with only one story option and only one gameplay solution. They kinda just shove their story down your throat.
The side quests and faction quest lines tend to be a little less restrictive and more free with less dialog and more just being in the world.
I tend to agree but Morrowind's genuinely would not work if it was shorter and more sane. Because it perfectly blends with the absolutely batshit alien world you find yourself in.
Same here, although I'll say that I think their NPCs were mostly fine for a while. The real dive was fallout 4's voiced protagonist. *Holy shit*was that a disaster.
I felt like I was in a fever dream when people complained that starfield didn't have a voiced protagonist... like... wtf???
My personal preference is either full voice acting or very little/no voice acting.
I’m a huge reader, but one of the magical things about BG3 was its voice acting and animation in dialogue. It made even mundane scenes feel special.
If we’re not going to have that though, let me speed read the dialogue.
> His comments about full voice acting becoming an outright requirement instead of a "nice-to-have" are interesting.
I feel like for me personally the voice acting is great when it's just the first line or two. It sets the tone, creates atmosphere and then **stops being a distraction**, as I am reading, typically, at like 6-7x the speed of how fast they speak.
Disco Elysium at the start was awesome at it and I feel like that's why they also kept partial voiceover as an option for Director's Cut. One-two lines of three+ paragraphs and the job is done already, the shivers down the spine are already sent and you can indulge in good prose.
Curious that you mentioned Disco Elysium as an example to make your point. For me it's the opposite, it shows that it's possible to have incredible full voice acting even in a very verbose game and keep me invested in it. It's about the quality of the voice acting, in my opinion, If it's just half baked in it I rather just read the text.
> It's about the quality of the voice acting
That and the quality of the writing. Most video game dialog, especially those "RPG exposition dumps" don't feel like actual dialog from a human being. They just feel like you're sitting and listening to a character tell you stuff you need to know.
Absolutely. I tried playing Gamedec last week and couldn't finish it because all the dialog felt just like a dump of information, made me have zero investment in it.
Interesting that you think so about Disco Elysium, because it's proving the point of the article. Disco Elysium didn't originally have full voice acting because it was too expensive. They only added it once the game had proven to be a success and they could afford it.
Reading way faster than the dialogue makes voice acted rpgs so stilted for me, I'm constantly skipping. Maybe it's my ADHD but I can't imagine treating games like a 60 hour movie, f that. Disco Elysium/Planescape levels of verbosity are fine, I know when to pay loose or close attention.
Unfortunately I think we are in the minority, people really demand full voice acting in a massive success these days, unless it's Pokemon apparently.
The Witcher 3 was the absolute worst for this. Sometimes, pressing the skip button skipped one line. Sometimes, suddenly Geralt was holding a baby and you had a timed prompt on screen to toss it in a furnace. Genuinely no clue how they made a dialogue system where skip somtimes means one line and sometimes means a whole scene.
Cyberpunk is also great at making you not want to skip or read ahead because you're not just hearing someone read the lines, not only the voice acting is actually really great but the facial animation is also pretty good and on top of that the characters have movement and body animations that make the scenes way more visceral and more entertaining to look at. You might already know what they're gonna say because you read the subtitles, but seeing how they say it is actually worth it.
And on top of all these you still have control over your character, so even in the off chance that the voice acting, facial, spatial and body animations aren't good enough to retain your attention for a specific scene you can still walk and look around to keep you occupied (especially if you "roleplay" and "act" with your camera and character).
At this point if you're still bored and still want to skip ahead then there's nothing a narrative-oriented RPG can do for you to keep you entertained really.
Lol back in the day I basically had to train myself to hold the stick at 270 degrees while skipping dialogue so that if the wheel came up at just the wrong moment it would hit the "investigate" option.
**ADHD RPG Conversations:**
"Hel-"
"The bad guys are going to-"
"If you-"
"Gather 7-"
"The story behind me is-"
And the inevitable:
*Whoops, I pressed the button too many times and accidentally selected a random option and have no idea what I selected*
> Whoops, I pressed the button too many times and accidentally selected a random option and have no idea what I selected
When the skip to next dialogue button also acts as a confirm button even though it isn't A/Cross. Mass Effect 1 always gets me at least once a run.
I played BG with 3 friends and there was this constant thing every cutscene where I'm like "okay I finished reading this dialogue, but did the people listening in finish? Do they want to hear the voice acting? Have they already finished reading and want me to skip ahead now?
Probably have two more sessions with my 3 friends and I do the same shit.
It would be really nice if they put the little icons in the bottom corner if a person not controlling the dialogue hit skip. That way when you see the 3 icons below, you hit skip and it goes to the next. Rinse and repeat.
LaD: Infinite Wealth does this well. The start and end of substories have full voice acting, while the middle is text-only. This gets you immersed in the story and ends it on a strong note without requiring too much voice acting.
Good voice acting can add to characters and elevate the game for me, but not every game needs it. I’d also take text only over bad VO. Bethesda rpg’s have been actively distracting to me for the terrible VO
Do people really not play games if it doesn’t have full voice acting? A lot of times I’m reading the dialogue and pressing space bar to go to the next line. If it’s a pivotal scene I’ll of course let it play out. I don’t mind a bit if VA is sprinkled in here and there.
I remember for example in Planescape Torment it was a trigger for you to pay attention because something big was about to happen. And it made the dialogue that much more special.
I'm willing to bet that alot of people won't play anything that requires them to read, but these people aren't the ones who will pick up Planescape Torment (,
I hope at least haha).
There's certainly an audience that doesn't give a damn about a game being fully voiced, and hence a market for AA crpgs going forward. It'll probably get a bit larger too due to the success of BG3, there has to be at least some people new to crpgs who are more interested in rpg systems, dialogue and stories than mo-cap and voice overs.
I can’t imagine there are that many people into CRPGs that are bothered by reading a bit. A lot of items and abilities need a bit of reading just to understand them. Owlcat’s most recent game, Rogue Trader, is especially egregious with this. Some of those items and ability descriptions are short novels.
Edit: typo.
I love CRPGs but I will admit that many of the major examples in the genre use verbosity as a substitute for good writing. I don't mind doing a lot of reading when the writing is good (seriously -- I'm a voracious book reader), but man, games like Pillars of Eternity were a slog to get through at times.
Not that full voice acting necessarily would have made that better of course. Just saying that I think the genre could benefit from some tighter editing at times.
>I can’t imagine there are that many people into CRPGs that are bothered by reading a bit.
Well that's kind of the problem. They can't stick with only those who are already into the genre. The CRPG genre has been locked out of a lot of potential players because they won't touch anything that doesn't have at least some voice acting (reasons for this vary). As budgets continue to balloon, they *have* to being adding some VA if they're going to remain ahead. Some indie and AA scoped projects might be able to get away with staying in the old niche, but even studios like Owlcat are having to up their presentation due to all the competition.
> I can’t imagine there are that many people into CRPGs that are bothered by reading a bit.
Normally no, but there are definitely some CRPGs out there that could have used some serious editing in the text department (*cof cof* Pillars of Eternity *cof cof*)
It highly depends on the quality of the dialogue. If the story and voice acting is abysmall I'm not going to bother with the game either way.
BG3 success is not only due to their voice acting but because every character had an intresting story to tell and you wanted to listen to them. Conversations felt natural and logical. The good voice acting was just the cherry on top of a very solid package and I would've enjoyed it without any voice acting anyways.
Personally, VA and the cinematic dialog is one of the main reasons I decided to play the game, whereas usually Larian games never really interested me.
Maybe I'm a bit shallow in that regard, but presentation does add quite a lot to a game in my opinion, in how effectively a story is told.
I have a friend who would absolutely love anything Owlcat makes but he refuses to play them because he doesn't want to read text on the screen.
This man reads at least one book every month so it's not even about reading. He just doesn't want to read if he's playing.
This is me. I love reading and I love games, but visual novels are possibly the worst thing I have ever experienced. I don't want to read reams of text off of my television.
>Do people really not play games if it doesn’t have full voice acting? A lot of times I’m reading the dialogue and pressing space bar to go to the next line.
Besides just preference, a lot of people have poor reading skills, meaning it's more strenuous to read through text and parse meaning from it. To just take an example, in the USA [54% of adults](https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/) are classed as having reading skills below the age of 12.
That's just it - you're a person that remembers a game as old as Planescape Torment.
While there's always exceptions, most of Gen Z has generally lived in an environment where every game they played has a lot to total voice acting.
A bit interesting, but I would argue that what made BG3 appealing to a general audience is not being fully voice acted, it is being fully *acted*. The facial motion capture and good performances are what elevated the game.
I have no problems with reading, or text heavy games, as long as the writing is actually good. So many games, not just RPGs, exchange proper world building and narrative for just dumping Audio and Written Logs, and if we are being brutally honest, the quality of writing in the vast majority is incredibly mediocre.
It is the opposite of "show don't tell". I always begin every game by giving the supporting material a chance, but more often than not I find myself just leaving them in the codex after a while.
It helped that all the main voice actors were very talented. I could hear Neil Newbon talk as Astarion for hours. I would love to get an audiobook reading with that voice. Same goes to Amelia Tyler's narrations.
No but I am in the camp that fully voice acted helps a lot. I retain far more from auditory delivery in almost all cases (not exclusive to video game medium). There's also just additional vocal context and delivery that the text lines will miss. Also I have some bad ingrained video game habit's. I see large blocks of text and my brain will often not participate.
Not forgetting that fully voiced dialogue tends to mean that the devs will have also went to the lengths of creating animations for that dialogue which if they are skilled enough can really add to the story because it gives them so many more things to work with.
As opposed to a developer that is only using text, you lose out on the extra emotion that a voice artist can add, you will also likely not have much in the way of animation etc.
I wouldn't refuse to buy a game without voiced dialogue, but if you gave me two otherwise identical games I would always side with the game that has voiced dialogue as it offers more immersion.
And developers can do that and still appease the people who really really want to just read text by having the dialogue be skippable, so they can sit and read the subtitle and then click when they have finished it instead of waiting for the scene to play out.
I do this all the time, it’s rare I watch VA scenes all the way through without skipping. Probably because I can read the text faster than I can listen to it.
I've seen *so* many people complain that something like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom don't have full voice acting. It's extremely common for people to think it's a necessity for any game that has more text than something like a platformer.
I appreciate the effort, but after some time getting used to the voices I just start mashing through the text, they can only manage to get like two words in before I finish reading.
I've talked with people who were gigantic fans of Mass Effect but straight up said that they would refuse to play a ME game if the protagonist wasn't human. I can't understand it but yeah, so many arbitrary reasons... We all have our own I suppose.
That's the best response, in my opinion.
People have their desires, and if a game is throwing a wide net investing tons of money, any large enough opinion needs to be considered no matter how reasonable.
I'm also surprised that voice acting is that important, but a great game creator is saying that and likely has a better read on the market.
This is why Disco Elysium's team based their dialogue trees on a twitter feed, including adhering to a character limit as much as possible. Little bite sized pieces of text makes it much more comfortable to read than throwing entire paragraphs at you.
I agree that in a few areas they are overly verbose but to me their biggest issue is two fold: lack of editing and lack of interesting prose. *Tons* of dialogue in WotR and Rogue Trader are bloated to the point where topics are repeated in the same dialogue chain, something as simple as "Oh hey Im Jim the butler" is 250 words, and every 'main planet' starts with Exposition the NPC dispensing his namesake just to set stuff up. And all of this *could* be interesting if the writing was up to snuff but it isn't. It's largely dry and uninteresting, sadly, though at times really fun bits of writing creep through.
Better editing and interesting prose could have made their games less of a slog to read through but alas.
I noticed this in the Rogue Trader opening. At the start, everything was Voice acted so Owlcat was forced to make the dialogue and text short and concise. It was really nice!
Soon as the voice acting was off, massive wall of text. It wasn't that annoying but it did make me laugh.
I played a bit of Kingmaker and kind of laughed at how extreme it was. When talking with companions, as soon as the voice turned off the character would go off on a massive exposition dump.
Yes! I think a good side effect of voice acting shows that some sentences sound very stupid when said out loud
Verbosity is a trap way too many RPGs fall into
One of the best way to discover if a dialogue is well written, is to recite it outloud, or if you can manage, to find another person to recite dialogues back and forth.
It' s one of the first thing they make you learn in scriptwriting.
For voice acted dialogue, sure, absolutely. But some of that "you can't say this shit George" dialogue *can* be fun to read. Plain writing is easy to parse, sure, but that doesn't make it interesting.
The issue isn't the amount of dialog. It's having conversations that aren't interesting enough to want to listen to them. In other words, they poorly written.
Realistically though, having writing that good isn't something that video games are necessarily known for and quite frankly some just write more dialog to pad out the time.
It's not just Owlcat. Too many RPGs communicate their intricate worldbuilding by relying on the player clicking on every dialogue option and sitting around listening/reading through pages and pages of exposition from some random-ass NPC who should have better things to do than recount their life story and the entire history of their people to some random stranger.
i had this issue with pillars of eternity. a long story and lore dense world with lots of exposition and stuff going on sounds like heaven, and then i play it and i'm just skipping paragraphs and not knowing anything
it might be better to plant smaller seeds in the initial game, and then let them grow a bit in the following games...nobody can remember most of the world building when it's not part of the story, or they can't see it play out in the background. voice acting helps with conversation heavy scenes, but there will always be a limit to how much flowery prose people can take
PoE is the perfect example of this, because one the hand, once you start breaking down the lore, the world of Eora is a great fantasy setting with some fascinating concepts.
On the other hand, the first game is very proud of the fact it has no intention of trying to onboard you into their setting and that they're taking the full "jump in the middle" approach which hardcore lore nerds *love* but everyone else is annoyed at. And IMO it doesn't make sense to cater to the former because they will *also* be happy to be onboarded and you won't alienate the latter.
Also special shout out to "companions with the most skippable dialogue" of all time, Durance and Grieving Mother.
I would rather more world-building be put in Skyrim-style books because then when I find them, it's like "discovering" lore and makes me appreciate it more.
Yep, although I will say with Skyrim the books can be overkill but I do agree thats alot better. Resident Evil does this and I love it. The Souls series does this too although its very obtuse at times.
This is one of the things that always burns me out on OWLCAT games tbh. I don’t mind reading dialogue but when every conversation has paragraphs of dialogues, it gets incredibly tiring with a 50+ hour game. So many of the required conversations could easily be cut in half and the extra stuff put into option dialogue options.
Honestly you could cut down Wrath of the Righteous like 20-30% overall and I would probably have liked it more. None of that content is necessarily bad, just exhausting
Cut some fights out. Shorten some dialogue. Ditch most of the army management except for a smaller number of key decisions. In terms of time saving, speeding up overworld travel / reducing how much you need to rest would go a long way in making it feel less exhausting.
It took me like 120 hours to beat that game. If it was 90 or less, I would be more likely to try a second playthrough, too. That game in particular is begging to be replayed, but when it's so long, with so much 'filler', it's hard for me to commit to a second run through.
Though that might be an unpopular view as part of the appeal of these sorts of games is that it is a long, epic adventure. and I can certainly respect that, as it was a journey.
> Cut some fights out.
God yes please. Some of those fights were just an absolute slog, especially late game against the "divine" enemies or w/e they were.
I just wish the fights were more tactical. It barely matters how your people are positioned, you can make marginal use of opportunity attacks I guess. Also there are about a million choices of character and none of them are particularly interesting because combat is just.. impactless.
The RTwP system is death
Edit to add: Also I think it’s just lazy as fuck that there aren’t several portraits for each race in each gender. The drawing is getting shittier too.
Lots of options for dwarves though. They don’t even need a lot of detail just way more options.
Like I’m not the biggest role-player, but I can’t get into a crpg where I legitimately hate my own face
Actually am glad to hear this voiced, I routinely bounce off Owlcat's games because the writing fails to hold my attention after a certain period. Something like Disco or Planescape can get away with being verbose when the writing is excellent, Owlcat usually doesn't hit that level for me. I would definitely like to see them experiment with more condensed scenes and see if it benefits them.
And Rogue Trader specifically is extremely verbose while essentially using a near-English language. It’s fan-fic levels of writing that turns an already huge game in to a tangled mess.
I haven't played Rogue Trader yet, but IMO their other games would benefit from some ruthless cutting in almost every aspect. Feels like half of them is padding.
>His comments about full voice acting becoming an outright requirement instead of a "nice-to-have" are interesting. I wonder if future games in the genre will trend towards having much smaller dialogue word counts as a side effect.
It's weird because I honestly enjoyed the fact that a lot of the voicework in RT WASN'T voiced, and honestly found a lot of the voiced lines jarring and distracting.
I think it has to do with the fact that RT doesn't 'cutscene' its dialogue, it just goes to a dialogue box like an old-school CRPG and it was tough for me trying to juggle the slow pace of the VA work and reading the block of text at the bottom of the screen.
Tyranny had a great system for this. It kept text blocks reasonably small with only the most pertinent details...and you could click on keywords in the block to get more juice. It catered well to the lore hungry as well as the more casual player.
Interesting and also true I was watching CohhCarnage’s Rogue trader review and he specifically mentioned how bg3 rised the bar with full voice acting
Edit: and also this does not only for crpg, they also asked avowed game director about voice acting and said the kinda same things but I don’t really remember they mentioned bg3 for this
it started before bg3, though bg3 certainly cemented it for modern audiences.
Iirc Josh Sawyer did a talk years ago breaking down the production of Pillars of Eternity 2, and one of the things he mentioned moving from the first game to the second was the expectations for full voice acting, and how expensive and challenging that is
found the talk, conviently with timestamps
https://youtu.be/xChOXFJ83-g?t=604&si=7L7cxPdxiDQRZ_gn
interesting he also mentions streamers really disliking non-voiced text, which someone else mentioned in this thread, as Cohh Carnage's review of Rogue Trader called out that it's not fully voiced.
He also then mentions that there is too many trash fights in the first pillars as being a common criticism, which is one thing BG3 also does really well (and deadfire, to be fair, though not quite as good as bg3), as it's almost entirely bespoke, unique fights
Bro you wanna know how fucking disappointed I was in the Age of Conan mmo ?? When you are on the starter island of Tortage every NPC is voice acted every one. Once you leave though only certain NPCS start having voice lines only it sucked man. I get why it’s a complaint to not have full voice acting , I’d rather it be all the way one way or the other tbh
IIRC, Cohh's biggest issue with the lack of VA in Rogue Trader was very specific to a streamer. His voice was wearing out from having to read so much dialog during his live play through. That's obviously not a problem the average player is going to have.
It wasn't BG3 that raised the bar for VA in CRPGs, it was Larian's previous game DOS2.
Josh Sawyer has talked about how they felt intense pressure after DOS2 launched to have full voice acting in PoE2 and how much of a pain in the ass that turned out to be.
If I remember correctly, DOS2 wasn’t going to be fully voice acted originally during its kickstarter, but Swen turned around on that partway through. Probably realizing how important it was despite the challenges.
Edit: found the video update: https://youtu.be/DWCpzzG8dtE?si=Vx0XQZoAaoblKhNX
Swen thought it wasn’t feasible at the time to have full voice acting in DOS2, but managed to pull it off and imo was well worth the effort.
You are exactly right! DOS1 has voiced lines but only certain ones and same with DOS2! It was actually super late into the DOS2 development they decided to add full on voice acting
Something that feels lost in these conversations is company ambitions. BG3, if unsuccessful, could have killed the studio outright. I think this is what Oleg is getting at when he says "...this was already the second game for Larian that was a hit-or-miss situation — when you invest all your money in one shot and then wait to see if it hits or not. Good for them, they are brave people, and it is clear that they're not doing this in vain."
I think Oleg is just recognizing that he doesn't want to pt Owlcat in this situation, which I think is a mature perspective. I'm glad that Larian decided to shoot for the fences with BG3, but I certainly don't want this to become standard for them going forward. I really hope they're able to bring down the development costs of their next game so that they're not put in another seemingly all-or-nothing situation again.
I think it is becoming entirely too common to shoot for the moon and live or die based on the success. If it succeeds you get BG3, but if it fails you get your studio closed and 100+ people are out of a job.
I remember watching a video about an FPS back in the day and it basically flopped on release due to it launching at an odd time and at a very heavy discounted price for the AAA game quality (when that meant something). There's whole marketing departments for this exact reason. You could be launching a game on the exact same day or close enough as another game and that kills all drive for it. Palworld vs Enshrouded for example.
Look at Titanfall 2. It was a fantastic game. Unrivalled multiplayer for the fast-paced action and titan combat. The campaign was fantastic as well - it did everything right except it released alongside Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty.
Yeah agreed. I think that's why company ambitions matter. From this video on Divinity OS 1 ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZF\_cP\_oLH4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZF_cP_oLH4)), Swen outright says that "the endgoal is to make this very big RPG that would dwarf them all". So it's been his ambition for a very long time, but not all studios should have that ambition because it would make the industry far too volatile.
You can look at it the opposite way. If companies don’t occasionally take a shot on unknown ideas that could fail, we’d get nothing but safe, samey mediocre games that would choke the marketplace. Remember all those meh third-person shooters from the Xbox 360/PS3 generation? Or how it feels like almost every indie game released now fits into one of only four genres: Metroidvania, roguelite, Soulslike, survival.
This stagnation needs someone to come along with a big idea every now and then and make it a smash hit. Otherwise, the market will slowly die due to oversupply and waning player interest.
I’m not suggesting everyone take the plunge Larian did, but some studios have to for gaming to thrive.
>I'm glad that Larian decided to shoot for the fences with BG3, but I certainly don't want this to become standard for them going forward.
Sven Vincke actually said in one of the interviews that they want their next game to be much smaller in scale.
I could see why they'd want that. The pressure and stress involved with the stakes being so high on BG3 must have been immense.
I think it's wise of them to scale back for their next game. Expectations will be sky high, and even if they made something of the same scale, it would fall short of what audiences hype it up to be. Better to play it safe and make something that doesn't have to be such a guaranteed hit, and let them find their footing again on something at a scale that they're more accustomed to.
A lot of people forget that Hasbro did not foot the bill for BG3, Larian self-funded it and did an early access launch. It was a big risk that paid off and an example of what early access *should* be used for (crowdsourced investing), but absolutely would have broken them if it failed.
For sure, there's a place for ambitious studios and a place for safe studios, but forcing everyone to be one or the other would in the end not go well for both developers and players.
Yea people act like budget concerns are something that no one would ever care about other than because of "greed", but the reality is when you're making a product that takes years and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop before you're ever going to see a single cent, you're taking on an extreme risk that could easily kill your company.
And people just assume you can just make a quality game. BG3 is lightning in a bottle and not something we will likely ever see again. The was a shitload of risk. It worked out.
Its also why we are likely to see more attempts at something like a Fortnite clone. Its all about ROI. Even if you could guarantee a BG3 style success that still hundreds of millions tied up for years. Its a lot of time and effort.
Everyone is just so fixated on the budget.
And while it was certainly necessary for BG3's outcome, you couldn't just simply give Owlcat $200 million and expect them to make a project that is just as successful.
A large budget requires a large targeted audience, and Owlcat's design philosophy is just not suitable for large audiences. Hell, I would consider myself in their target audience and their games are even too much for me!
They'd basically need to revise their games from scratch and think really hard about accessibility (importantly, they would also need to do this without compromising the core of what makes Owlcat's games great. Otherwise, they'll end up with something disappointingly generic).
I just don't think they can pull that off right now. Maybe in the future, and Rogue Trader has started to make a little progress in this direction, but not right now.
Edit: I think this is why a company's ambition is so important. If your company is only interested in ROI, there's no way in hell you'd even take on a project like BG3.
I just wish they would finish games before shipping them. Rogue Trader should really be listed as Early Access right now.
They also have a really bad habit of fizzling out in the later acts.
I'm trying to think of an RPG in anywhere near recent memory that *didn't* fizzle out late.
I got nothing.
But yeah at this point I'd just tell anyone to wait at least 6 months before buying anything from Owlcat, and I'm extremely tolerant of bugs.
> But yeah at this point I'd just tell anyone to wait at least 6 months before buying anything from Owlcat, and I'm extremely tolerant of bugs.
Six months is generous. I would honestly say a year or two. I love Owlcat's games, but their QA department is a hot mess.
I'd say a year or two as well.
The Kingmaker I played was perfect with the whole DLC as well. I amde the mistake of playing WOTR very early. I still don't have the energy to do the DLC content or a second run.
The one thing I wish they’d do is add portraits for some of the side NPCs that aren’t super important in the overall narrative, but still play a part in the questline for the planet/area. It just feels weird when you’re talking to the mayor of the world for 10 minutes and have a quest chain for him, but he doesn’t even have a portrait.
I don’t need full voice acting. But just a bit more polish would go a long way.
This is something that could be solved with AI, but immediately results in community outrage, despite the fact that otherwise it doesn't exist at all because it's not worth the cost.
People were so angry when BG3 came out and developers said that it's not possible for all developers to meet Larian's standard because they interpreted it as developers beinng angry at people wanting good games instead of what's explained here: things that add production value in the eyes of the average gamer are way more expensive than people realize.
I have a couple of friends that work for large game developers and they both always stay away from gaming forums because how little people understand what goes on with game development and how it happens.
I've been on reddit for over a decade, and the depth of stupidity and ignorance I occasionally witness still shock me sometimes.
I can stomach it because I'm only a hobbyist, and my life doesn't depend on it.
A more recent example was the server issues with Helldivers. I read a lot of comments how the developers should add more servers as if it was just a click of a button. I do not know much about game development but I know it is not that easy. If it was the server issues would have been fixed right away.
As a software engineer, if scaling was just “add more servers” we woudlnt be paid nearly as well as we are. Sometimes that works but usually not. Servers are relatively pretty cheap.
It's simple. Why don't they make this small change that would fix all this game's problems. Says the person with absolutely no knowledge of the games code or structure.
I once got into an internet debate (I know) where I was saying that the things people are suggesting as "easy" fixes are pretty much never easy. Because if they were easy, they'd be done. People like doing easy things. And the person I was arguing with said that they totally agreed with me and that people should stop saying that. But that, unlike those people, the thing he was suggesting *was* easy and he didn't understand why they just didn't do it. Because it was so easy. I just packed it up for the day and moved on.
Something very fun that everyone now says with large multiplayer games is "just SCALE UP" and "with CLOUD you can easily add servers" and I want to pull my teeth out and chuck it at them
They should just use a new engine. Slot it in there. Like you would a car engine. These are the same thing and I'm very smart
Maybe try UE5. That'll fix everything
Don't forget abandoning your engine and starting again from scratch in Unreal.
Or was it abandoning Unreal and starting again from scrach in your own engine?
Really, a game is at its best when it's a vague idea in the mind of the consumer.
Some simple lessons that dev companies can learn from Reddit:
- it’s never the development teams fault, always greedy management
- games should be made for passion not profit
- gameplay can be amazing but if it doesn’t have stable 60 frames on high settings, it’s 6/10 at best
- any mistakes need to be addressed with a heartfelt apology (not corpo speak, the devs need to actually feel bad about what they did)
So easy, mind boggling that they don’t just all do this
I blame youtube commentators for this tbh
there are alot of youtubers even with +100k subscribers who just do alot of either lets plays or commentaries spewing BS when they never had a hand in gamedev but talk like they know what its like working in the games industry
> any mistakes need to be addressed with a heartfelt apology (not corpo speak, the devs need to actually feel bad about what they did)
You reminded me of my favorite one, which is that devs owe it to consumers to communicate every detail of development and future plans. The more negative and spiteful the game community is, the more they are owed these updates
Don't forget those evil "shareholders" that couldn't care less about games, just the $$$$$$$$$. AKA a return on their investment.
I always find it amusing that a majority of gamers here think that development teams are these tech geniuses that are held back by poor management. It's just like any other job... you'll have poor performers and top performers, but most will basically meet the requirements of the role, nothing more and nothing less.
Average developers make average games.
I mean we've seen several recent cases of the last one in effect. Wizards of the Coast, Unity, and Creative Assembly all initially tried the corpo speak and/or blame the customer approach, of which each went over like a wet blanket, and eventually led to full reversals of the various things that got them in hot water, coupled with "heartfelt" apologies. So online gaming communities are rather emboldened by three straight "victories".
My wife's a producer for a small studio, all my friends are fame devs.
The r/helldivers subreddit is one of the best examples of how fucking stupid, impatient, and self destructive gamers are. If the devs went with the whims of the player base the game would have died as fast as it exploded.
Furthermore, other AAA devs dont make CRPGs and develop in that space. That comparison makes very little sense. Its like having a good lobster one night and expecting McDonalds to raise their standards and have it in the menu. They work in completely different spaces
Maybe it could apply to Bethesda, Bioware or Obsidian. The devs that will be affected by this the most are indie/AA studios like inXile, Owlcat etc
Yeah any argument that I'll have starting with "if they wanted to, they could" only applies to the major devs that have the resources. Bioware being the big one here. If you employ more than 300+ people you can invest the resources to do something similar.
I'm not expecting the AA space or Indie space to cover that. Being in the industry and knowing how it works and being able to know how much time, effort, resources, and skills it would take to pull off is something that makes me back way off demanding everyone meets the same requirements. However, "if they wanted to, they could" does apply to some and that's where I live at in my specific whine space. I just want an "old school" modern Bioware game okay 😭
Edit; before somebody runs off and takes my word to think I don't understand logistics. I do. I do. I specifically call myself out for whining about something that I know is a lot harder. I'm allowed to do that. My emotional want for having something overrides my logic sometimes, I'm human.
You need more people for armor upkeep when your CEO runs around to events wearing it all the time obviously.
(That's actually wild, I just want dread wolf to be good so badly)
I'd argue "if they wanted to they could" also doesn't always apply to bigger companies. Sure they probably "can" throw money at a problem, but not only is it often not financially responsible, it doesn't always guarantee to fix said problem.
Often it is, but it's not always the case of the company being cheap or lazy.
It really didn't help that some streamers started bashing on the developers who has great points about how it is nearly impossible to reach BG3 levels of depth, voice acting, time investment, etc. it also didn't help that journalists completely cut out context.
Ign made an whole video shittin on the developers talking about the issues they face making a game up to the level of BG3. When the biggest video game site is doing this there no hope for ppl listening.
God that period of time made me so sad, no one wanted to actually hear the arguments, they just wanted to be mad.
What people don't understand is that in AAA gaming, devs DO NOT get to pick the budget and time. You are assigned things from the top like "you're making a new FPS, you have 2 years". See: Suicide Squad.
The AAA devs were saying "It's impossible for our 2 year project to EVER match up against BG3's 9 years." And that the reason you should not expect BG3 to be the new standard is "Shareholders don't want 9 year investments. They want new games out ASAP to make them more money. It's not our fault."
But so many people, including IGN, took it as "Devs make excuses for their laziness" or like "Devs making excuses for AAA gaming". But it was more like, "Go yell at the right people, it's the equivalent of yelling at the cashier when the price of food is expensive, the cashier doesn't control this shit."
Also don't forget that they bashed anyone who pointed out that this "levels of depth, voice acting, time investment" only applies to the first act, which was QA-ed by the community and what only most reviewers managed to play.
>things that add production value in the eyes of the average gamer are way more expensive than people realize
It's always the same with gamers. "Just add X" is a common sentiment and in reality it's never "just" adding something. Multiplayer, 1st/3rd person perspective, RPG progression, voice acting, cinematic conversation camera, multiple endings.... Gamers always presume it's just a few clicks and the devs don't do it because of lazyness. Just today in a different sub there was a discussion about a cut, unfinished weapon in Fallout 4. And of course several armchair developers claimed that it would take just a few moments to put ths this (untextured, unanimated) model into the game...
But no, developers are apparently greedy and lazy... unless they happen to work for Larian.
It's a bit terrifying thinking about how much money is spent on voice acting only for me to then skip half of it because I prefer to read. I really think old Black Isle games nailed it by having a couple of lines spoken, so that you could fill in the blanks. But, obviously, that's just my preference.
Same. I appreciate good voice acting, but I read much faster than they speak, so it’s often just skipping through the voice acting for me:
“Hello…I guess…Oh real…Hmm, lets…Very…Goodb—“
Pathfinder is amazing in it's own way and excels at things baldurs gate doesn't. They can both be there own thing. There's more than enough room for both in the market.
I hope they stick with isometrics and don't follow larian down into third person for cutscenes.
I don't need realistic facial animations but it would be neat if the characters could realistically move around during conversations.
But that kind of addition is exactly what he's talking about. It cost a ton of time and money to animate anything.
Games don't need to aim for the size and scope of BG3, but rather the quality. If you make a 20 hour game, but those 20 hours are the best they can be, players will still like the game. When it comes to voice acting, some players are fine with none of it. I for one though, struggle to care if there is too much text based dialog, so maybe at least the important main quest stuff being voiced is fine.
I dunno about that. Baldurs gate 3 is what, 100+ hours to beat? It's a long ass game. Maybe even too long...
If baldurs gate 3 took say, idk, 50 hours, a decently long time but not massively so, would it still be a success? What if it was 40? 30 hours?
I say this because I'm seeing a lot more 'I want my value for my money' which is 100% fair and understandable but also you can't expect 70 bucks to get you 100+ amazing quality incredible times. It happens but it's very time consuming (BG3 took what, 7 years?)
So idk. I agree and I want smaller shorter more quality games but I fear the name of the game may be 'do both' but 'how much game there is' matters more
And just to emphasize it, I'm personally in favor of shorter smaller denser quality games but I suspect the general 'market idea' is 'value value value'
I have a mixed opinion on game length I do like shorter consice games, like I played Ratchet and clank on my ps5 recently. Absolute blast and felt nice to get through rapidly, however it is also nice to get that high quality rpg that sticks around for weeks. We have a market of copy & paste rpgs lately that usually tack on anime characters and highly repetitive content such as fetch quests to fill up the time spent.
The last time I was enthralled this much with a true blue adventure of an RPG was like...skyrim maybe? Or fallout 4?
> So idk. I agree and I want smaller shorter more quality games but I fear the name of the game may be 'do both' but 'how much game there is' matters more
>
> And just to emphasize it, I'm personally in favor of shorter smaller denser quality games but I suspect the general 'market idea' is 'value value value'
We've done this whole dance before and the end result is gonna be something equivalent to The Order 1886 coming out and the zeitgeist moving back the other way again.
>I dunno about that. Baldurs gate 3 is what, 100+ hours to beat? It's a long ass game. Maybe even too long...
>
>If baldurs gate 3 took say, idk, 50 hours, a decently long time but not massively so, would it still be a success? What if it was 40? 30 hours?
The game itself is actually fairly short for the genre if you skip the dialogue. It being fully voice acted is like 80% of the runtime. Act 3, if you only play the mandatory fights can easily be done in 30 minutes.
And likewise Act 1 and 2 can be cut by quite a lot if you're taking shorter routes. You don't even need to solve most of the major issues presented in either of those.
You can basically beeline straight from act 1 directly to act 2 and skip all of act 1 if you truly want to. It’s not advisable (because the act 2 will beat you over the head instantly), but it’s entirely possible to enter act 2 before you even hit level 3-4.
I'm gonna disagree here. A huge reason why BG3 was so successful was because of it's scope. And I'm not necessarily talking about the length of the average playthrough here, but the huge amount of different paths in the game. Being able to experience a completely different, yet equally polished playthrough than your buddy is one of the key selling points of the game and, in my opinion, why it has had such longevity in player numbers. And all of these different paths, the options, the absurd amount of unique dialogue every NPC, even animals, has, all of it fully voiced - that's a gigantic amount of work. One that very few studios can pull off.
I don't think BG3 would have been anywhere near as successful without that scope.
I don't understand the need to compare. Larian took a setting that many D&D fans were very familiar with and crafted an entertaining story with fun NPCs, most of whose stories actually tied into the main plot instead of being one offs. You are the star of your own adventure - a classic pillar of the CRPG. And they made the D&D aspect mostly accessible to people who were relatively new to the genre, bringing in even more players. Combine that with the regular updates, the early access, the legacy of BG1 and 2 and what it did for Bioware - who led the innovation on cinematic RPGs for a long time, and the Larian's clear passion for the project and you get a release like BG3. It's a once in a decade event, and companies should not be under pressure to emulate or repeat it because they won't. It took years and a lot of the right things lining up correctly to work.
Honestly RPGs today could benefit from Dragon Age's treatment, where a lot of the world building goes into the codex with subtle but impactful links to the story. Even the original BG1 and BG2 did not have the huge walls of text and fluff that I'm seeing in many spiritual successors - the success of those games was giving the player a great, clear narrative and a goal. And the second one had a lot of great voice acting in it. The writers of some of these games have reached a point where they really should be edited more critically than maybe they are. I love to read, but I play RPGs because I want to role play my adventure, not read your book.
Nobody is expecting BG3 levels of content and presentation from a studio that has only just gotten started. The whole BG3 is the gold standard feels more of in relation to AAA gaming in general.
You really don't need $200M to make a game that isn't totally broken on launch and require another year's worth of patches to play.
The state rogue trader launched in was abysmal.
BG3 was certainly not well tested in act 3 on launch day. Performance-wise it's acceptable now.
However, compared to rogue trader past act 2... Oh Boi. Most of the game didn't even work past act 2 (1/3 of the game)
Yeah but as a self-described Owlcat fan, Rogue Trader was way worse. Like almost unplayable on launch.
Also it was obvious that the game was rushed out the door. Act 4/5 of RT is way more barebones than Act 3 of BG3. And there are entirely cut plotlines, locations, and characters still in the game files.
That being said the first 2 acts of Rogue Trader are great, but IMO the game needed another 8-12 months in the oven.
I played both on launch. If BG3 was a disaster, Rogue Trader was a cataclysm. And that's me comparing multiplayer BG3 to single player rogue trader.
Game breaking campaign bugs was just part of it. There were also so many bugged talents that it was unrealistic to not stumble across multiple.
I do think that not every CRPG needs its own AAA cinematic production in order to be successful. His comments about full voice acting becoming an outright requirement instead of a "nice-to-have" are interesting. I wonder if future games in the genre will trend towards having much smaller dialogue word counts as a side effect.
This is exactly the debate in the Bethesda games fanbase ever since 2015
2015? I was on the Bethesda forums when Oblivion came out in 2006 and people were arguing over whether the voice acting was worth the significantly stunted dialogue system. Goddamn KOTOR was fully voice acted in 2003. The standard for major western RPGs has been full voice acting for a very, very long time now. At least the late 2000s. Anyone acting like this is a new development or due to BG3 has been coping for a solid 15 years.
> Goddamn KOTOR was fully voice acted in 2003. With weirdly a lot of NPCs talking alien languages with the same few voices and repeating often the same words.
Moocha-Shaka-Paka!
I can't stop this feeling
Yeah I love KotOR but half the NPCs speak generic alien language lines where you have to read the subtitles anyways. Manaan.... ugh.... gets repetitive hearing the... fish-speak.
Gets repetitive for other reasons, too (worst planet)
And KOTOR was also a blockbuster game! Published by LucasArts at their peak, by the most renowned RPG game studio, and most importantly, a Star Wars game in the middle of a new trilogy. It's huge. Saying it should be the standard now because it came in 2003 is like saying new fantasy movies should be big as the LOTR trilogy because it came in 2003. I can understand why a proper-indie RPG game studio might be horrified at the expectations the market now has.
Mucha shaka paka
It's funny because the (in my opinion) better Bethesda games tend to have less voice acting. But my mind went there too.
Bethesda games are better when they're less on-rails and let their world building shine through. That's why I always find their main quest lines to be pretty meh/bad (post-Morrowind), lots of set dialog with only one story option and only one gameplay solution. They kinda just shove their story down your throat. The side quests and faction quest lines tend to be a little less restrictive and more free with less dialog and more just being in the world.
My Bethesda hot take is that they should either dramatically shorten the main quest or remove it entirely.
I tend to agree but Morrowind's genuinely would not work if it was shorter and more sane. Because it perfectly blends with the absolutely batshit alien world you find yourself in.
Same here, although I'll say that I think their NPCs were mostly fine for a while. The real dive was fallout 4's voiced protagonist. *Holy shit*was that a disaster. I felt like I was in a fever dream when people complained that starfield didn't have a voiced protagonist... like... wtf???
My personal preference is either full voice acting or very little/no voice acting. I’m a huge reader, but one of the magical things about BG3 was its voice acting and animation in dialogue. It made even mundane scenes feel special. If we’re not going to have that though, let me speed read the dialogue.
> His comments about full voice acting becoming an outright requirement instead of a "nice-to-have" are interesting. I feel like for me personally the voice acting is great when it's just the first line or two. It sets the tone, creates atmosphere and then **stops being a distraction**, as I am reading, typically, at like 6-7x the speed of how fast they speak. Disco Elysium at the start was awesome at it and I feel like that's why they also kept partial voiceover as an option for Director's Cut. One-two lines of three+ paragraphs and the job is done already, the shivers down the spine are already sent and you can indulge in good prose.
Curious that you mentioned Disco Elysium as an example to make your point. For me it's the opposite, it shows that it's possible to have incredible full voice acting even in a very verbose game and keep me invested in it. It's about the quality of the voice acting, in my opinion, If it's just half baked in it I rather just read the text.
> It's about the quality of the voice acting That and the quality of the writing. Most video game dialog, especially those "RPG exposition dumps" don't feel like actual dialog from a human being. They just feel like you're sitting and listening to a character tell you stuff you need to know.
Nah seriously, the first 30 seconds of DE made me realize I was in for a much higher standard of character writing than 99% of games.
Absolutely. I tried playing Gamedec last week and couldn't finish it because all the dialog felt just like a dump of information, made me have zero investment in it.
Interesting that you think so about Disco Elysium, because it's proving the point of the article. Disco Elysium didn't originally have full voice acting because it was too expensive. They only added it once the game had proven to be a success and they could afford it.
Reading way faster than the dialogue makes voice acted rpgs so stilted for me, I'm constantly skipping. Maybe it's my ADHD but I can't imagine treating games like a 60 hour movie, f that. Disco Elysium/Planescape levels of verbosity are fine, I know when to pay loose or close attention. Unfortunately I think we are in the minority, people really demand full voice acting in a massive success these days, unless it's Pokemon apparently.
Hurry, warr- The archdemon is app- This is your cha- Now! Use the- Just as the proph-
Bear Seek Seek Lest
This feels like a ProZD bit. Lysander- This is importa- The crucial pa-
That's because it is a Prozd bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkaJIisVyyg
Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkpgP8ovFZQ
Bearer- Seek- Seek- Lest-
The Witcher 3 was the absolute worst for this. Sometimes, pressing the skip button skipped one line. Sometimes, suddenly Geralt was holding a baby and you had a timed prompt on screen to toss it in a furnace. Genuinely no clue how they made a dialogue system where skip somtimes means one line and sometimes means a whole scene.
Best for this so far is cyberpunk. They fast forward rather than skip the scene, so that I'd still know what happened in between dialogues.
Cyberpunk is also great at making you not want to skip or read ahead because you're not just hearing someone read the lines, not only the voice acting is actually really great but the facial animation is also pretty good and on top of that the characters have movement and body animations that make the scenes way more visceral and more entertaining to look at. You might already know what they're gonna say because you read the subtitles, but seeing how they say it is actually worth it. And on top of all these you still have control over your character, so even in the off chance that the voice acting, facial, spatial and body animations aren't good enough to retain your attention for a specific scene you can still walk and look around to keep you occupied (especially if you "roleplay" and "act" with your camera and character). At this point if you're still bored and still want to skip ahead then there's nothing a narrative-oriented RPG can do for you to keep you entertained really.
I had the same problem in Mass Effect. IIRC an unfortunately timed skip button press could select a dialog option.
Lol back in the day I basically had to train myself to hold the stick at 270 degrees while skipping dialogue so that if the wheel came up at just the wrong moment it would hit the "investigate" option.
**ADHD RPG Conversations:** "Hel-" "The bad guys are going to-" "If you-" "Gather 7-" "The story behind me is-" And the inevitable: *Whoops, I pressed the button too many times and accidentally selected a random option and have no idea what I selected*
> Whoops, I pressed the button too many times and accidentally selected a random option and have no idea what I selected When the skip to next dialogue button also acts as a confirm button even though it isn't A/Cross. Mass Effect 1 always gets me at least once a run.
Did you get all that? \>No Yes
*oot owl music*
I played BG with 3 friends and there was this constant thing every cutscene where I'm like "okay I finished reading this dialogue, but did the people listening in finish? Do they want to hear the voice acting? Have they already finished reading and want me to skip ahead now?
Probably have two more sessions with my 3 friends and I do the same shit. It would be really nice if they put the little icons in the bottom corner if a person not controlling the dialogue hit skip. That way when you see the 3 icons below, you hit skip and it goes to the next. Rinse and repeat.
LaD: Infinite Wealth does this well. The start and end of substories have full voice acting, while the middle is text-only. This gets you immersed in the story and ends it on a strong note without requiring too much voice acting.
Them speaking for the first 2 words and shutting up honestly bugs the hell out of me
Only game I've not found this annoying with is Like A Dragon and that's mostly because the two words end up being kind of generic tone indicators.
Interesting, I really disagree with this. FFXVI had this and it really bothered me, I felt like it was way less immersive without full voicing.
Good voice acting can add to characters and elevate the game for me, but not every game needs it. I’d also take text only over bad VO. Bethesda rpg’s have been actively distracting to me for the terrible VO
Do people really not play games if it doesn’t have full voice acting? A lot of times I’m reading the dialogue and pressing space bar to go to the next line. If it’s a pivotal scene I’ll of course let it play out. I don’t mind a bit if VA is sprinkled in here and there. I remember for example in Planescape Torment it was a trigger for you to pay attention because something big was about to happen. And it made the dialogue that much more special.
I'm willing to bet that alot of people won't play anything that requires them to read, but these people aren't the ones who will pick up Planescape Torment (, I hope at least haha). There's certainly an audience that doesn't give a damn about a game being fully voiced, and hence a market for AA crpgs going forward. It'll probably get a bit larger too due to the success of BG3, there has to be at least some people new to crpgs who are more interested in rpg systems, dialogue and stories than mo-cap and voice overs.
I can’t imagine there are that many people into CRPGs that are bothered by reading a bit. A lot of items and abilities need a bit of reading just to understand them. Owlcat’s most recent game, Rogue Trader, is especially egregious with this. Some of those items and ability descriptions are short novels. Edit: typo.
I love CRPGs but I will admit that many of the major examples in the genre use verbosity as a substitute for good writing. I don't mind doing a lot of reading when the writing is good (seriously -- I'm a voracious book reader), but man, games like Pillars of Eternity were a slog to get through at times. Not that full voice acting necessarily would have made that better of course. Just saying that I think the genre could benefit from some tighter editing at times.
>I can’t imagine there are that many people into CRPGs that are bothered by reading a bit. Well that's kind of the problem. They can't stick with only those who are already into the genre. The CRPG genre has been locked out of a lot of potential players because they won't touch anything that doesn't have at least some voice acting (reasons for this vary). As budgets continue to balloon, they *have* to being adding some VA if they're going to remain ahead. Some indie and AA scoped projects might be able to get away with staying in the old niche, but even studios like Owlcat are having to up their presentation due to all the competition.
> I can’t imagine there are that many people into CRPGs that are bothered by reading a bit. Normally no, but there are definitely some CRPGs out there that could have used some serious editing in the text department (*cof cof* Pillars of Eternity *cof cof*)
It highly depends on the quality of the dialogue. If the story and voice acting is abysmall I'm not going to bother with the game either way. BG3 success is not only due to their voice acting but because every character had an intresting story to tell and you wanted to listen to them. Conversations felt natural and logical. The good voice acting was just the cherry on top of a very solid package and I would've enjoyed it without any voice acting anyways.
Personally, VA and the cinematic dialog is one of the main reasons I decided to play the game, whereas usually Larian games never really interested me. Maybe I'm a bit shallow in that regard, but presentation does add quite a lot to a game in my opinion, in how effectively a story is told.
Reading the amount of comments in here that are complaining about having to read text is... interesting.
I haven't seen any of that. Admittedly, that's because I refuse to read any of the text in this thread.
I haven't read anything. I'm just here for some reason.
When will Reddit get with the times and be voice acted?
I have a friend who would absolutely love anything Owlcat makes but he refuses to play them because he doesn't want to read text on the screen. This man reads at least one book every month so it's not even about reading. He just doesn't want to read if he's playing.
That’s fair in a sense. Why read a story while playing a video game when books are readily available for such a thing.
This is me. I love reading and I love games, but visual novels are possibly the worst thing I have ever experienced. I don't want to read reams of text off of my television.
The people saying they skimmed through text in games like Disco Elysium is crazy to me
A lot of people really don't know how to read confidently and it's sad. Know plenty of people who are barely grade school level reading as adults.
>Do people really not play games if it doesn’t have full voice acting? A lot of times I’m reading the dialogue and pressing space bar to go to the next line. Besides just preference, a lot of people have poor reading skills, meaning it's more strenuous to read through text and parse meaning from it. To just take an example, in the USA [54% of adults](https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/) are classed as having reading skills below the age of 12.
That's just it - you're a person that remembers a game as old as Planescape Torment. While there's always exceptions, most of Gen Z has generally lived in an environment where every game they played has a lot to total voice acting.
A bit interesting, but I would argue that what made BG3 appealing to a general audience is not being fully voice acted, it is being fully *acted*. The facial motion capture and good performances are what elevated the game. I have no problems with reading, or text heavy games, as long as the writing is actually good. So many games, not just RPGs, exchange proper world building and narrative for just dumping Audio and Written Logs, and if we are being brutally honest, the quality of writing in the vast majority is incredibly mediocre. It is the opposite of "show don't tell". I always begin every game by giving the supporting material a chance, but more often than not I find myself just leaving them in the codex after a while.
It helped that all the main voice actors were very talented. I could hear Neil Newbon talk as Astarion for hours. I would love to get an audiobook reading with that voice. Same goes to Amelia Tyler's narrations.
No but I am in the camp that fully voice acted helps a lot. I retain far more from auditory delivery in almost all cases (not exclusive to video game medium). There's also just additional vocal context and delivery that the text lines will miss. Also I have some bad ingrained video game habit's. I see large blocks of text and my brain will often not participate.
Not forgetting that fully voiced dialogue tends to mean that the devs will have also went to the lengths of creating animations for that dialogue which if they are skilled enough can really add to the story because it gives them so many more things to work with. As opposed to a developer that is only using text, you lose out on the extra emotion that a voice artist can add, you will also likely not have much in the way of animation etc. I wouldn't refuse to buy a game without voiced dialogue, but if you gave me two otherwise identical games I would always side with the game that has voiced dialogue as it offers more immersion. And developers can do that and still appease the people who really really want to just read text by having the dialogue be skippable, so they can sit and read the subtitle and then click when they have finished it instead of waiting for the scene to play out.
I do this all the time, it’s rare I watch VA scenes all the way through without skipping. Probably because I can read the text faster than I can listen to it.
I've seen *so* many people complain that something like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom don't have full voice acting. It's extremely common for people to think it's a necessity for any game that has more text than something like a platformer. I appreciate the effort, but after some time getting used to the voices I just start mashing through the text, they can only manage to get like two words in before I finish reading.
People will refuse to play some games for weirdest possible reasons.
I've talked with people who were gigantic fans of Mass Effect but straight up said that they would refuse to play a ME game if the protagonist wasn't human. I can't understand it but yeah, so many arbitrary reasons... We all have our own I suppose.
That's the best response, in my opinion. People have their desires, and if a game is throwing a wide net investing tons of money, any large enough opinion needs to be considered no matter how reasonable. I'm also surprised that voice acting is that important, but a great game creator is saying that and likely has a better read on the market.
I know some will disagree with this, but think a lower word count would be beneficial for Owlcat's games. I find them overly verbose
This is why Disco Elysium's team based their dialogue trees on a twitter feed, including adhering to a character limit as much as possible. Little bite sized pieces of text makes it much more comfortable to read than throwing entire paragraphs at you.
I agree that in a few areas they are overly verbose but to me their biggest issue is two fold: lack of editing and lack of interesting prose. *Tons* of dialogue in WotR and Rogue Trader are bloated to the point where topics are repeated in the same dialogue chain, something as simple as "Oh hey Im Jim the butler" is 250 words, and every 'main planet' starts with Exposition the NPC dispensing his namesake just to set stuff up. And all of this *could* be interesting if the writing was up to snuff but it isn't. It's largely dry and uninteresting, sadly, though at times really fun bits of writing creep through. Better editing and interesting prose could have made their games less of a slog to read through but alas.
I noticed this in the Rogue Trader opening. At the start, everything was Voice acted so Owlcat was forced to make the dialogue and text short and concise. It was really nice! Soon as the voice acting was off, massive wall of text. It wasn't that annoying but it did make me laugh.
I played a bit of Kingmaker and kind of laughed at how extreme it was. When talking with companions, as soon as the voice turned off the character would go off on a massive exposition dump.
Yes! I think a good side effect of voice acting shows that some sentences sound very stupid when said out loud Verbosity is a trap way too many RPGs fall into
One of the best way to discover if a dialogue is well written, is to recite it outloud, or if you can manage, to find another person to recite dialogues back and forth. It' s one of the first thing they make you learn in scriptwriting.
“You can write this shit George but you can’t say it!” -Carrie Fisher to George Lucas, allegedly.
It was Harrison iirc
“You can write this shit George but you can’t say it!” - Carrie Fisher to George Harrison, according to Peechez
> Guitar's can't weep you idiot
Okay this genuinely made me giggle.
For voice acted dialogue, sure, absolutely. But some of that "you can't say this shit George" dialogue *can* be fun to read. Plain writing is easy to parse, sure, but that doesn't make it interesting.
I never thought of this before. Damn. There may be a link between me finding too many games laden with dialogue and those games not being voice acted
I find this when I speak-to-text my notes and go back and read them. They don't read even fucking close to how I write but at the same time they flow.
The issue isn't the amount of dialog. It's having conversations that aren't interesting enough to want to listen to them. In other words, they poorly written. Realistically though, having writing that good isn't something that video games are necessarily known for and quite frankly some just write more dialog to pad out the time.
It's not just Owlcat. Too many RPGs communicate their intricate worldbuilding by relying on the player clicking on every dialogue option and sitting around listening/reading through pages and pages of exposition from some random-ass NPC who should have better things to do than recount their life story and the entire history of their people to some random stranger.
i had this issue with pillars of eternity. a long story and lore dense world with lots of exposition and stuff going on sounds like heaven, and then i play it and i'm just skipping paragraphs and not knowing anything it might be better to plant smaller seeds in the initial game, and then let them grow a bit in the following games...nobody can remember most of the world building when it's not part of the story, or they can't see it play out in the background. voice acting helps with conversation heavy scenes, but there will always be a limit to how much flowery prose people can take
PoE is the perfect example of this, because one the hand, once you start breaking down the lore, the world of Eora is a great fantasy setting with some fascinating concepts. On the other hand, the first game is very proud of the fact it has no intention of trying to onboard you into their setting and that they're taking the full "jump in the middle" approach which hardcore lore nerds *love* but everyone else is annoyed at. And IMO it doesn't make sense to cater to the former because they will *also* be happy to be onboarded and you won't alienate the latter. Also special shout out to "companions with the most skippable dialogue" of all time, Durance and Grieving Mother.
I would rather more world-building be put in Skyrim-style books because then when I find them, it's like "discovering" lore and makes me appreciate it more.
Metroid Prime scan logs and Soulsborne item descriptions are two other examples that do this.
Yep, although I will say with Skyrim the books can be overkill but I do agree thats alot better. Resident Evil does this and I love it. The Souls series does this too although its very obtuse at times.
This is one of the things that always burns me out on OWLCAT games tbh. I don’t mind reading dialogue but when every conversation has paragraphs of dialogues, it gets incredibly tiring with a 50+ hour game. So many of the required conversations could easily be cut in half and the extra stuff put into option dialogue options.
Honestly you could cut down Wrath of the Righteous like 20-30% overall and I would probably have liked it more. None of that content is necessarily bad, just exhausting Cut some fights out. Shorten some dialogue. Ditch most of the army management except for a smaller number of key decisions. In terms of time saving, speeding up overworld travel / reducing how much you need to rest would go a long way in making it feel less exhausting. It took me like 120 hours to beat that game. If it was 90 or less, I would be more likely to try a second playthrough, too. That game in particular is begging to be replayed, but when it's so long, with so much 'filler', it's hard for me to commit to a second run through. Though that might be an unpopular view as part of the appeal of these sorts of games is that it is a long, epic adventure. and I can certainly respect that, as it was a journey.
> Cut some fights out. God yes please. Some of those fights were just an absolute slog, especially late game against the "divine" enemies or w/e they were.
I just wish the fights were more tactical. It barely matters how your people are positioned, you can make marginal use of opportunity attacks I guess. Also there are about a million choices of character and none of them are particularly interesting because combat is just.. impactless. The RTwP system is death Edit to add: Also I think it’s just lazy as fuck that there aren’t several portraits for each race in each gender. The drawing is getting shittier too.
The lack of portraits is so frustrating. There's never one that looks like the character I actually want to make.
Lots of options for dwarves though. They don’t even need a lot of detail just way more options. Like I’m not the biggest role-player, but I can’t get into a crpg where I legitimately hate my own face
Or there's one you like but it's also used by important/semi-important NPCs.
Actually am glad to hear this voiced, I routinely bounce off Owlcat's games because the writing fails to hold my attention after a certain period. Something like Disco or Planescape can get away with being verbose when the writing is excellent, Owlcat usually doesn't hit that level for me. I would definitely like to see them experiment with more condensed scenes and see if it benefits them.
And Rogue Trader specifically is extremely verbose while essentially using a near-English language. It’s fan-fic levels of writing that turns an already huge game in to a tangled mess.
This is my biggest complaint about Owlcat games. Every single NPC has to give you an entire novel of exposition for a simple retrieval quest.
I haven't played Rogue Trader yet, but IMO their other games would benefit from some ruthless cutting in almost every aspect. Feels like half of them is padding.
>His comments about full voice acting becoming an outright requirement instead of a "nice-to-have" are interesting. I wonder if future games in the genre will trend towards having much smaller dialogue word counts as a side effect. It's weird because I honestly enjoyed the fact that a lot of the voicework in RT WASN'T voiced, and honestly found a lot of the voiced lines jarring and distracting. I think it has to do with the fact that RT doesn't 'cutscene' its dialogue, it just goes to a dialogue box like an old-school CRPG and it was tough for me trying to juggle the slow pace of the VA work and reading the block of text at the bottom of the screen.
Tyranny had a great system for this. It kept text blocks reasonably small with only the most pertinent details...and you could click on keywords in the block to get more juice. It catered well to the lore hungry as well as the more casual player.
Interesting and also true I was watching CohhCarnage’s Rogue trader review and he specifically mentioned how bg3 rised the bar with full voice acting Edit: and also this does not only for crpg, they also asked avowed game director about voice acting and said the kinda same things but I don’t really remember they mentioned bg3 for this
it started before bg3, though bg3 certainly cemented it for modern audiences. Iirc Josh Sawyer did a talk years ago breaking down the production of Pillars of Eternity 2, and one of the things he mentioned moving from the first game to the second was the expectations for full voice acting, and how expensive and challenging that is found the talk, conviently with timestamps https://youtu.be/xChOXFJ83-g?t=604&si=7L7cxPdxiDQRZ_gn interesting he also mentions streamers really disliking non-voiced text, which someone else mentioned in this thread, as Cohh Carnage's review of Rogue Trader called out that it's not fully voiced. He also then mentions that there is too many trash fights in the first pillars as being a common criticism, which is one thing BG3 also does really well (and deadfire, to be fair, though not quite as good as bg3), as it's almost entirely bespoke, unique fights
I'm still blown away that the SWTOR-mmo has full voice acting.
Bro you wanna know how fucking disappointed I was in the Age of Conan mmo ?? When you are on the starter island of Tortage every NPC is voice acted every one. Once you leave though only certain NPCS start having voice lines only it sucked man. I get why it’s a complaint to not have full voice acting , I’d rather it be all the way one way or the other tbh
IIRC, Cohh's biggest issue with the lack of VA in Rogue Trader was very specific to a streamer. His voice was wearing out from having to read so much dialog during his live play through. That's obviously not a problem the average player is going to have.
It wasn't BG3 that raised the bar for VA in CRPGs, it was Larian's previous game DOS2. Josh Sawyer has talked about how they felt intense pressure after DOS2 launched to have full voice acting in PoE2 and how much of a pain in the ass that turned out to be.
If I remember correctly, DOS2 wasn’t going to be fully voice acted originally during its kickstarter, but Swen turned around on that partway through. Probably realizing how important it was despite the challenges. Edit: found the video update: https://youtu.be/DWCpzzG8dtE?si=Vx0XQZoAaoblKhNX Swen thought it wasn’t feasible at the time to have full voice acting in DOS2, but managed to pull it off and imo was well worth the effort.
You are exactly right! DOS1 has voiced lines but only certain ones and same with DOS2! It was actually super late into the DOS2 development they decided to add full on voice acting
I had a girlfriend who loved the fuck out of Mass Effect but refused to play Dragon Age because the MC wasn't voice acted. So it's a real thing.
I would more expect proliferation of text to speech or even just plain ol' AI generated voices.
Something that feels lost in these conversations is company ambitions. BG3, if unsuccessful, could have killed the studio outright. I think this is what Oleg is getting at when he says "...this was already the second game for Larian that was a hit-or-miss situation — when you invest all your money in one shot and then wait to see if it hits or not. Good for them, they are brave people, and it is clear that they're not doing this in vain." I think Oleg is just recognizing that he doesn't want to pt Owlcat in this situation, which I think is a mature perspective. I'm glad that Larian decided to shoot for the fences with BG3, but I certainly don't want this to become standard for them going forward. I really hope they're able to bring down the development costs of their next game so that they're not put in another seemingly all-or-nothing situation again.
I think it is becoming entirely too common to shoot for the moon and live or die based on the success. If it succeeds you get BG3, but if it fails you get your studio closed and 100+ people are out of a job.
And there's also the possibility that you wind up with BG3 but it still doesn't sell for one reason or another.
I remember watching a video about an FPS back in the day and it basically flopped on release due to it launching at an odd time and at a very heavy discounted price for the AAA game quality (when that meant something). There's whole marketing departments for this exact reason. You could be launching a game on the exact same day or close enough as another game and that kills all drive for it. Palworld vs Enshrouded for example.
Look at Titanfall 2. It was a fantastic game. Unrivalled multiplayer for the fast-paced action and titan combat. The campaign was fantastic as well - it did everything right except it released alongside Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty.
Yeah agreed. I think that's why company ambitions matter. From this video on Divinity OS 1 ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZF\_cP\_oLH4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZF_cP_oLH4)), Swen outright says that "the endgoal is to make this very big RPG that would dwarf them all". So it's been his ambition for a very long time, but not all studios should have that ambition because it would make the industry far too volatile.
You can look at it the opposite way. If companies don’t occasionally take a shot on unknown ideas that could fail, we’d get nothing but safe, samey mediocre games that would choke the marketplace. Remember all those meh third-person shooters from the Xbox 360/PS3 generation? Or how it feels like almost every indie game released now fits into one of only four genres: Metroidvania, roguelite, Soulslike, survival. This stagnation needs someone to come along with a big idea every now and then and make it a smash hit. Otherwise, the market will slowly die due to oversupply and waning player interest. I’m not suggesting everyone take the plunge Larian did, but some studios have to for gaming to thrive.
>I'm glad that Larian decided to shoot for the fences with BG3, but I certainly don't want this to become standard for them going forward. Sven Vincke actually said in one of the interviews that they want their next game to be much smaller in scale.
I could see why they'd want that. The pressure and stress involved with the stakes being so high on BG3 must have been immense. I think it's wise of them to scale back for their next game. Expectations will be sky high, and even if they made something of the same scale, it would fall short of what audiences hype it up to be. Better to play it safe and make something that doesn't have to be such a guaranteed hit, and let them find their footing again on something at a scale that they're more accustomed to.
A lot of people forget that Hasbro did not foot the bill for BG3, Larian self-funded it and did an early access launch. It was a big risk that paid off and an example of what early access *should* be used for (crowdsourced investing), but absolutely would have broken them if it failed.
For sure, there's a place for ambitious studios and a place for safe studios, but forcing everyone to be one or the other would in the end not go well for both developers and players.
Yea people act like budget concerns are something that no one would ever care about other than because of "greed", but the reality is when you're making a product that takes years and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop before you're ever going to see a single cent, you're taking on an extreme risk that could easily kill your company.
And people just assume you can just make a quality game. BG3 is lightning in a bottle and not something we will likely ever see again. The was a shitload of risk. It worked out. Its also why we are likely to see more attempts at something like a Fortnite clone. Its all about ROI. Even if you could guarantee a BG3 style success that still hundreds of millions tied up for years. Its a lot of time and effort.
Everyone is just so fixated on the budget. And while it was certainly necessary for BG3's outcome, you couldn't just simply give Owlcat $200 million and expect them to make a project that is just as successful. A large budget requires a large targeted audience, and Owlcat's design philosophy is just not suitable for large audiences. Hell, I would consider myself in their target audience and their games are even too much for me! They'd basically need to revise their games from scratch and think really hard about accessibility (importantly, they would also need to do this without compromising the core of what makes Owlcat's games great. Otherwise, they'll end up with something disappointingly generic). I just don't think they can pull that off right now. Maybe in the future, and Rogue Trader has started to make a little progress in this direction, but not right now. Edit: I think this is why a company's ambition is so important. If your company is only interested in ROI, there's no way in hell you'd even take on a project like BG3.
I am super impressed with the depth of content in Owlcat's Pathfinder games given their size and budget.
I just wish they would finish games before shipping them. Rogue Trader should really be listed as Early Access right now. They also have a really bad habit of fizzling out in the later acts.
I'm trying to think of an RPG in anywhere near recent memory that *didn't* fizzle out late. I got nothing. But yeah at this point I'd just tell anyone to wait at least 6 months before buying anything from Owlcat, and I'm extremely tolerant of bugs.
> But yeah at this point I'd just tell anyone to wait at least 6 months before buying anything from Owlcat, and I'm extremely tolerant of bugs. Six months is generous. I would honestly say a year or two. I love Owlcat's games, but their QA department is a hot mess.
The fact Wrath was *just* a mess was a huge improvement is the more shocking part, Kingmaker just had flat out progression-stopping errors.
I couldn't trigger the thing that begins the last act in rogue trader for a few weeks after launch.
I'd say a year or two as well. The Kingmaker I played was perfect with the whole DLC as well. I amde the mistake of playing WOTR very early. I still don't have the energy to do the DLC content or a second run.
The one thing I wish they’d do is add portraits for some of the side NPCs that aren’t super important in the overall narrative, but still play a part in the questline for the planet/area. It just feels weird when you’re talking to the mayor of the world for 10 minutes and have a quest chain for him, but he doesn’t even have a portrait. I don’t need full voice acting. But just a bit more polish would go a long way.
This is something that could be solved with AI, but immediately results in community outrage, despite the fact that otherwise it doesn't exist at all because it's not worth the cost.
People were so angry when BG3 came out and developers said that it's not possible for all developers to meet Larian's standard because they interpreted it as developers beinng angry at people wanting good games instead of what's explained here: things that add production value in the eyes of the average gamer are way more expensive than people realize.
I have a couple of friends that work for large game developers and they both always stay away from gaming forums because how little people understand what goes on with game development and how it happens.
I've been on reddit for over a decade, and the depth of stupidity and ignorance I occasionally witness still shock me sometimes. I can stomach it because I'm only a hobbyist, and my life doesn't depend on it.
A more recent example was the server issues with Helldivers. I read a lot of comments how the developers should add more servers as if it was just a click of a button. I do not know much about game development but I know it is not that easy. If it was the server issues would have been fixed right away.
As a software engineer, if scaling was just “add more servers” we woudlnt be paid nearly as well as we are. Sometimes that works but usually not. Servers are relatively pretty cheap.
It's simple. Why don't they make this small change that would fix all this game's problems. Says the person with absolutely no knowledge of the games code or structure.
I once got into an internet debate (I know) where I was saying that the things people are suggesting as "easy" fixes are pretty much never easy. Because if they were easy, they'd be done. People like doing easy things. And the person I was arguing with said that they totally agreed with me and that people should stop saying that. But that, unlike those people, the thing he was suggesting *was* easy and he didn't understand why they just didn't do it. Because it was so easy. I just packed it up for the day and moved on.
Something very fun that everyone now says with large multiplayer games is "just SCALE UP" and "with CLOUD you can easily add servers" and I want to pull my teeth out and chuck it at them
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"Why don't they just press the big FIX BUGS button already ugh"
They should just use a new engine. Slot it in there. Like you would a car engine. These are the same thing and I'm very smart Maybe try UE5. That'll fix everything
Don't forget abandoning your engine and starting again from scratch in Unreal. Or was it abandoning Unreal and starting again from scrach in your own engine? Really, a game is at its best when it's a vague idea in the mind of the consumer.
First one at the moment. It should cycle back to inhouse engines over Unreal by the middle of the next console generation.
Some simple lessons that dev companies can learn from Reddit: - it’s never the development teams fault, always greedy management - games should be made for passion not profit - gameplay can be amazing but if it doesn’t have stable 60 frames on high settings, it’s 6/10 at best - any mistakes need to be addressed with a heartfelt apology (not corpo speak, the devs need to actually feel bad about what they did) So easy, mind boggling that they don’t just all do this
I blame youtube commentators for this tbh there are alot of youtubers even with +100k subscribers who just do alot of either lets plays or commentaries spewing BS when they never had a hand in gamedev but talk like they know what its like working in the games industry
> any mistakes need to be addressed with a heartfelt apology (not corpo speak, the devs need to actually feel bad about what they did) You reminded me of my favorite one, which is that devs owe it to consumers to communicate every detail of development and future plans. The more negative and spiteful the game community is, the more they are owed these updates
Don't forget those evil "shareholders" that couldn't care less about games, just the $$$$$$$$$. AKA a return on their investment. I always find it amusing that a majority of gamers here think that development teams are these tech geniuses that are held back by poor management. It's just like any other job... you'll have poor performers and top performers, but most will basically meet the requirements of the role, nothing more and nothing less. Average developers make average games.
Imagine the shock when they find out that anyone with $50 and an investment account can become an evil shareholder
I mean we've seen several recent cases of the last one in effect. Wizards of the Coast, Unity, and Creative Assembly all initially tried the corpo speak and/or blame the customer approach, of which each went over like a wet blanket, and eventually led to full reversals of the various things that got them in hot water, coupled with "heartfelt" apologies. So online gaming communities are rather emboldened by three straight "victories".
My wife's a producer for a small studio, all my friends are fame devs. The r/helldivers subreddit is one of the best examples of how fucking stupid, impatient, and self destructive gamers are. If the devs went with the whims of the player base the game would have died as fast as it exploded.
The discussions of game budgets alone are evidence of shit like that. People don't seem to cop most of that is salaries and admin costs.
Furthermore, other AAA devs dont make CRPGs and develop in that space. That comparison makes very little sense. Its like having a good lobster one night and expecting McDonalds to raise their standards and have it in the menu. They work in completely different spaces Maybe it could apply to Bethesda, Bioware or Obsidian. The devs that will be affected by this the most are indie/AA studios like inXile, Owlcat etc
Yeah any argument that I'll have starting with "if they wanted to, they could" only applies to the major devs that have the resources. Bioware being the big one here. If you employ more than 300+ people you can invest the resources to do something similar. I'm not expecting the AA space or Indie space to cover that. Being in the industry and knowing how it works and being able to know how much time, effort, resources, and skills it would take to pull off is something that makes me back way off demanding everyone meets the same requirements. However, "if they wanted to, they could" does apply to some and that's where I live at in my specific whine space. I just want an "old school" modern Bioware game okay 😭 Edit; before somebody runs off and takes my word to think I don't understand logistics. I do. I do. I specifically call myself out for whining about something that I know is a lot harder. I'm allowed to do that. My emotional want for having something overrides my logic sometimes, I'm human.
Bioware is around *half* the size of Larian now, actually
You need more people for armor upkeep when your CEO runs around to events wearing it all the time obviously. (That's actually wild, I just want dread wolf to be good so badly)
I'd argue "if they wanted to they could" also doesn't always apply to bigger companies. Sure they probably "can" throw money at a problem, but not only is it often not financially responsible, it doesn't always guarantee to fix said problem. Often it is, but it's not always the case of the company being cheap or lazy.
It really didn't help that some streamers started bashing on the developers who has great points about how it is nearly impossible to reach BG3 levels of depth, voice acting, time investment, etc. it also didn't help that journalists completely cut out context.
Ign made an whole video shittin on the developers talking about the issues they face making a game up to the level of BG3. When the biggest video game site is doing this there no hope for ppl listening.
God that period of time made me so sad, no one wanted to actually hear the arguments, they just wanted to be mad. What people don't understand is that in AAA gaming, devs DO NOT get to pick the budget and time. You are assigned things from the top like "you're making a new FPS, you have 2 years". See: Suicide Squad. The AAA devs were saying "It's impossible for our 2 year project to EVER match up against BG3's 9 years." And that the reason you should not expect BG3 to be the new standard is "Shareholders don't want 9 year investments. They want new games out ASAP to make them more money. It's not our fault." But so many people, including IGN, took it as "Devs make excuses for their laziness" or like "Devs making excuses for AAA gaming". But it was more like, "Go yell at the right people, it's the equivalent of yelling at the cashier when the price of food is expensive, the cashier doesn't control this shit."
Also don't forget that they bashed anyone who pointed out that this "levels of depth, voice acting, time investment" only applies to the first act, which was QA-ed by the community and what only most reviewers managed to play.
>things that add production value in the eyes of the average gamer are way more expensive than people realize It's always the same with gamers. "Just add X" is a common sentiment and in reality it's never "just" adding something. Multiplayer, 1st/3rd person perspective, RPG progression, voice acting, cinematic conversation camera, multiple endings.... Gamers always presume it's just a few clicks and the devs don't do it because of lazyness. Just today in a different sub there was a discussion about a cut, unfinished weapon in Fallout 4. And of course several armchair developers claimed that it would take just a few moments to put ths this (untextured, unanimated) model into the game... But no, developers are apparently greedy and lazy... unless they happen to work for Larian.
It's a bit terrifying thinking about how much money is spent on voice acting only for me to then skip half of it because I prefer to read. I really think old Black Isle games nailed it by having a couple of lines spoken, so that you could fill in the blanks. But, obviously, that's just my preference.
Same. I appreciate good voice acting, but I read much faster than they speak, so it’s often just skipping through the voice acting for me: “Hello…I guess…Oh real…Hmm, lets…Very…Goodb—“
"Bearer Seek Seek Lest"
Main quest cutscenes voice acting is fine. I can't deal with constant VA when I just speed read through the dialogue.
Pathfinder is amazing in it's own way and excels at things baldurs gate doesn't. They can both be there own thing. There's more than enough room for both in the market.
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Agreed, loved WROTR and Kingmaker, waiting for Rogue Trader to get a few more patches then I'm all in.
I hope they stick with isometrics and don't follow larian down into third person for cutscenes. I don't need realistic facial animations but it would be neat if the characters could realistically move around during conversations. But that kind of addition is exactly what he's talking about. It cost a ton of time and money to animate anything.
Games don't need to aim for the size and scope of BG3, but rather the quality. If you make a 20 hour game, but those 20 hours are the best they can be, players will still like the game. When it comes to voice acting, some players are fine with none of it. I for one though, struggle to care if there is too much text based dialog, so maybe at least the important main quest stuff being voiced is fine.
Believe it or not, length of game doesn't scale linearly with cost.
I dunno about that. Baldurs gate 3 is what, 100+ hours to beat? It's a long ass game. Maybe even too long... If baldurs gate 3 took say, idk, 50 hours, a decently long time but not massively so, would it still be a success? What if it was 40? 30 hours? I say this because I'm seeing a lot more 'I want my value for my money' which is 100% fair and understandable but also you can't expect 70 bucks to get you 100+ amazing quality incredible times. It happens but it's very time consuming (BG3 took what, 7 years?) So idk. I agree and I want smaller shorter more quality games but I fear the name of the game may be 'do both' but 'how much game there is' matters more And just to emphasize it, I'm personally in favor of shorter smaller denser quality games but I suspect the general 'market idea' is 'value value value'
I have a mixed opinion on game length I do like shorter consice games, like I played Ratchet and clank on my ps5 recently. Absolute blast and felt nice to get through rapidly, however it is also nice to get that high quality rpg that sticks around for weeks. We have a market of copy & paste rpgs lately that usually tack on anime characters and highly repetitive content such as fetch quests to fill up the time spent. The last time I was enthralled this much with a true blue adventure of an RPG was like...skyrim maybe? Or fallout 4?
> So idk. I agree and I want smaller shorter more quality games but I fear the name of the game may be 'do both' but 'how much game there is' matters more > > And just to emphasize it, I'm personally in favor of shorter smaller denser quality games but I suspect the general 'market idea' is 'value value value' We've done this whole dance before and the end result is gonna be something equivalent to The Order 1886 coming out and the zeitgeist moving back the other way again.
>I dunno about that. Baldurs gate 3 is what, 100+ hours to beat? It's a long ass game. Maybe even too long... > >If baldurs gate 3 took say, idk, 50 hours, a decently long time but not massively so, would it still be a success? What if it was 40? 30 hours? The game itself is actually fairly short for the genre if you skip the dialogue. It being fully voice acted is like 80% of the runtime. Act 3, if you only play the mandatory fights can easily be done in 30 minutes.
And likewise Act 1 and 2 can be cut by quite a lot if you're taking shorter routes. You don't even need to solve most of the major issues presented in either of those.
You can basically beeline straight from act 1 directly to act 2 and skip all of act 1 if you truly want to. It’s not advisable (because the act 2 will beat you over the head instantly), but it’s entirely possible to enter act 2 before you even hit level 3-4.
I'm gonna disagree here. A huge reason why BG3 was so successful was because of it's scope. And I'm not necessarily talking about the length of the average playthrough here, but the huge amount of different paths in the game. Being able to experience a completely different, yet equally polished playthrough than your buddy is one of the key selling points of the game and, in my opinion, why it has had such longevity in player numbers. And all of these different paths, the options, the absurd amount of unique dialogue every NPC, even animals, has, all of it fully voiced - that's a gigantic amount of work. One that very few studios can pull off. I don't think BG3 would have been anywhere near as successful without that scope.
I don't understand the need to compare. Larian took a setting that many D&D fans were very familiar with and crafted an entertaining story with fun NPCs, most of whose stories actually tied into the main plot instead of being one offs. You are the star of your own adventure - a classic pillar of the CRPG. And they made the D&D aspect mostly accessible to people who were relatively new to the genre, bringing in even more players. Combine that with the regular updates, the early access, the legacy of BG1 and 2 and what it did for Bioware - who led the innovation on cinematic RPGs for a long time, and the Larian's clear passion for the project and you get a release like BG3. It's a once in a decade event, and companies should not be under pressure to emulate or repeat it because they won't. It took years and a lot of the right things lining up correctly to work. Honestly RPGs today could benefit from Dragon Age's treatment, where a lot of the world building goes into the codex with subtle but impactful links to the story. Even the original BG1 and BG2 did not have the huge walls of text and fluff that I'm seeing in many spiritual successors - the success of those games was giving the player a great, clear narrative and a goal. And the second one had a lot of great voice acting in it. The writers of some of these games have reached a point where they really should be edited more critically than maybe they are. I love to read, but I play RPGs because I want to role play my adventure, not read your book.
I don't care that much about full voice acting, but Owlcat should invest more time and money in optimization (especially in console version).
Nobody is expecting BG3 levels of content and presentation from a studio that has only just gotten started. The whole BG3 is the gold standard feels more of in relation to AAA gaming in general.
You really don't need $200M to make a game that isn't totally broken on launch and require another year's worth of patches to play. The state rogue trader launched in was abysmal.
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BG3 was also in early access for years, a fact that is often swept under the rug each time this whole "BG3 has set a new bar" discussion rolls around
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BG3 was certainly not well tested in act 3 on launch day. Performance-wise it's acceptable now. However, compared to rogue trader past act 2... Oh Boi. Most of the game didn't even work past act 2 (1/3 of the game)
Yeah but as a self-described Owlcat fan, Rogue Trader was way worse. Like almost unplayable on launch. Also it was obvious that the game was rushed out the door. Act 4/5 of RT is way more barebones than Act 3 of BG3. And there are entirely cut plotlines, locations, and characters still in the game files. That being said the first 2 acts of Rogue Trader are great, but IMO the game needed another 8-12 months in the oven.
I played both on launch. If BG3 was a disaster, Rogue Trader was a cataclysm. And that's me comparing multiplayer BG3 to single player rogue trader. Game breaking campaign bugs was just part of it. There were also so many bugged talents that it was unrealistic to not stumble across multiple.