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Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire - All Dialogue Fully Voiced

Enduin

Enduin

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Oct 25, 2017
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From the Deadfire general update thread



So after a great deal of uncertainty and will they wont they speculation Justin Bell, Audio Director at Obsidian, has confirmed all dialogue in the game has voice work to the joy and misery of many a fan. This is rather big news for a game of this size, with the huge amount of content and dialogue in it, and on the rather tight budget the game is being made on.

As well for those not aware already, over the weekend at PAX East they announced that all the members of Critical Role will be voicing companions/characters in Deadfire. Character/Actor info can be found here. Their Vox Machina characters will also be available as voice sets for custom characters in Deadfire.

You can hear a bit of the VO from a Stream conducted this past Wedesday: https://mixer.com/MaximusRaeke?vod=27848688 - Skip ahead to about 1 hour in for some dialogue.

Will update with any further info/media that comes out.
 
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Bhonar

Bhonar

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Oct 31, 2017
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Very glad this is the case.

I know some more cynical RPG fans will say that just reduces the number of written dialog lines. But quite frankly that's a good thing, because POE1 had too much writing in it anyway.

I don't like RPGs nowdays anymore with huge amounts of written dialog. The new Torment had way too much.
 
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Enduin

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Not sure this will really effect dialogue count. Recording, along with the decision to record all the dialogue and not just some of it, likely occurred well after most of the writing and content was completed and locked.
 
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Enduin

Enduin

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It would be great if we could get Backer Update 46 today with some more detail info on the music and VO in the game, but I'm guessing that's still not ready if they resorted to a Tweet to announce this, but hopefully this was just a tease to get the word out there ahead of the video.
 

Sandersson

Banned
Feb 5, 2018
2,535
Im fine with it. Im doing my first run of white march pt. 1 and 2 and so far the first part boasts really good performances.
 
Derrick01

Derrick01

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Oct 25, 2017
7,289
This is a good thing if the dialogue system didn't have to be dumbed down or reduced in size. It's not like I'm anti-voice acting or anything weird like that, I just hate it when it's the cause of a reduction in scope.

After divinity OS2 this was probably needed regardless to avoid people making drive by comments about it being worse because it wasn't fully voiced or whatever.
 
KorrZ

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Oct 27, 2017
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Good news, I found the mix of voice and unvoiced lines in Pillars to be pretty poorly done and jarring so I'd prefer they go fully one way or the other. I found Divinity 2 to be more enjoyable with it's fully voiced dialogue so it's definitely a plus.

Derrick01 said:
This is a good thing if the dialogue system didn't have to be dumbed down or reduced in size. It's not like I'm anti-voice acting or anything weird like that, I just hate it when it's the cause of a reduction in scope.

After divinity OS2 this was probably needed regardless to avoid people making drive by comments about it being worse because it wasn't fully voiced or whatever.
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Honestly Pillars 1 could have done with a bit of an editors trim on the dialogue so having a bit more constraint with voice acting is probably a net benefit.
 
Sotha_Sil

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Nov 4, 2017
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KorrZ said:
Good news, I found the mix of voice and unvoiced lines in Pillars to be pretty poorly done and jarring so I'd prefer they go fully one way or the other. I found Divinity 2 to be more enjoyable with it's fully voiced dialogue so it's definitely a plus.
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This. Great news for PoE2.
 
Charlotte Lucas

Charlotte Lucas

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Oct 25, 2017
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While I'm likely to skip the voiced dialog since I read faster than it can finish, it is nice to have. This ensures that we won't have awkwardly placed voiced dialogs in the middle of NPC convos anymore.
 
Paches

Paches

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Oct 25, 2017
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This is great, really improved D:OS2 in a way I never realized before so I am glad they went with this here.
 

Deleted member 31817

Nov 7, 2017
30,876
Fully voiced stuff is nice in a crpg but since the angles aren't "cinematic" I usually just end up reading it and skipping like half of the lines because the VA is too slow. Did it for Divinity OS and Wasteland 2.
 
Mivey

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Oct 25, 2017
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Great news. Hope they push this further in the next game by just replacing all written dialogue by voice files. Reading is just totally pre 21th century. I mean, it's a 5000 year old technology. These days, everything should just work by speaking it out loud. Also, let's not forget that the spoken language has far more intricacies than writing could ever hope to catch. This writing/reading thing, therefore, was really just a clutch, we need to move on from it.

Dictated with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
 

Deleted member 31817

Nov 7, 2017
30,876
Mivey said:
Great news. Hope they push this further in the next game by just replacing all written dialogue by voice files. Reading is just totally pre 21th century. I mean, it's a 5000 year old technology. These days, everything should just work by speaking it out loud. Also, let's not forget that the spoken language has far more intricacies than writing could ever hope to catch. This writing/reading thing, therefore, was really just a clutch, we need to move on from it.
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Reading is still much faster than listening lol
 
adj_noun

adj_noun

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
17,217
Nice!

I'm going to skip the vast majority of it because I read ahead of the VO, but still nice!
 

Cap G

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
2,488
This might suck though.

There was dialogue added in patches, after they added White March to the original game. Could they have been able to do that if it was fully voiced? I don't know.
 
KarmaCow

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Oct 25, 2017
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I can't get the Mixer vod to load but PoE had descriptive text to convey physical behaviour or things otherwise not actually represented in the game, how is that handled with voice over?
 
Red.Sparrow

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Got used to reading in game dialogue since playing BG and Torment, I don't mind voiced VO as they add tones and emotions to the dialogue but sometimes I read the text faster than the VO so I get tempted to hit the skip button a lot.
 
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Enduin

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KarmaCow said:
I can't get the Mixer vod to load but PoE had descriptive text to convey physical behaviour or things otherwise not actually represented in the game, how is that handled with voice over?
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Not voiced. Though apparently the Narrator will voice certain major events outside the intro/ending, not sure what that fully means though.
 
Anno

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KarmaCow said:
I can't get the Mixer vod to load but PoE had descriptive text to convey physical behaviour or things otherwise not actually represented in the game, how is that handled with voice over?
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It's not. Prose aren't voiced, just dialogue. Thankfully.

The good news is that they're being positioned either in separate windows or at the end of text rather than between sentences so there's no more weird break in the written dialogue that isn't reflected in the VO.
 
KarmaCow

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Enduin said:
Not voiced. Though apparently the Narrator will voice certain major events outside the intro/ending, not sure what that fully means though.
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Anno said:
It's not. Prose aren't voiced, just dialogue. Thankfully.

The good news is that they're being positioned either in separate windows or at the end of text rather than between sentences so there's no more weird break in the written dialogue that isn't reflected in the VO.
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Okay good. Still kinda wary of a disembodied narrator though.
 
decoyplatypus

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Oct 25, 2017
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Given that we know the voice-acting hasn't compromised the game's writing, I am happy for the people who wanted more voice-acting. I am also relieved I won't have to read a bunch of complaints about "outdated" presentation or whatever.

I will continue to click through text ahead of most voiceover.
 
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Enduin

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I use to skip ahead on voiced dialogue all the time, in middle and high school when my friends and I would always play games together they hated how fast I read the text and just blew right through it and did not believe I was actually reading things, but now that I have way less time to play games I actually have found it a lot more enjoyable to just listen and let it soak it. Despite there being issues with how VO was distributed in PoE it was really nice to just sit back and listen to things and take my time.

Also there will be an AMA on the r/criticalrole channel Monday at 1pm Pacific with Justin Bell the Audio Director and a few other devs.
 

Jerykk

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Dec 26, 2017
1,184
Seems like a waste of money. In a 100+ hour RPG with a ton of dialogue, I'm not going to sit there and wait for VOs to finish when I can just read the text and finish the conversation about 4x faster. Having some VO to help establish a character's voice and demeanor makes sense. VO for every piece of dialogue from every character? Not so much.

But if Obsidian thinks that the VOs will attract enough new players to offset the costs, I'm okay with it.

Bhonar said:
I know some more cynical RPG fans will say that just reduces the number of written dialog lines. But quite frankly that's a good thing, because POE1 had too much writing in it anyway.
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You're missing the point. It's about having more options. The writing itself can still be concise while providing options to the player. If all dialogue is voiced, that inevitably results in fewer dialogue options that haven't had nearly as much iteration and polish because getting actors to redo lines isn't cheap.

On a side note, it's kind of sad how many people so averse to reading these days. I don't even read books myself and I have no problems with text-heavy games.
 
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CottonWolf

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Feb 23, 2018
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The thing I'm most happy about is that is pretty much ensures they can't do any three paragraph lore dumps this time. You can't get people to actually read that stuff aloud. Hopefully it forces the dialogue to be much more naturalistic.
 
ilium

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I think it's great if it's consistent. I read faster, but sometimes I just want to sit back and immerse myself
 
the_wart

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His Majesty said:
this is liquid shit, either do everything or nothing

now I can already deduce from moment 1 whether a quest or interaction will be meaningful based on voice narration being present or not
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I have no idea how you got that from what Josh wrote. It sounds like only a very small number of major story events will have voiced narration. Presumably one can recognize that a major story event is major regardless of the VO. No quest is going to have voiced narration.
 
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Enduin

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Jerykk said:
Seems like a waste of money. In a 100+ hour RPG with a ton of dialogue, I'm not going to sit there and wait for VOs to finish when I can just read the text and finish the conversation about 4x faster. Having some VO to help establish a character's voice and demeanor makes sense. VO for every piece of dialogue from every character? Not so much.

But if Obsidian thinks that the VOs will attract enough new players to offset the costs, I'm okay with it.



You're missing the point. It's about having more options. The writing itself can still be concise while providing options to the player. If all dialogue is voiced, that inevitably results in fewer dialogue options that haven't had nearly as much iteration and polish because getting actors to redo lines isn't cheap.

On a side note, it's kind of sad how many people so averse to reading these days. I don't even read books myself and I have no problems with text-heavy games.
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That's far from true. The writing and content in games is usually locked down quite a while before release. Iterations and touch ups happen when and where necessary, as do changes with regards to the removal of content when things can't be completed in time, but VO is often one of the last things that occurs in production and should have minimal impact on content. Especially a game like this which does not require any kind of mocaping along with it, just straight recording time. And in the case of Deadfire it seems like the decision or ability to do full VO was an especially late/uncertain one.

Games reduce complexity and dialogue options more so for overall design decisions than anything else. These types of choice and dialogue heavy games don't sell as much and creating a wide array of optional content that most players will never see is increasingly a less viable option regardless of VO. It's not as though the rest of development behind branching paths is free. It takes a lot of man hours to write, script and create whatever assets may be needed. Along with testing and so forth. VO doesn't magically make it all cost prohibitive. The entire effort is costly, especially from an ROI perspective.

Even then some of the best choice games in years have been fully voiced. Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines and Fallout: New Vegas have a tremendous level of depth and complexity to their dialogue choices and branching options, even when compared to some of these new crowd funded titles, but are fully voiced. And in both cases I would vehemently argue that any limitations in the options found in those games compared to past entries or other games is more a result of the overall style and gameplay being fully 3D action games than because they incorporate VO. Being a Bethesda style open world game with the loss of many Skill uses and means of interacting with the world resulted in a far greater loss of player choice than having full VO.

And as for people being averse to reading I find that questionable too. Games are supposed to be an interactive audio/visual experience and that expectation is only ever increasing that games engage us on every level of that from the video to the audio. We have JRPGs with truly massive scripts that are fully voiced, or nearly, games with large branching paths and dialogue options like TellTale Games series. People expect VO, especially in narrative driven games. Audio is a major strength of games not just from a music and SFX standpoint and people want to have that complete experience. It's not always about being averse to reading, but finding that experience to be sub-par compared to the alternative and not inline with their expectations of the medium.

Complaints about VO make as much sense to me as if someone were to complain about them taking the time to improve the character models, lighting and effects. You could make the same argument as you do about VO; the first game looked good enough, so why waste the money and time of artist's and coder's with superfluous visual effects and improvements and instead have them focus on creating more content for the game so we have more environments, enemy types/models and other unique assets. Basic 3D models and 2D sprites for paper dolls worked perfectly fine in BG, so why blow a portion of your budget on high poly count ones. I find it odd most people don't bat and eye at expansive and expensive visual improvements, which to the best of my knowledge art and asset creation is always the greatest portion of your budget, but become incredibly concerned about VO.
 

Jerykk

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Dec 26, 2017
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Enduin said:
That's far from true. The writing and content in games is usually locked down quite a while before release. Iterations and touch ups happen when and where necessary, as do changes with regards to the removal of content when things can't be completed in time, but VO is often one of the last things that occurs in production and should have minimal impact on content. Especially a game like this which does not require any kind of mocaping along with it, just straight recording time. And in the case of Deadfire it seems like the decision or ability to do full VO was an especially late/uncertain one.

Games reduce complexity and dialogue options more so for overall design decisions than anything else. These types of choice and dialogue heavy games don't sell as much and creating a wide array of optional content that most players will never see is increasingly a less viable option regardless of VO. It's not as though the rest of development behind branching paths is free. It takes a lot of man hours to write, script and create whatever assets may be needed. Along with testing and so forth. VO doesn't magically make it all cost prohibitive. The entire effort is costly, especially from an ROI perspective.

Even then some of the best choice games in years have been fully voiced. Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines and Fallout: New Vegas have a tremendous level of depth and complexity to their dialogue choices and branching options, even when compared to some of these new crowd funded titles, but are fully voiced. And in both cases I would vehemently argue that any limitations in the options found in those games compared to past entries or other games is more a result of the overall style and gameplay being fully 3D action games than because they incorporate VO. Being a Bethesda style open world game with the loss of many Skill uses and means of interacting with the world resulted in a far greater loss of player choice than having full VO.

And as for people being averse to reading I find that questionable too. Games are supposed to be an interactive audio/visual experience and that expectation is only ever increasing that games engage us on every level of that from the video to the audio. We have JRPGs with truly massive scripts that are fully voiced, or nearly, games with large branching paths and dialogue options like TellTale Games series. People expect VO, especially in narrative driven games. Audio is a major strength of games not just from a music and SFX standpoint and people want to have that complete experience. It's not always about being averse to reading, but finding that experience to be sub-par compared to the alternative and not inline with their expectations of the medium.

Complaints about VO make as much sense to me as if someone were to complain about them taking the time to improve the character models, lighting and effects. You could make the same argument as you do about VO; the first game looked good enough, so why waste the money and time of artist's and coder's with superfluous visual effects and improvements and instead have them focus on creating more content for the game so we have more environments, enemy types/models and other unique assets. Basic 3D models and 2D sprites for paper dolls worked perfectly fine in BG, so why blow a portion of your budget on high poly count ones. I find it odd most people don't bat and eye at expansive and expensive visual improvements, which to the best of my knowledge art and asset creation is always the greatest portion of your budget, but become incredibly concerned about VO.
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You're right that VO recording happens late in production. However, if your game has VO, that places an additional limit on the amount of time you have for iteration and polish. There are other limits as well, obviously, such as localization. However, getting a batch of dialogue re-translated is quicker and cheaper than getting the voice actors to come back in and re-record VO.

Bloodlines and New Vegas were not fully voiced. The player character had no VO, hence the huge variety of dialogue options. Add VO and you simply can't afford to have as many options. See Dragon Age Origins vs Dragon Age 2/Inquisition. Or Fallout: New Vegas vs Fallout 4. Hell, one of the reasons why Mass Effect only lets you play as a human is because recording different versions of the player dialogue for Krogans, Turians, etc, simply wouldn't be feasible.

The difference between VO and graphics is that VO is redundant when all dialogue is already conveyed through text. Not only that but reading the text is often more favorable because it's faster and lets me progress through the conversation more quickly. Why would I sit around and wait for VO to finish when I already know what the character is going to say? Graphics, on the other hand, are not redundant. You will always see them while playing the game. The visuals are a fundamental part of conveying the game experience to the player. VOs, on the other hand, are completely optional and unnecessary to convey their respective system (i.e. dialogue trees).

I don't disagree that many people prefer having voiced dialogue. I just think that there are a lot of downsides to that and that the money could be better spent in other, more important areas of the game like UI, SFX and general polish.
 
lorddarkflare

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Oct 25, 2017
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Jerykk said:
Seems like a waste of money. In a 100+ hour RPG with a ton of dialogue, I'm not going to sit there and wait for VOs to finish when I can just read the text and finish the conversation about 4x faster. Having some VO to help establish a character's voice and demeanor makes sense. VO for every piece of dialogue from every character? Not so much.

But if Obsidian thinks that the VOs will attract enough new players to offset the costs, I'm okay with it.



You're missing the point. It's about having more options. The writing itself can still be concise while providing options to the player. If all dialogue is voiced, that inevitably results in fewer dialogue options that haven't had nearly as much iteration and polish because getting actors to redo lines isn't cheap.

On a side note, it's kind of sad how many people so averse to reading these days. I don't even read books myself and I have no problems with text-heavy games.
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Love, love, LOVE to read, and even I have come to understand why people are such big fans of VO in choice-heavy RPGs.

Voice acting can bring a whole different texture to the experience.

Like, the voice work single-handedly save ME2's shallow-ass cast and elevated way more than the actual text.

I will say that I do no strictly require full voice acting, but I appreciate it when the devs are able to implement it.
 
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Enduin

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Small update from Josh Sawyer via Tumblr on how they plan to approach any updates to the script and the overall impact, or lack there of, on the writing:

melnorme asked:

OK, more serious question: How are you going to deal with patching dialogue in the future now that it's going to be voice acted? Also when did you decide to do the full voice acting? Was it decided late in development like in Original Sin 2? Because I imagine that has implications on the way you designed the dialogue in the game, like in terms of putting details that might change in non-voice acted journal entries and stuff like that.
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If we have to patch text, it's okay if the written text has a slight mismatch with the spoken line in some cases. If there's something wildly off / completely incorrect in the line, we may remove the spoken line and just have a line of text – which is odd, but preferable to a gross mismatch.

Specifically, what we did is voice every line of spoken dialogue and all unique ambient barks in the world. Prose is only spoken by a narrator at key story points. The decision to do this amount of VO was made at the owner level and was made after most of the writing had already been done.

I can't speak for the other narrative designers, but it didn't have a large impact on how I wrote my dialogue before or after the decision was made. The recording process does expose some flaws in spoken dialogue that aren't apparent in a written line. In those cases, I always edit the line in the session and match the written line to the spoken line afterward.

I don't think I'm as strong of a writer as most of our other narrative designers, but (maybe because of my background in theatre) I tend to write for spoken performance anyway. The decision to voice or not voice a character doesn't impact my process much.
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Enduin

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There's an AMA on Reddit starting in about 5 minutes, 1pm Pacific, with:
  • Josh Sawyer, Game Director for Deadfire
  • Carrie Patel, Lead Narrative Designer for Deadfire
  • Justin E. Bell, Composer and Audio Director for Deadfire
  • Mikey Dowling, PR Manager for Deadfire
  • Kate Dollarhyde, Narrative Designer for Deadfire
Good a place as any to try and get some questions about VO or writing answered.
 
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