User Generated Audio and Voice

I've read the threads- people don't want cheesy voice actors reading the dialog. But what about the players creating the voice acting? And the players voting on it? Every hear of YouTube? It could work.

Now you might find people with real talent (and for free!). Maybe you entice with some free gameplay credit if they get a lot of their dialog chosen.

I'm bored to hell with saving civilians that say thank you the same three ways. I'd rather burn them up. Screams would be nice.

As for audio, of course you should get more and again, have people submit it and the community vote for it. Imagine the diversity and richness of such a scheme. There would be enough content that everyone would find something they liked.

And it they didn't, then they turn off the voice. Don't pick the new music. The end.

The players have just as much potential (more, actually) for cheesy voice acting than the professionals. Pass, thanks.

LEGION OF VALOR - Be a part of the Legend!

I'm on Skype. There's more than enough 'real' voice acting on there

Also, there's no way of censoring people as it's not a written format but something which a moderator would need to listen to. Give a person a microphone and, 9 times out of 10, they WILL swear.

Also voice actors (professionals) have the benefit of recording studios with proper mics, mixing tables, and a professionally trained sound engineer and editor. There's a lot of work goes into it. More than I've just typed even

Giving a fanboi/girl a mic and expecting them to make a professional sounding recording is a tall order. I'm sure there are some players out there with access to wondrous technology and who may even be professional actors, but it's up to them to pitch their talent to Paragon Studios.

User Generated (i.e. Public Created) voice stuff is okay for things like modding, which may have a limited audience. But for an MMO that is striving to appear professional and slick, in order to compete, it would likely be a PR disaster.

EDIT: Forgot to say Welcome to The Forums!

Honestly, I'm for it - as long as it doesn't require diverting too many resources from the official development.

As for the quality, the average quality of an amateur voice actor is fairly low - but we also have a very large pool of potential contributors to choose from. A method of voting from other users on the quality of an individual's voicework and a means to easily insert downloadable "voice packs" into the game {windows with certain text calling set audio files, maybe?} seem like a simple enough infrastructure to build on.

An open letter to NCsoft

"BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOGER!"

LEGION OF VALOR - Be a part of the Legend!

All of one day live on this feature before the people we rescue say things like this.

There is a whole other side the the issue noone's touched on, yet: Legality.

"Just have them sign a waiver!" Nope. No can do. There's all sorts of legalities through copyright courts, hiring lawyers, creating legal documents. It's a huge pile of work for very little overall benefit (cheesy voice actors that some, potentially many, players may not want to listen to).

Think back to Wing Commander and all the other old voice-acted games. How horrible were they? I still can't help but think back to Krazy Ivan for the Playstation and his obsession with "Flooffy Dice!"

So let's go over the reasons to add voice acting to City of Heroes!

1. Potential Immersion increase

2. Some other MMOs are doing it

Why not to do it:

1. Cheesy Voice Acting

2. Legal Issues

3. Potential immersion breaking as a player who RPs their Brute as a Hero gets called "Villain" all the time.

4. Repetitive voice actors. The same handful of "Good" actors wind up playing all the roles.

5. The Wilhelm Scream. After hearing the "Kidnapping Victim" beg for mercy the 200th time you'll be ready to give off a Wilhelm scream.

6. Other games with enormous budgets that haven't been released yet have it and may or may not flop, whether the voice is a factor remains to be seen.

7. Lower replay value: There's only so many times you can listen to the same actor giving the same line over and over again before you don't want to hear it. At least you can skim over text as it stands.

8. Skip? If the vocals are skippable you've wasted tons of time coding them into the game for the people who skip them. If it's unskippable you've just slowed down every activity in the game which involves voice acting.


So yeah. Maybe you can think of more reasons. Why not copy-paste this list and expand on it in your posts?

-Rachel-

For a little spin on things, I'd like to see (professional) voice-overs during the cutscenes.

Voice recognition on the recorded audio can manage keeping people to the script, if there is a business case for it at all. Sounds like most people just don't like the idea. Will be interesting.

On an aside, having audio team chat would be cool (ala Team Fortress).