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Comment by dmm | Hacker News Reader

Starting with Oblivion the elder scroll games have voiced dialogue, presumably because that's what players started expecting.

But this had the effect of dramatically reducing the number of options when talking to NPCs and also creating some immersion breaking artifacts like an NPC sadly recounting a personal tragedy and then immediately cheerfully discussing the weather or whatever.

It's also strange when the same four voice actors play so many characters. It's just tedious and immersion breaking.

AI has the potential to improve this situation in several ways.

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I noticed that even the expansion packs for Morrowind had a lot more voice acting - dialogue was still textual of course, but NPCs' "monologues" were a lot more substantial.

I know it's just nostalgia talking, but I feel like the text dialogue was one of the things that made MW as special as it was. At a certain point I think text becomes easier for a user to digest - you don't necessarily want some NPC talking at you for ages about the history of Vvardenfell. And MW was very rich in history like that.

> At a certain point I think text becomes easier for a user to digest - you don't necessarily want some NPC talking at you for ages about the history of Vvardenfell.

No to mention, this can sometimes become immersion-breaking. Especially with such data dumps, voice actors would forget (or not be informed) about the context in which their lines are being heard by the player, and then you end up with a random villager or space soldier suddenly giving you a TED talk.

Honestly I think that the reuse of voice actors is even more annoying in Oblivion than the absurd non-conversations NPCs keep having with each other.

How is this a detriment for both of you?

It's a lovely redeeming quality of both games, by far. Having the same voice actor for everyone is absolutely freaking hilarious, too, to boot.

I mean, how can you not love this lol: https://youtu.be/N6hVmn9FM7o

Don't get me wrong, it's very entertaining, but that doesn't change the fact that it takes my suspension of disbelief and bashes it around the head and neck with a sock full of Septims.

One of my favorite RPGs (Pathfinder: Kingmaker) had the devs talk about it. They had limited voice acting, and that already heavily limited their options for DLCs and post launch content. If we actually get AI voice acting, I'd stop having issues with it.

Yep. I saw that change from Fallout 2 to Fallout 3. It was dramatic and bad. Voice acting in RPGs made for much more limited game dialog (and gameplay!) across many RPG series. They stopped being role playing games and started being movies you played through. AI voices are a welcome potential fix... though I doubt the big corporate game studios are going to go back to the old ways.

> AI has the potential to improve this situation in several ways.

In something of the caliber of TES they could just get a few hundred voice actors. It's something like 100m budget vs 1b in revenues.

With Oblivion in particular I think they threw a ton of money to get Patrick Stewart to voice a few lines. That could have done towards hiring many voice actors, but it may have been a reasonable marketing move overall - it's hard to tell given the shape of the market and that genre at the time.

I think Oblivion is the game where all the voice lines were recorded in alphabetical order, so the delivery is terrible because the actors didn't get any context.

VA is a real pain, especially for an indie game dev.

It completely changes your workflow because you need to have your script ready and finalized to record all the lines all at once. Say good bye to iterative development. Want to tweak something or add additional lines? Yeah, that is going to cost you.

I think "AI" based voice generation (well data driven voice generation, I will die on the hill that it should not be called AI as it is not intelligent) will absolutely have a place for prototyping games and having filler voice acting.

The problem is though, that good VA can absolutely make or break a game. Will players really tolerate "AI" voices? I hope not! There is a reason certain famous voice actors are paid good money: it is an art.

People will watch certain shows or play certain video games simply because they have a voice actor that they like in. You can't get that emotional attachment form generated voices.

Voice carries so much more information than just the text. It gives hints to the emotional state of the speaker, their background and education, their intentions. "AI" can never replace top-tier voice acting from humans simply because that would require a general intelligence.

> You can't get that emotional attachment form generated voices.

Vocaloid managed to turn people’s emotional attachment to generated voices into a billion-dollar industry

(I’m actually crying right now, just remembering the emotional impact of The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku — a song written from the perspective of a piece of voice synthesis software which is in the process of being uninstalled, and performed at a speed no human singer could match, as she tries to squeeze in one last goodbye T_T)

"AI" can never replace top-tier voice acting from humans simply because that would require a general intelligence.

This exact same quote has been used as a desperate means of gatekeeping for what it means to be intelligent across every domain. Deep blue with chess, AlphaGo, diffusion generative art, the list goes on and on. It's amazing that people continue to make this mistake to me.

Everyone thinks that their domain is safe, and everyone is inevitably wrong.

There have already been many high profile realistic sounding TTS engines in the last 10 years. Some of the newest advancements allow you to combine a TTS voice with a recording of your own voice. So a game developer can record a line of dialogue angrily and with emotion, and then this is transferred onto the appropriate TTS generated voice (elf princess, dwarven blacksmith, etc).

Voice acting is a field absolutely ripe for disruption.

https://mashable.com/article/james-earl-jones-gives-rights-t...

People will watch certain shows or play certain video games simply because they have a voice actor that they like in.

There are certainly people who do this, but you're projecting. This is objectively a minority of the target market. I could canvas 100 children who have watched Amphibia or owlhouse and it's doubtful a single one of them could name a single voice actor in those shows.

This applies even more so to voice acting in video games, I'm an avid game player everything from GTA, to tomb raider, to portal, to baldurs gate. Gun to my head and I couldn't name a single person who voiced a single line.

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