Custom story's with texting instaid of voice acting?

[jssjr90]

When we look at a custom story that features the character talking to another character, we would expect it to have voice acting. But as we know finding a AAA voice actor is almost uncertainty. The question remains, would we want to sacrifice bad voice actors instead of reading dialogue text? Or let our imagination take in hand and read in contemplate the dialogue the characters are saying? (In this case the dialogue must be rich with detail.) We still get the story, but we sacrifice a big degree of emotion. From the community's thoughts please.

[Kman]

You don't have to be a AAA voice actor to be a good actor, there are plenty of voice actors in this community that show lots of emotion and are amazing actors, the fact that you even considered using text over voice actors boggles my mind.

[jssjr90]

Well I guess your right about that on some cases. Just look at Silent Hill 2. Bad voice acting but phenomenal acting. If that makes since. I mean text based acting is not all that bad. I think of it as if im reading a interactive novel. Now I know that most if not all people hate reading in amnesia. We all mostly know that we do not want to read pages of text with in a note. Though it may contain valuable information and lore, people are just generally lazy in this generation when it comes to reading text with in video games. But if I gave some book worm a text based video game with rich dialogue im sure he would feel the feelings of that character to some degree.


Text based voice acting is not a bad implication. You just half to make sure the lines are rich and interesting. Though yes you will have that feeling of emptiness.


The problem lies with in the fact that you are in 1st person. It would be odd to see text in the middle of the screen. So how do we fix this? Well one way is building a character model and scripting the animations. This is something that I might do but I have no experience in this field. But I might try this in the feature. But the best approach for me would to create a comic book style cut scene. To do this I would need to take a screen shot of the cut scene you want to work on. Put in the artistically drawn character with in the screen shot and you have fixed the problem. With a little art and Photoshop or Gimp, a comic book style cut scene will be the solution. This is something that I plan to achieve with in my custom story. (The Hands Resist Him)

[Robosprog]

(08-03-2012 05:11 AM)Kman Wrote:  You don't have to be a AAA voice actor to be a good actor, there are plenty of voice actors in this community that show lots of emotion and are amazing actors, the fact that you even considered using text over voice actors boggles my mind.

To be fair, I'm using text over voice acting as I find that when you read stuff, you read it in your voice, and you become more attached to the character as you believe them an extension of yourself. I would however, say that voice acting for other characters is a good idea.

[HateSolstice]

If you're making a custom story that involves no other characters physically(even Amnesia and Justine had other characters involved), then I don't see why plain text can't be used. If you're really good, or even just decent, at describing scenes and emotions, then text shouldn't be an issue.

Again, it really depends upon the kind of story you're going for.

[Bridge]

It worked in Penumbra.

[Adny]

(08-03-2012 04:32 PM)Bridge Wrote:  It worked in Penumbra.

Not the same thing. Literally everyone talks in that game, even Philip at the beginning for the intro & back story. The only text that is provided (aside from subtitles for voice acting) isn't even dialogue, it's more along the lines of a help message to aid the player, or Philip's thoughts; there's a difference.

There is never a time in Penumbra where actual dialogue is written out and there is no accompanying voice. There is never a soliloquy. In my opinion, there is no contest that voice acting trumps messages written out across the screen.

Also, I must disagree with Robosprog on the idea that voice acting would make the player feel less attached to their character. With a physics based game such as Amnesia, the game play itself has one of the biggest roles in making the player and their character feel as one. Besides, even in mods where the character speaks often (i.e. Gary's Dark Secrets or something like that), it still happens so rarely that to me personally, I don't feel like it has any effect.

[Robosprog]

(08-03-2012 05:21 PM)andyrockin123 Wrote:  

(08-03-2012 04:32 PM)Bridge Wrote:  It worked in Penumbra.

Not the same thing. Literally everyone talks in that game, even Philip at the beginning for the intro & back story. The only text that is provided (aside from subtitles for voice acting) isn't even dialogue, it's more along the lines of a help message to aid the player, or Philip's thoughts; there's a difference.

There is never a time in Penumbra where actual dialogue is written out and there is no accompanying voice. There is never a soliloquy. In my opinion, there is no contest that voice acting trumps messages written out across the screen.

Also, I must disagree with Robosprog on the idea that voice acting would make the player feel less attached to their character. With a physics based game such as Amnesia, the game play itself has one of the biggest roles in making the player and their character feel as one. Besides, even in mods where the character speaks often (i.e. Gary's Dark Secrets or something like that), it still happens so rarely that to me personally, I don't feel like it has any effect.

I have a system similar to Penumbra in the custom story I am developing in which you can find out more about the object by interacting with it. I played with the idea of voice acting everything, of only a few things, and of none at all and I felt that none at all simply worked better, as if you had thoughts on something with no voice acting and stuff with voice acting, it made it feel less organic in my opinion, and all of it made it feel more like you/they are narrating, which I thought detracted from the immersion. You may disagree, but I feel with some custom stories, less is more and none at all is the best.

[Traggey]

As the lazy bastard I am whilst playing games and simply by judging most users around here english skills I have to say I much rather prefer voice acting.

If the writing is done in a good way however, then I don't mind at all.