http://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3106069

pretty interesting, specially his comments about how voice acting is whats killing role playing games.

whats your thoughts on it?

My thoughts is that Ken Rolston is a very entertaining guy to watch in interviews.

A bit old but good. I like him and his opinions.

yeah hes a bit strange but i like the way he thinks and hes very honest about what he has to say, also like you said hes pretty entertaining.

Didn't watch the video but read much of the transcript. I tend to agree with him on the voice-acting. One of the main reasons Morrowind is better than Oblivion is that there's just so much more there. Each character has so much to say, sometimes paragraph after paragraph of depth is added...in dialogue. In Oblivion you received snippets of development, backstory, and atmosphere in dialogue, but much was left to books and other sources. In Morrowind there was so much to gain from 'asking' someone about everything they knew. The "Latest Rumors" and "Little Advice" seemed deeper. There were many more answers to the same 'query' based on whom you were asking, disposition, etc. And don't underestimate the value of %PlayerName% to add subtly to the immersion. Not to mention, of course, that pages and pages of dialogue can be happily modded in.

That being said, I'm not a huge RPG connoisseur. I play TES and KoToR, and some old fashioned DnD. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages...:shrug:

He's right, and it doesn't just apply to RPGs. Triple A titles, as part of their nature, limit their scope to what is most popular. Their very nature suppresses the fringe ideas, or even ideas that were once conventions (large, branching dialog trees, for example) which are now considered outdated thanks to new technology (like full voice overs).

I almost feel as if Mr. Rolston should move to making indie projects or something. You CAN put those sorts of things into indie projects, because they are NOT out to make as much money as possible or look for the largest group to buy it up, however, games like Minecraft show that indie games CAN become a powerful force within the gaming market.

True, but massive ambitious RPGs cost a lot of money to produce, even if you're not voice acting them. And I doubt an indie RPG could get the popularity that Minecraft does.

It's a strange situation. The indies don't have the funds to create something truly huge. And while big companies would have the funds to make that game that the indie developer would like to make, they wouldn't be able to do it exactly like that, because they're expected to release a triple A product with good graphics and full voice acting and all that expensive stuff. And it has to appeal to a large audience too, so they are more likely to get that money back.

Skyrim cost what? 100 million dollars or whatever. That's a lot of sales to recoup, many of them to people who would have the same reaction to lack of voice overs as my kid does when I watch a black and white film. No explanation, or attempt to educate, seems to work in this situation. Ah, well, such is life.

It really is a paradox. Indies want to produce an ambitious game, but don't have the resources and money, but large companies have the resources and money, and maybe the ambition, but they just can't because it wouldn't be worth the effort involved for a triple-A title.

Good RPGs coming out every quarter? Not really.

yeah its a messed up situation, too bad we cant have the best of both worlds... one great example of comparing the old way of making games with a grand scope compared to triple A small scoped game is deus ex vs deus ex human revolution.

While HR has great atmosphere and some pretty good ideas, it just fails in comparison to the original in aspects of a true rpg. HR was basically a shooter with rpg elements in it, where as deus ex is an rpg with shooter elements.

@Xarnac the term rpg gets thrown around so much now that the name has pretty much degraded into meaning you level up or theres loot... which is sad but its the truth and in that aspect that statement is correct. what i beleive your definition of rpg is, theres really no game coming out other than maybe skyrim that will fit that definition of rpgs and maybe kingdom of amalur reckoning depending on how it turns out.

I especially liked his thoughts on realistic synthesized voices, especially the idea of an RPG with all of the characters as robots(although it could be annoying).

The thing about text over voice-acting is that I don't really want to spend forever navigating dialogue trees. I certainly want good dialogue in my games, and text can convey emotions just fine, but if there's so much of it that I spend an hour talking to some person on the street, it will get a little tiring. So I prefer voiced dialogue over text, but as long as the voice acting isn't completely awful.

I don't think triple-A titles have any less scope then indie games, they just have certain goals and deadlines to meet that indie games aren't restricted by.

well by lots of dialog i think he mostly means more than one choice, not simply long text. like take mass effect for example, at the most youll have 3 choices because it has such a limited story to tell because the main character is voiced; now take dragon age origin, the main character is not voiced and usually had atleast 3 choices if not more. point is more dialog options gives more choices which is one base of rpgs and having recorded voices limits the ammount of choices due to limitations.

Tripe A titles have less scope due to them trying to appeal the largest ammount of consumers.

EDIT: @Riddike (didn't notice your post) In Origins, most of the time 10 of those dialog options were "investigate" options, "I have to go" options, "let's change the topic", and "could you repeat that?"

I agree with him about all of these brittle production processes, but here's the thing that always irks me: back when we didn't have voiced dialog, its not like we got all these hundreds of options. Honestly, DA:II is better than BG:II at consistently giving the player multiple meaningful ways of responding to a question. I feel like the real core of that particular problem is that RPG devs just don't emphasize consistent player choice in dialog all that much.

Also: it's just fascinating to watch his hands as he talks.

Brilliant, just brilliant.

Although, I believe mainstreaming, and not just audio dialogue in itself, killed RPGs.


Morrowind <3

Strange... yet entertaining, I'll admit, he has a point on the Voice Over part (though I do enjoy games with and without voice over)

I guess it could be compared to stuff like silent films and films with talking. Films with talking are able to express things easily (to me) but you have to really be drawn into a silent film (ex: Begotten. If anyone remembers it.. It was completely silent right??) maybe I'm not going anywhere with that lol :/

I remember hearing that interview a couple of weeks ago and I agree 100%. Having voiced characters takes away depth because of how much memory it adds on. With having Text based charcters instead of two-three lines you have six-eight.

That's what i've been saying for years too! Nice that someone from the industry agrees.

My answer to Ken Rolston, Hatsune Miku

Vocaloid isn't really a good option, as it take up a lot of CPU and space resources.

It's not really a "real" voice synthesizer, but instead consist of thousands of tiny voice recordings that are then put together like a voice puzzle in realtime to say whatever it's supposed to say.

And that's just one person. Just having 10 different NPCs with 10 different voices would increase the amount of space considerably. All the "voice puzzle pieces" for one voice take a lot of space.

Not to mention the enormous amounts of time they have to spend to record all the "voice puzzle pieces" for one voice. I doubt he would want a barbarian to sound like Hatsune Miku (or in reality the voice actress Saki Fujita).

I know Origins was a poor example but i was just using it since its one of the more recent games with a silent PC and i just compared it to a similar game, mass effect. DAO still has more options than mass effect even with the examples you gave. Im a bit surprised you would bring up DA2 since that game lacks in so many ways to DAO (DA2 has the set up to a good story but simple fails due to many things and it being rushed). DA2 suffers from the same thing as mass effect from having a voice actor, giving the player limited options when compared to the silent PC of DAO.

All that said, you are right that we didnt have hundreds of options when we had text based dialog but again that comes from limitations that the devs had.

I want to hear him kindly ask what my job is and when I was born, and then hand me my release papers...

I agree with him on recorded audio and having millions of dialogue branches and trees.

Might check out Reckoning.

Only thing I would voice:

Only need for voice acting -Main quest characters possibly, intro that explains the background of the world, ending, etc.