Slick scoring and 3D modeled NPCs OR deep dialogue trees? : V - Skyrim

» Mon Jun 11, 2012 8:40 pm

I didn't see anything wrong with the dialogue in Skyrim as far as what they say (well, maybe in a few cases). My problem is that you're offered no options at all as to what to say back. When you do have a few options, they lead to the same end. Pursuade/Intimidate? What a laughable joke that's become. Why even have it in the game (and perk-able no less) when it appears 5% of the time? Voice acting, like I keep repeating over and over again, not only costs much more money than text-based replies but it doesn't give devs much wiggle room in the polishing phase.

The ideal 2012 RPG (in my mind) is voice acted greetings, and perhaps an opening line or two-- then resort to text. This also allows modders to easily add entire new quest lines to the game.

This is simply a matter of opinion and I'll leave it at that. If you liked the story/dialogue better is irrelevant-- fact is that you had more options in Morrowind. In my mind, and as far as an RPG goes, less options = a step backwards.

dude. go open your copy of skyrim, install it, and play it. because you clearly havent... like none of what you say about it is true...unless you stayed in whiterun doing radiant quests your entire playthrough....

» Tue Jun 12, 2012 11:28 am

Some folks seem to be stuck to the false choice between quality of presentation or quality of content like a barnacle sticks to the hull of a ship. You can have both, it's not an either/or thing.

True, Oblivion had more dialogue than Morrowind, hard to believe however most dialogue in Morrowind was repeated a lot.
Hopefully they get text to speech to work well enough for TES 6, combined with generated sentences it would give more variation.

» Tue Jun 12, 2012 12:57 am

I have friends in high places too. Like google. Those rates came from voice.com; see for yourself (and that is hardly the last word; but checking across several sources yields about a +$200 variance. And it is solely for outside the loop voice talent; you get serious named actors like Max VonSydow, and unless they are doing it on a lark, you will see much larger numbers being batted about) . And I also make animated shorts, which requires the production staff (namely me) to record voice, foley, scoring, etc. So I know from experience exactly how easy it is to rack up 20-30 takes for one bit of dialog. That hourly rate is the time they spend standing in the studio.....not the time they spend talking. If you don't have your act together, you can blow a -lot- of money on people standing around getting pissed at you for being so unprofessional.

I suppose I should add that I deliberately didn't involve data involving being provided an actual studio; this is just the voice actor's cost. Studio time ( if you haven't built it yourself, as BGS has), involves another layer of cost that varies wildly depending on equipment, location, availability, phases of the moon, and color of the goat's fur you sacrificed to get the owner to actually talk to you in the first place.

Not that voice.com isn't a fantastic resource, but whoever put those numbers on their pulled them out of their nether regions.

AFTRA rates for Interactive Media mandate a $781.75 minimum for one session, which is construed as one four-hour day of work involving no more than three voices. That's AFTRA rules, and since most of the big names have to be union players, the rest of the people involved are most likely AFTRA as well. Day Performers get closer to $400 an hour, but they're considered Day Performers because they're rarely in the studio longer than an hour.

The site you were getting information from was most likely quoting someone's personal rates for non-union work, which are not at all universal. The only reliable measure of actors' pay is union minimums, because any non-union project sets its own rates based on their budget.