Why is speech recording so unpopular? (and what are the alternatives)

[Oneway]

I am probably going to answer most of the question myself here, but i really would like to know what you guys all think about it and what makes you decide NOT to do it.

In my view, speech recording is a tool that can greatly help in conveying the right emotions to the player. When done right it will give you a richer playing experience, make you feel more attached to the character and will generally make a game look more finished and/or polished.

Against these pro's, off course, are the con's. The recording process can be tedious, finding good voice actors is quite the task, and after a quick estimate is seems that it will increase download size with 5 to 25 MB depending on the lenght of the game.

From what i've read around the forums, adding voice recordings to a game is often concidered more of an extra than something you are to expect in an amateur adventure game. Personally, because of the pro's listed above, i would love to see and hear about more games including voice acting in their games.

In the game i am developing, i even think adding voice recordings is vital to being able to grab the player and keep him interested in the game. This is because i have no on-screen main character. You will only see him once halfway in the game to give the player (and himself) a nice surprise.

So, what i'd like to know is: What made you decide NOT to include voices in your game?

[Radiant]

As you say, it's a lot of work and roughly doubles the download size.

However, speech is one of those things that is better not done at all, than done poorly. Arguably some commercial games suffer from this. Poor voice acting will likely ruin your game's atmosphere.

Personally, I usually turn voice acting off with any game, because I read a lot faster than the speech goes and because many responses aren't that relevant (except of course in tension-filled cut scenes).

(edit: DOH! wrong topic)

[veryweirdguy]

Mostly the extra effort, I imagine.

It seems that MOST games are made by one person, and it is unlikely that that one person will be able to do every voice exactly how they want in the game, and as a result, if they want voices they will have to go out & find other people for it. Most people just cannot be bothered finding others & working with them for what they consider to be an extra.

Also consider the potentially high extra file size that sound adds to the game, and people see this as a disadvantage because it means less people (for example 56kers) will want to download the finished product.

[MrColossal]

That and not everyone has their own website to upload large games too. If you have a 25 meg game and you stick it on a geocities account... Well, you get the idea.

[Ghormak]

Bad voice acting is... bad. Bad sound in games is one of my pet peeves, and 90% of amateur games with voices suffer from really poor speech. I'd much rather read the text than hear it spoken by someone who recorded it with a $5 headset they bought to use in Counter-Strike.

[Mr Flibble]

...When done right...

Thats why its not used. I don't think anybody here can make sure that all of their actors have access to a proper recording studio.
The voices are often poorly recorded, with background noise.

For example, Night of the Hermit. The voices were okay, but Herman's accent completely ruined the game for me. Instead of an old man, he sounded like a student from Liverpool.

[edmundito]

I agree with the Ghormak.

"Speech recording" has the following issues:
1) Some games can actually be designed for text speech only. Like, for example, the old monkey island games have some lines that wouldn't  sound well as speech but can be accepted at text.
2)  It's not just speech recording but it's also voice acting and it's not as easy at it seems. And sometimes it's  difficult to find people to do a good job.
3) The most common way is for people to record their voices at different places all over the world and send their work, which means that the quality of the microphone/room/sound file will be very inconsistent from character to character and sometimes lines said by the same character
4) When the size of the speech file is five times bigger than the game, then why would you go through all that trouble
5) With the size of speech files, some may have a hard time uploading the files to a server if they don't have much room.
6) It's a lot of extra work.

[Kinoko]

I agree with everyone here so I won't go over that again. There are a few exceptions to my stance on voice recording in games, one of which is Grim Fandango. Now, of course, it's a commercial game so they could afford proper voice actors and they really did a good job. I have to say though, that even during that game, I would hear these lines I just... didn't think "Manny" was reading right. Sometimes entirely the wrong emphasis or tone was used, and it was off putting. Most of the game gave you the impression you were listening to Manny, but these few lines here or there would send it back home that I was listening to a voice actor reading lines off a sheet of paper.

THAT was one of the best voice actings jobs I've seen in a game, and even there I had some problems with it. If you leave speech out completely, you're getting rid of any possibility to ruin the tone of the game like that, so it's a "Better safe than sorry" situation. Also, I think 99% of adventure game players know well the benefits of reading only, and don't necessarilly feel that speech adds anything at all. I do find that it's mostly the 'newer' generation of game players that are really into speech in games. Not a rule of course, but it tends to be that way.

It's not necessarily a bad thing, it CAN be a great thing, but it's often not, particularly with independant adventures.

[MillsJROSS]

Voice acting, or proper voice acting, takes time and is tedious. I remember playing around with the idea of a short voice acting game a while ago. You have to make sure what you recorded doesn't sound ackward within the context of the game. And a person like me who tries to make a response for everything the player can interact with, makes even a small game seem tedious and booring. Since I'm the one who has to make this thing, and give it out for free, it's not worth the effort, to me, to record voices.

Now, for a commercial game, I almost always expect voice acting. It does  have the ability to make a game more enjoyable. Look at SQ6 with Gary Owens doing the narrator voice over. Some of it isn't nearly as funny without the sarcasm that he is so able to put in almost every sentence. However, there are games, where I think reading it to myself, might make it more enjoyable. Some jokes are made that wouldn't sound natural if someone were to actually read them.

However, don't let any of what I said or anyone else deter you from doing your own voice acting. If you think you can do it, and do it well, then by all means go ahead. No one will fault you for it. It might not get as many downloads, but if it's a really good game, even those with dial-up will eventually get around to downloading it. That and you could very easily make two versions of the game (one with the voice acting, and one without).

It's funny, though. Even with voice acting, I almost always end up reading the text while the voice acting is going on. I don't know why, I'vce turned it off before, and found I wasn't enjoying myself as much.

-MillsJROSS

[Radiant]

Do a lot of AGS games have voice acting? I know KQ1 and 2 do, but can't think of any others... (but then some people here have played far more AGSies than I have...)

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Night of the Hermit, Greg and his Mountanous Adventure (or something like that), I think The Park also had it... Mittens Muder Mystery, too... Fatman, of course... and Calsoon 2 also did.

These are the only ones I can pull out of my hat right now.

[scotch]

I think the Grim speech was flawless, can't remember thinking they put the wrong emphasis on words, something I notice a lot in the Lucasarts game I'm playing at the moment, KotOR.

Hardly any commercial game voice acting is a negative to me, I am even glad FotAQ had it, and that is among the worst.  Amateur voice acting is another level of badness, I didn't really like the KQ2VGA voices, and I can't think of any better than that.  Bad graphics, bad story, bad puzzles are all things we are used to in amateur adventures, but bad audio can make something unplayable.

[Radiant]

Bad graphics, bad story, bad puzzles are all things we are used to in amateur adventures, but bad audio can make something unplayable.

I respectfully disagree with that. After all, if there's bad audio, you can always turn your sound card off, or play a MP3 in the background. Whereas if a game has bad story or bad puzzles, many people will just delete it and not play it any more.

[SSH]

Yeah, and if a game has bad graphics, you can always close your eyes when you play it... 

[Oneway]

Thanks for all your responses guys!

It really made me think wether or not i should try to include a voicepack into my game. The damage it can do when it isn't 'done right' seems quite substantial. Also the practical reasons not to do it that you all have mentioned are all valid in my eyes.

I have some friends who definately have good equipment for recording (even a small home recording studio) but getting the voices themselves would be quite a task as i (and my friends, who are willing to give it a shot) are not native english speakers.
I suppose the accent would scare off a lot of people.

However, i'm not willing to give up on having voice acting just yet. The importance of it for my game still seems to big. When i get to the point when i concentrate on the voices i'll post a couple of things in the critics lounge and see how you guys react to them.

In the mean time i will try to think of alternatives as a backup. Maybe you can give me some thoughts on that aswell.
The game i'm working on doesn't have a visible main character. This is for practical reasons as i can't for the life of me get a decent drawing out of my hands. The environment will be in 3D and modeling a character as detailed as its surroundings is also beyond my capabillities (and, not showing the character untill well in the 2nd half of the game is an integral part of the plot!).
That is the reason why i thought of voice acting as a way to get the player to bond with the character. Whithout it it seems to me that you get such a lifeless feeling of just clicking around in a lifeless worlds where it doesn't matter how you feel as long as you get that puzzle solved. The only 'lifesign' you get from the character would be the responses displayed in a modified statusline. I hope you understand what i'm talking about.

So, how would you go about creating a 'liking' for the character without ever seeing him on screen (save for one reflection in the mirror)?

[Radiant]

So, how would you go about creating a 'liking' for the character without ever seeing him on screen (save for one reflection in the mirror)?

How about putting the dialogs in first-person writing, and make them very opinionated and subjective?

[MillsJROSS]

I'd also have to agree. Dialog would be the key way to go. Make it to your characters observations on things are unique, in a good way. It might make him likable. It's not that much harder to make him likable. Other that dialog and character responses to things, though, I see no other way to flesh the character out.

-MillsJROSS

[landslidepurist]

My 2 cents:

I've always loathed sampled dialog in adventure games. I mainly dislike it as I read very quickly, and the speech always plays catch-up, meaning that I just click through it. This makes the dialog sound rubbish, so I always prefer text-only dialog.

I also think that reading the text allows greater interpretation on the behalf of the player, which helps me to become more immersed in an adventure game. This is especially important to the jokes in these games, as badly-voiced jokes will always fall flat.

I think that good music/droney noises and sound effects are much better at creating an atmosphere than real voices.

My fave adventures are Beneath a steel sky and the first 2 monkey island games, which had no voice acting.

[Ozwalled]

I'm personally a big fan of speech in games. I don't even mind the eternally punishable and laughable dialoge in Resident Evil. It's awful, but I can deal with it. And take Greg's Mountain Adventure (or whatever it's called) -- the speech wasn't very well-done (loud as heck sometimes, quiet others) but I thought it added a TREMENDOUS amout of humour to that game.

Anyway, as far as alternatives (since it seems to have been added to the subject line sometime after this topic got underway), I've said it many times before, I'm sure, but I think that the solution to a LOT of the problems people have with speech is to take the route of Planescape: Torment.  In that wonderful, wonderful game, I sure many people would have LOVED to hear full voice acting, as its quality was impeccable. HOWEVER, what was used was very sparse voice-acting. It was used to introduce important characters (thus giving you a better feel for their personality and allowing you to voice them better in your head when their words weren't spoken) and to emphasise important parts of the game.

It would be SO much easier to do that for us AGS users. Even if the speech was gawdawful, there wouldn't be much of it. Even if the quality would vary from character to character, it wouldn't be so noticable. And it wouldn't take a huge amount of time, space or effort. I SO wish more people would consider this alternative. I know I figure I'll be doing it for something eventually.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Shannara did something similar. Voices were only used in dialogs. It worked similarly.

<looks up> Damn most insipid post I've ever written.