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Voice acting and dialogue

Posted: Thu, 17. May 18, 16:51
by MegaJohnny
Obviously X has always had campy dialogue, and I'm sure it won't stop with X4. But I feel in XR, NPCs make a lot more quips and witty remarks that sound too cartoony, and there's tons of lines where they just sound rude or aggressive, even if they're your own employees.

For example, NPCs coming aboard the Skunk:
"How does your co-pilot cope with the smell of sweaty male clothing back here?"
"Where's the bar?"
"I wish you'd change the decor, though!"

Captains finishing their orders:
"Yes? And the new orders are....?"
"Yes, we're wasting time now, waiting for new instructions."

The snooty English voice type as an architect:
"You pick it, we build it, you live with it!"
"Are we done looking at stuff here?"
"If you've finished admiring your new module, would you like us to start another one?"

And oh god, assassination briefings are a treasure trove:
"I want you to help someone meet up with their parents - their dead parents!"
"I want someone to make an abrupt exit - from life!"
"I need you to do a hatchet job - no, you don't need an axe!"
"I want you to scratch an itch for me - the itch is a person, and the scratching involves explosions!"

The list goes on...

So could the X4 dialogue be a bit less interesting? A bit more utilitarian? I can handle deadpan a lot better than brusque or flippant.

Posted: Thu, 17. May 18, 19:15
by Ketraar
Personally I liked the sarcastic tone and the overall "we live in space so what's new" type attitude, mostly as that would be me I guess. :-D

MFG

Ketraar

Posted: Thu, 17. May 18, 20:11
by Fleabum
Ketraar wrote:Personally I liked the sarcastic tone and the overall "we live in space so what's new" type attitude, mostly as that would be me I guess. :-D

MFG

Ketraar
X Space is like the frontier wild west back in the 1800's, full of gun toting lawless miscreants... and what do you think would happen if you spoke to a guy with a bad attitude holding a couple of big guns, especially as rude as some characters in X do... chances are you would get a hole in your chest, or in this case, a hull breach.

So no, your crew would not speak to you with disrespect, otherwise you would teach them to spacewalk without a suit. ;)

Regards
Flea

Posted: Thu, 17. May 18, 21:15
by Nanook
Ketraar wrote:Personally I liked the sarcastic tone and the overall "we live in space so what's new" type attitude, mostly as that would be me I guess. :-D

MFG

Ketraar
Yep, you. :P Personally, I'm with the OP. Enough with the juvenile humor and comments. Most of us X players are grownups. The 'witty' comments would go over a lot better if they were few and far between, rather than a constant diet. :roll:

Posted: Fri, 18. May 18, 05:53
by A5PECT
I feel like cheesy NPCs are part of the X series.

I think XR's problem is it reduced the role of Betty. Her straightforward speech was a good balance to the NPC dialogue. Replacing her with Yisha made things a bit too cheesy.

Hopefully with the removal of a dedicated co-pilot Betty can become more prominent again.

Posted: Fri, 18. May 18, 07:31
by Skeeter
Would be nice if say Betty was for argon ship/race and different voiced computers for other races like one for paranoid, split, etc. Would make changing ships have a fresh experience.

Posted: Fri, 18. May 18, 07:43
by ZaphodBeeblebrox
Paranid voice could treat you with contempt as an inferior life form.

Split voice would be belligerent and comment on how bad your fighting skills are.

Boron (when they finally make an appearance) could be like some stoned hippy all love and peace man.

Teladi make encouraging remarks when ever you made a profit.

Xenon 01011100 11001100 etc.

Kha'ak would be sort of scratch an sniff pheromones. So we'd have to wait for smell-o-vision as an immersive new part of the game.

Posted: Fri, 18. May 18, 16:58
by Honved
I'm hoping we don't get multiple pronunciations of the same thing (Suss-a-NOW-a / Sue-ZAN-o-Vah) and other immersion breakers (mispronounced technical terms), probably because the voice actor(s) wasn't/weren't given enough guidance or pronunciation help by the development team.

Other than that, the developers should remember that we're probably going to hear the same lines over and over hundreds of times in the next few years, so something used frequently that's mildly "amusing" but corny is going to get old really fast. Save the quirky dialog for the one-time missions and major plotline speeches that we're only going to have to suffer through once per campaign after we've already seen them before.

Posted: Sat, 19. May 18, 00:41
by Snafu_X3
Honved wrote:I'm hoping we don't get multiple pronunciations of the same thing (Suss-a-NOW-a / Sue-ZAN-o-Vah) and other immersion breakers (mispronounced technical terms), probably because the voice actor(s) wasn't/weren't given enough guidance or pronunciation help by the development team.
I haven't noticed the differences you spotted, but it makes a certain amount of sense to have some things pronounced differently due to different racial/species dialects (even thru a translator device)
Other than that, the developers should remember that we're probably going to hear the same lines over and over hundreds of times in the next few years, so something used frequently that's mildly "amusing" but corny is going to get old really fast. Save the quirky dialog for the one-time missions and major plotline speeches that we're only going to have to suffer through once per campaign after we've already seen them before.
HIGHLY UPVOTED!

Posted: Sat, 19. May 18, 07:08
by Zetoss
I'm in the "keep-the-cheesy-but-cut-the-rude" camp. Employee giving their boss a bad attitude for no reason? SO fired, so very very mega fired, possibly fired and then kicked out of an airlock drifting towards a gas giant with a slowly leaking suit. Merchant treating customers like pests? Great way to go out of business, also a great way to hook up with masochists, get socially ruined and start a knife collection in the torso.

Some dork always cracking the same stale jokes over and over? Most of us probably know someone like that in real life, good background noise as long as they make sure to stay in the background. :P

On the note of people pronouncing stuff totally wrong or different, keeping that part a LOT more in check would be nice but one thing where I'd love for stuff to instead deviate a little more is having deliberately different expressions. Can't think of any good example right now but occasionally using different words for the same thing makes it feel a bit less static and more like the thing is being mentioned enough to get various nicknames. Terrible example but Kha'ak could sometimes be called "beam-bugs" by pilots who encounter them often, because of their weapons.

Posted: Sat, 19. May 18, 15:32
by Ketraar
I guess none of you watched Firefly.

MFG

Ketraar

Posted: Sat, 19. May 18, 20:31
by Dingus Rex
Voice acting. Dialogue. Character development. Character models and animations. Walking on stations.


These things have never been strong points in the X series. At times they are annoying enough to actually take away from the game experience. X should play to its strengths rather than tacking on this extra layer of poorly implemented(in my opinion) ancillary stuff.

There's nothing inherently wrong with cheesy dialogue or humor but it's not something X does particularly well. It gets old fast.

Posted: Sun, 20. May 18, 02:32
by MegaJohnny
On the inconsistent pronunciation, I think most of that was down to different recordings - by AP Betty's lines were something of a patchwork quilt. I doubt X4 will have this problem, as I can't see any important names carrying over from XR (and I'd be flabbergasted if they recycled any lines from X3).

As long as she doesn't say "Ommicron Loorae", though, it could be worse...

Posted: Mon, 21. May 18, 21:34
by Nanook
Ketraar wrote:I guess none of you watched Firefly.

MFG

Ketraar
Wrong! But we didn't watch it hundreds or thousands of times, hearing the same dialogue over and over and ...... :P

Posted: Wed, 23. May 18, 22:28
by radcapricorn
On the topic of creativity in general, I have two words:

Rahanas
Sanahar

I mean, forget X3's miss-isles vs. miss-eels, this is kindergarten galore.

Posted: Wed, 23. May 18, 23:19
by adeine
Honved wrote:I'm hoping we don't get multiple pronunciations of the same thing (Suss-a-NOW-a / Sue-ZAN-o-Vah) and other immersion breakers (mispronounced technical terms), probably because the voice actor(s) wasn't/weren't given enough guidance or pronunciation help by the development team.
I must be one of the few people who enjoyed Betty's occasional mispronunciations. It added its own charm and made it feel like a legit TTS/board computer as opposed to a real person.

Posted: Thu, 24. May 18, 12:34
by BigBANGtheory
Nanook wrote:
Ketraar wrote:I guess none of you watched Firefly.

MFG

Ketraar
Wrong! But we didn't watch it hundreds or thousands of times, hearing the same dialogue over and over and ...... :P
My thoughts exactly.

Witcher3, Skyrim, Fallout and ME work because they have an enormous catalog of dialogue they can call on they set the modern RPG standards. I didn't mind the XR dialogue per se but the repetition just killed the experience stone dead.

Posted: Thu, 24. May 18, 18:07
by Honved
My point was that half of the problems could be solved by providing a bit more assistance to the voice actor, either with a well-written pronunciation guide for the phrase currently being recorded, or someone speaking it first, so the voice actor knows how it's SUPPOSED to be pronounced. Even a few extra minutes of time invested at that point could make a big difference.

Oblivion also had that issue, with DAY-dra or DEE-dra, depending on who voiced the character. One shopkeeper couldn't pronounce his own name (Vornado calling himself "Vernardo"). The list went on and on from there. Egosoft doesn't have a monopoly on the problem.

Also, while the voice actor is speaking a line to be used frequently in the game, wouldn't it make sense to have them voice several "variations" of it, with a couple of words changed or shifted? Rather than hear the same line 600 times, you get any of 3 different versions of it at random. The extra handful of megabytes of data shouldn't break the game, and the voice actor should be able to burn through the variations quickly, because it's all in roughly the same tone, just a bit more or less rushed, relieved, or upset, with no need to mentally readjust for a completely different character voice.


"Good, just in time"

"Ah, you made it in time"


"I was worried you woudn't make it in time"

Posted: Thu, 24. May 18, 20:20
by radcapricorn
You know what's wrong with Albion these days? Everyone is obsessed with AI.

The problem is not in repetition per se, it's the context. Conversation with a person demands versatility. I'm not bothered by the most repeatedly heard line in X3 ("docking granted, command accepted"), even though it's generic and is spoken in a monotonous voice. It's a machine - the same machine - reacting to player input, it is expected.
With people, you want unexpected. Otherwise it all turns into visits to the Cloud District while having arrow in the knee for discussions about damn lizards and difference between AI and AGI in light of Canterran restoration effort.
Skyrim, Fallout, Oblivion - they all have this problem. You meet supposedly different people, yet they impose on you same tired old lines you've been hearing 40 hours ago when you first started. Smalltalk and employee interactions in XR took it to the next level of mindboggling annoyance.
Two, three variations won't save the day though. Ideally you don't want to hear the same stuff more than once per several hours, but that would need a ton of recorded dialogue, is a mess to maintain and edit as the game changes. But the small-scale precedent already exists in X3: the announcement about loose animal vaporization makes me smile even today, although I must've heard it hundreds of times by now.

Modern game developers act as if too much silence is boring, and fill the air with one-liners which are so boring they're annoying. I'd opt for people to be silent until player actually really wants them to speak: story missions, reports on demand, taunts and pleas via shp-to-ship comms.

Re: Voice acting and dialogue

Posted: Fri, 25. May 18, 00:52
by spankahontis
MegaJohnny wrote:Obviously X has always had campy dialogue, and I'm sure it won't stop with X4. But I feel in XR, NPCs make a lot more quips and witty remarks that sound too cartoony, and there's tons of lines where they just sound rude or aggressive, even if they're your own employees.

For example, NPCs coming aboard the Skunk:
"How does your co-pilot cope with the smell of sweaty male clothing back here?"
"Where's the bar?"
"I wish you'd change the decor, though!"

Captains finishing their orders:
"Yes? And the new orders are....?"
"Yes, we're wasting time now, waiting for new instructions."

The snooty English voice type as an architect:
"You pick it, we build it, you live with it!"
"Are we done looking at stuff here?"
"If you've finished admiring your new module, would you like us to start another one?"

And oh god, assassination briefings are a treasure trove:
"I want you to help someone meet up with their parents - their dead parents!"
"I want someone to make an abrupt exit - from life!"
"I need you to do a hatchet job - no, you don't need an axe!"
"I want you to scratch an itch for me - the itch is a person, and the scratching involves explosions!"

The list goes on...

So could the X4 dialogue be a bit less interesting? A bit more utilitarian? I can handle deadpan a lot better than brusque or flippant.

I loved the Assassination Mission Dialogues, there needed to be more witty lines like the above.

I can see your point with Architects, with Traders in general.
It's like they forgot the very basic rules of running a business, like... Treating your customer like a Human Being.
Sorry but If I get slagged off by a Shelf Stacker, I'd either ask to see their Manager or find somewhere else to do business. In X games the Shelf Stacker and the Manager slag you off.. And you still buy their crap.
:D

Fleabum wrote:
X Space is like the frontier wild west back in the 1800's, full of gun toting lawless miscreants... and what do you think would happen if you spoke to a guy with a bad attitude holding a couple of big guns, especially as rude as some characters in X do... chances are you would get a hole in your chest, or in this case, a hull breach.

So no, your crew would not speak to you with disrespect, otherwise you would teach them to spacewalk without a suit. ;)

Regards
Flea
Only, this is not a FPS, so no Clint Eastwood at a local bar,just "Show me your Wares Please".
Not even a "Force them to walk out the Space-lock" Which I like the sound of if someone wants to do a Pirate playthrough?
Being able to ask crewman to escort "Mrs gobby Architect" off the ship while doing 250kms in your Arawn Carrier would certainly cheer me up when being told to "Go boil my Head".
adeine wrote: I must be one of the few people who enjoyed Betty's occasional mispronunciations. It added its own charm and made it feel like a legit TTS/board computer as opposed to a real person.

It made me think if Google Translate had sex with a tele-prompter, would the child be Betty? xD
radcapricorn wrote:You know what's wrong with Albion these days? Everyone is obsessed with AI.
I see what you did there! :lol:

But totally agree, the topic of conversation was always on the same 8-10 subjects.
People are boring in the future!!!