Voice acting in video games. It's dicey. An awful lot of video game voice acting is... not good. And even if the voice acting is good, often times the writing is not good. And even if both the voice acting and writing are good on the same project, if the voice is presented simultaneously to written text it often becomes a drag to wait for the voice actor/actress to catch up with my reading speed. And even if all of that is gotten right, it can still go sour if voice clips are re-used too frequently through a game (I want to find out who had the idea that JRPG characters need to shout the name of their attack every time they use it and strangle him).
I would also submit that recent games have proven that voice work is absolutely not necessary to do decent storytelling. Be it the comedy of Mario and Luigi RPG, the melodrama of Ace Attorney, or the mystery/conspiracy story in 999. These games are all best in class in their genres, and I'm not sure that any of them would benefit from dialogue being read aloud to the reader.
Also consider entering a new hardware cycle which will drive AAA development costs up yet further. The Japanese side of the industry is also feeling a pinch, less because of high spec hardware but instead because the handhelds that are so successful in Japan aren't as big in the West. Many of their biggest localization projects these days are for handheld games which they're forced to sell for less money than console titles which require, from a localization perspective, similar investment.
So my conclusion is that maybe we should start asking for less voice acting or at the very least place less importance on the feature. It can easily go wrong, narratives can work well without it, and at a time when the market is so tough we see more studios close every week cutting out this extra development cost could lead to more developers staying above water and quicker development/localization periods. Which seems like a lot of benefit to us consumers.
Certainly I wouldn't take this to an extreme - some games really need voice acting to work well (can you imagine DmC without it?) - but maybe we got a little focused on getting voice acting because we can have it rather than because projects necessarily need it.
Thoughts?
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