Dialogue Voice Acting: Voiced or Silent Protagonist?

Alexander Freed recently wrote a series of articles on Branching Conversation Systems and the Working Writer for Gamasutra.

In Part 2, he writes:

What are your thoughts?

For indies who want to up their game with voice acting, a silent protagonist eliminates two-thirds of the workload (female protagonist and male protagonist, leaving only NPCs). This would be for a design-your-own-character RPG style game. With a predefined protagonist, the savings would only be 50%. Even so, this seems like a huge benefit, given the time and cost of voice actors and lipsync processing.

Plus, the player is free to hear their lines in their heads the way they imagine. In Mass Effect, for example, it was occasionally frustrating to choose a paraphrase only for Shepard to say something completely opposite of what you intended.

On the other hand, is it now jarring to hear other characters speak but not your own character?

Is there any way to make this work?

 

For silent protagonists to work, it is absolutely crucial to write your story accordingly - especially the dialogues.
If you run into a situation where the lack of a response is outright ridiculous, you have a problem.

Counting mods, Underhell is the #1 on my personal best-games-evaaar list. Without wishing to spoil, there was one particular situation where the player character opening his damn mouth would have saved a lot of people a lot of stress and time. It was basically a situation where people were questioning whether they can trust you, and you not explaining who you are.

As writer, you need to find this balance. To make the player feel like a part of the story, you need to make sure that the protagonist is. Basically you want to put some of the story-telling-focus on the protagonist himself.
You should already see the problem there. The more focus you put on something, the more obvious its flaws become. And not being able to speak is a massive one.
If you make the protagonist so unimportant that he might as well not even be there, the players won't be as invested in the story.

Again, it's about finding this sweet spot. Half-Life got it right and so did BioShock.

On a side-note:
I would be careful when saying it's less work. The thing is that while you save money for voice acting, you need to compensate for this with far better writing. Considering how writing is probably the weakest aspect of most videogames, that's something you should keep in mind.

 

@TheSniperFan, those are good points. I hadn't considered games where the protagonist doesn't deliver any lines at all.

My initial question was about games where the protagonist and NPCs both deliver lines, but only the NPC's lines are voice acted -- the way games like KoToR work. So the protagonist can "talk" a lot by choosing responses from a menu, but there's no associated audio or lipsync. Any thoughts on this scenario?

 

Some time ago I played the crap out of Fallout. The lack of character voice did not bother me one bit. I didn't even think about it to be honest.

I think that if you were to record every single line, you'd waste your money. Not only would it be a lot of work, but dialogs still wouldn't feel "natural" due to the fact that the player needs to read all of the options before picking the desire one.
It could even end up worse than no recorded lines (uncanny valley - the closer you get to realism, the more people notice the remaining flaws).

 

Good to know! I don't remember it bothering me, either. But the trend is fully-voiced protagonists like Mass Effect, which I enjoyed -- but they had to hire two voice actors (one male, one female) for all of the protagonist's lines. I think the advantage of a voiced protagonist is that you can do a full cinematic cutscene where the protagonist can lean against a bar, speak, and punch someone all in the same delivery of a line, in a third person view. I don't think it would work the same if the protagonist were silent and the player had to just assume that he spoke the lines.

 

I liked Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and KOTOR 2: The Sith Lords. While being old (and, in KOTOR2's case, horrendously buggy) games, I liked that the other characters were voiced, but that the protagonist was silent, but still technically spoke via conversation choice selection. The reason I like that, is because you are implying that the player's (the one behind the keyboard) voice that they imagine for the character is coming through (I imagine Revan's voice being a little deeper than mine, but Meetra I have my own thoughts about...)

 

The only thing I don't particularly care for is protagonists voicing decision choices (the line you actually chose) after the fact. If it's not tied to a decision, I would prefer voiced characters. I just don't like having to have a line repeated that I already read and decided on.

 

That's how I remember it, too. But are we looking back through a foggy lens of nostalgia? Would it play the same now, after playing games like Mass Effect?

That's interesting! What are your reasons for preferring voiced protagonists (for non-decision lines)? I keep going back to Mass Effect because it ushered in the contemporary approach: the decision choices are short phrases meant to convey the gist of the decision. But the actual line spoken (and acted out) is an expanded version. I think one of the crucial differences between KoToR and Mass Effect is that the protagonist acts out the line as he/she speaks it -- walking, sneering, drawing a weapon, etc. It's much more cinematic, but the cost is more distance between the protagonist and the player.

 

For decisions choices like Mass Effect, where the choices were ambiguous and the next lines are extrapolated, I'm fine with being voiced. I just don't like seeing the exact line I just read suddenly voiced out. It makes it feel like a play that suddenly stops, I write the next line of the script, and then hand it to the actor who keeps going. It kind of pulls me out of being the character when it decides to repeat a line that "I" have already effectively said.

Alternately, having the character voice out the lines while making the decision is totally fine (so long as it doesn't get cumbersome), which also has the benefit of presenting some amount of the tone.

 

Thanks! I agree.

 

Really nice angle, not sure if I have heard that problem mentioned before but I completely agree now that I think on it. It also slows down the overall experience while you first read, then pick and finally listen on something that could have been done faster.

Personally, the worst thing I know is vague options like [angry response] and then the character throws out something that I feel is completely out of character or even worse... It happend maybe twice in Mass Effect that I had an option that I did not even knew what it meant

Voiced versus silent characters is a bit similar to the problems with first-person vs third-person view.
The first-person view allows you to immerse yourself more because you see the world through the eyes of the character. You can completely imagine what the character really looks like if you are never show his appearance like Master Chief in Halo... well except that "latest" game where you got show a bit of his skin etc...
Third-person view establishes a character for you either through a predefined model or your choices in the character creation system. This is great when you want to drive and control a story but the player becomes a bit less immersed because he always watch someone else back in the game.

We define a lot about a person through their choice of words, a voiced character gives us a bit of personality that we have to live with whether we like it or not. A character that is only voiced with text at least allows us to pick the voice... a character that is voiced through his actions and maybe iconic menu options allows our imagination to run wild. What did he say, what tone does his voice got etc...

The worst part is when things do not match up like you expect it too... We were testing voice actors once and a colleague hooked up a real Jamaican-styled voice actor with a white character (for fun) and it felt so wrong that we almost fell out of our chairs laughing. At least all of us were crying while laughing.
Side note, the voice-actor was really awesome, we did not have use for him at that point but ended up adding a character just for him in the end

 

Personally, I find myself skipping a lot of spoken dialog in dialog heavy games. I can read way faster than most people speak, and plenty of games have uninspiring voice acting for anything other than major characters. I like it being there for NPCs, but I don't necessarily listen to it all except when it's a) well written and b) excellently delivered. (Some voice actors are so good that they're fun to listen to just for its own sake.)

For the player, I often find fully voiced stuff jarring if I get to pick what's said. The issue is that what you say is only half of the message, the other half is how you say it, and Mass Effect in particular commonly threw surprises at me in that regard. I found it far less engaging and immersive than, say, Baldur's Gate era games where the player's dialogue was fully written out and, due to a lack of player voicing, forced the writers to make sure that what was written effectively conveyed both content and tone. The problem with newer such games is that I'm meant to be role playing the character, and how you behave in a convesation is a huge part of that, but fully voiced games often leave me feeling like I've missed out on a part of that.

Fully voiced stuff works great if the player isn't role playing the character and the voice acting is good.

Voices outside of dialog shouldn't be forgotten, though! People who don't make any vocal noise are creepy. In a game prominently featuring human beings there should be grunts, moans, people talking to themselves/each other, humming, the little noises you don't notice you make when you're doing stuff, breathing, sighs, reactions to hearing/seeing/noticing things, so on and so forth. If someone's alive then they should sound like it!

 

Here's a follow-up design question. Assuming the protagonist isn't voiced, but all other characters are, how do you implement this in a modern game so it has the same feeling of completeness and cinematic polish as voiced-protagonist games such as Mass Effect?

I imagine that you would want to write conversations so the protagonist isn't required to act out responses, since it would look strange without voice acting. Perhaps switch into first person mode (so you can't see that the protagonist is just standing there) and focus on the NPC's actions? Any thoughts?

 

I actually like the synopsized options a bit more, if for no other reason than they are boiled down to their tone which is something a lot of the older games didn't convey well. It might just be that I've been bitten recently enough to remember, but I've had enough cases of an option I chose playing out nowhere close to how I thought it would.

 

That's exactly the issue I had with Mass Effect's conversations.

 

Well you could do the voices like how Nintendo does it in the Legend of Zelda games.
Good example, eg. Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
Where the characters, makes a laugh or a grunt type sound, followed by a facial/body expression, and the rest is silent dialogue, with reading dialogue.

2:21 to 2:22secs. Ganondorf laughs.
2:22 to 5:04 secs. lots of voices and expressions.

Warning: Spoiler Alert.
If you haven't played WInd Waker yet, Please don't watch the rest of the video after 5:04 secs.
Since this is the Final Battle stage.

I hope this helps.

PS: Personally I like how Nintendo does the voice dialogue etc. for this game.
It really suits it.

 

I personally prefer the silent type for any game where you play the hero, and only him, be it in first or third person camera.
That is because you are him, and he is you in that world, you control his actions, and are somewhat linked to him.
You are mostly acting as him in the world, and it makes sense to leave some very personal things like the voice up to the player.
For the appearance, many of those game allow you to personalize it however you want, but for the voices, it would require quite a big bank of voices to be able to let you chose the voice you want, and unless you build your whole game to fit that, it would cost a lot, for voices that might never be used, or only by a very small part of the player base.
The only exception I can find for this is for characters that are not supposed to be played as an avatar of the player. By this, I mean characters that already decided what they want and how to achieve it, because voicing characters with a clear, firm character adds an other layer of deapth to it.

 

How then to explain the popularity of games like Mass Effect where the player "is" the protagonist to a great degree (you make all the personal and moral choices) but yet the protagonist is voiced? Players are choosing to play these games when they could play others, so there's something to them. (BTW, I really enjoyed the Mass Effect series; I'm just trying to analyze this.) When the protagonist is voiced, he or she can be part of the cinematic action of the conversation, acting out lines with voice and motion. Does this outweigh the benefits of a non-voiced protagonist? Is there a way to get the best of both worlds?

 

Well, that's just my preferences, and I don't think of myself as "every gamer".
I mean, I usually don't play all the "call of duty" and "battlefield" series (I still played a few of each, to try them out), and I kind of dislike how they play, but there are so many players that buy each and every one of those, each year as it comes out, meaning that they do enjoy it and at least somewhat agree with the gameplay and choices.

In the end, complete voicing, partial voicing and full text all have their pros and cons, and what matters the most is that the whole conversation system is built and written to take full advantages of the pros it offers.
Afterward, if player A decides that he would have prefered something else, but that most others enjoyed it, it just means that player A has different tastes, and if he enjoyed the rest, then it's not that bad.

Same goes for cinematic modes for conversations, it implies a lot of things, and a well done system can really give life to the whole conversation, but it will be different to conversations that take place directly in the game world, that can make for a more immersive experience. And both can be pretty poor if not used and made correctly.