Voiceless Mods

[CWDelicious]

You know, I dont see what could be so hard about recording a voice. I mean, there are all these mods, and only a few have some voice acting. I know the character's facial animation might be difficult, but atleast put some effort into the bloody thing.

[ub3rman123]

It is REALLY REALLY hard to find a good voice actor. Unfortunately, most people who mod can't do voice acting themselves, for obvious reasons (I tried doing a dwarf voice myself once, but it sounded like a dying cat). Very few people have the voice and the equipment to do recording properly.

[TheVampireDante]

Indeed. It requires someone(s - plural) who has the time, talent and equipment to record voice overs for mods.

 

Instead of complaining about it, how about giving it a try yourself? Find out how difficult is it to get right...

[TodaY]

You know, I dont see what could be so hard about recording a voice. I mean, there are all these mods, and only a few have some voice acting. I know the character's facial animation might be difficult, but atleast put some effort into the bloody thing.

 

This is just rude. Do you know anything about the time and effort that goes into creating mods? You have zero uploads dude, before complaining give it a try yourself. Stuff doesn't just appear you know, you're the one that's being lazy, try creating your own mod with voice acting

[CWDelicious]

You know, I dont see what could be so hard about recording a voice. I mean, there are all these mods, and only a few have some voice acting. I know the character's facial animation might be difficult, but atleast put some effort into the bloody thing.

 

This is just rude. Do you know anything about the time and effort that goes into creating mods? You have zero uploads dude, before complaining give it a try yourself. Stuff doesn't just appear you know, you're the one that's being lazy, try creating your own mod with voice acting

 

I'm sorry, when I typed that up, I was steamed up about something completely different. I should have chosen my words a bit better. My apologies. I didn't realize people would take this personally, but maybe I should have used a little foresight.

 

Apologies aside, arent there quite a few voice recording programs out there? Free voice recording programs? A good quality mic, and wouldn't you be good to go?

[zprospero]

Well, there are quite a few more reasons than that.

 

Number 1 is probably the Lip synch. The most recent version of the construction set has a broken .LIP creation button.

 

So, you have to maintain an older version of the construction set, you have to record all the lines, export the voice files into the proper format, create the lip files with a template (one for every single line each of which are often broken into many many pieces), and then convert the voice files to a different template for playback.

 

And then you have to make sure the names of all the files are correct, that they're in the right place, etc...

 

 

However, assume you can do all this with no difficulty at all, can pull of every single manipulation of the CS.

 

If you can't act, then you've got no hope. Ever watched a movie where the actors were REALLY bad? Takes you right out of the movie, eh?

 

No voice acting is sometimes better than really bad voice acting.

[Pronam]

Not everyone is an artist, nor a modder. Try catching them both. And....tools ain't everything. You can like your own voice all the best but once you put a mic before it you can't put the right emotion on it or it'll simply not fit the idea of an character. Actually ...the real issue? IF you find people or ways yourself to get it done, people will complain it'll not sound right and 'It sounds the same as the others, ugly etcet. or it's very badly acted' (either similar or when the same person tries to put up an accent..both are flamed on). Everyone has a different mic and usually it's one that came with a cheap headset/sound card. Then it's the noises in the surrounding, static noise from PCs, etc . All the trouble there is to find people at the right time with time, being good at voicing, have a fit character, without a cheap mic and some experience...is usually put aside to focus on things people do like...modding.

 

No voice acting is sometimes better than really bad voice acting.

Yep, exactly :).

[JCP768]

Another issue:Voice Acting kind of pushes you into a corner. If you think to yourself: "Okay, I'm going to make a mod, it's going to be voice acted, have awesome scripted sequences, like-able and fleshed out characters, huge questlines, and the ability to have a romance subplot with 1 of 4 NPCs!" You're just plain, crazy!

 

Voiceacting means significantly less dialogue, and when you release the mod and then find that... "Oh I didn't include dialogue for this possibility...", "Ohhh, that doesn't sound right/make sense.", or "Hey, now that I think about it, it would be totally awesome if I added <blank>."....... At this point you'll find that you are screwed because you can't get a hold of the voice actors again, or they're busy or whatever and so there's no way of fixing things.

 

Let's put it this way: Integration has over 24 hours of silent dialogue. Do you think that much dialogue could be voice acted by a single person that has no means of paying people to help him?

[Povuholo]

Even if you have a good microphone and can act well, you still wouldn't be able to do much. Unless you're very good at speaking with different accents that all sound good, you're not going to be able to voice act a large group of NPCs. Especially if multiple races are involved. And NPCs of the opposite sex.

 

Not to mention that for consistency you'd also have to create new 'hello' 'goodbye' and 'you move like a pregnant cow' lines so that the NPC outside the conversation he has with you still always has the same voice.

 

When your mod has 3400 lines of dialogue, for all 9 races both male and female, voice acting is not an option. Even for projects with less dialogue it's very difficult to arrange for a group of people to voice your lines for you.

 

Of course when the dialogue for Kragenir's Death Quest was written we knew it wasn't going to be voiced, so we didn't limit ourselves. :P

[jack254]

while i agree that many mods should have more voice acting you have to remember

 

 

1: that i has to stay consistent with most other lines of dialogue, its similar to how the beggers voices go as soon as you ask about rumors

 

2: many people dont have voice recording things, or cant plug them into a pc

 

3: many people dont have star voices, while this doesnt stop bethseda as all nord,orc,and beggar voices are complete poo, many users also feel funny about hearing their voice coming from a computer character