I just can’t do it captain, I don’t have the……voice

In a recent post I made on our AvidGamers blog, I mentioned bad voice acting in the new Simon the Sorcerer game. But it doesn’t ring true for that game alone. A myriad of current generation (and last generation for that matter) games have had terrible voice acting. Some people do argue that bad voice acting isn’t such a big deal. That the game is still the game, and in some ways they are right, but come what may, bad voice acting does hurt a game a lot. The “get-drawn-in” factor halves for those games.

Re-visiting an older game like The Matrix – Path of Neo, you start to realize what good voice acting does for a game. Keeping the hype of the movies and the whole franchise in the back of one’s head for a moment, the skeleton of the game doesn’t really promise a hardcore gaming experience. Sure it’s a ton of fun to fight against agents and do cool moves in bullet-time, but that’s about the only thing that you do throughout the game. Yet add the voices of the actors from the movies, and the game gets brought to life on a completely new level. The characters are a lot more believable and you can relate to how they feel simply by listening to the voices.

Some probably feel that this is because you’ve seen the actors in the movies relating to the game, but I do believe it would have had the same effect if those actors did the voices, but didn’t feature in the movies. They add something extra to the mix giving it credibility.

In more news on voices, it was recently commented that Fallout 3’s voice acting will kick Oblivion’s ass. In my opinion, that’s not such a tall order. Taking the size of the game world in Oblivion into account, and the fact that they only had 13 credited voice actors on it’s cast, the picture becomes clear that the voices are going to become repetitive fast. And it does. Even though Oblivion is still an incredible game on my “must-play” list of games for anybody, the illusion of an “open world” is tainted by the voices being the same all over.

But why do games end up having bad voice acting ? I think that people take it for granted. In old games (pre 1990), having voices in a game was very rare. But the games that did employ it, were remarkable to say the least. They were the epitome of gaming. The very benchmark for all games to come. So what’s the difference between then and now ? Or more importantly, what went wrong. A few factors come into play.

The first being, limited resources. We didn’t have jiggerbaaits of ram to play with in those times. Nor was it commonplace to see a HDD larger than a few hundred megabytes. So the fact of the matter is, the game developers had to make it count. They put extreme effort into adding the features to their games. So the end product was sleek, smooth and most importantly, quality.

Something else that I guess could also be listed under limited resources, is the lack of huge budgets for games as there are in the current day and age. It simply wasn’t feasible to throw bucket loads of money at making a game with gaming still being in it’s infancy and being a still-emerging form of entertainment. In which case game developers would go after quality instead of quantity.

Nowadays, it seems like voices are a must have in games, yet it feels as if developers see it as a hurdle towards their game release. Something they have to do, not want to do. An afterthought then, not a feature. But an interesting observation can be made that, the games that are enjoying popularity at this moment in time, are games that stuck to the “minimum yet quality” rule. Games like WoW and Team Fortress 2 for instance. They have a huge amount of players. Yes, those games are popular because of their mechanics, but that’s exactly it. The voices have been added to complement the rest of the game. They’re not there as a huge part of the game ending up in disappointment / spoiling the rest of the game. And also, the amount of voices is kept to a minimum.

So game developers, hear our plea. If the decision is made that your game needs voices, go the extra mile and make them worthwhile! Add that extra spark to the game to take the blandness away. Give us an experience we won’t forget. And who knows, maybe have auditions and employ the services of gamers to make the voices! =D

And as gamers, we should uhhhh, make our voices heard and urge developers to up the bar of greatness a tad. We could even record our own voice-overs of cut-scenes and mail them to the developers. Who knows what we’ll end up with! Either something that’s the same quality we have now, or something better. We can thus only go forward.