Possible Road Block For Fallout 4 Modding: Talking Protagonist

[Deleted31449895User]

In Fallout 3 and New Vegas, if you wanted to create a custom companion or a custom NPC, you could, and all you have to worry about is giving the NPC a good sounding voice actor. But, now with Fallout 4's voice protagonist, you will also have to find away to get a good sounding voice actor that can do a good immitation of the Sole Survivor's voices, as their is more interaction between Sole and Companions in this game. Otherwise you could have HUGE disconnect.

[Lisnpuppy]

True to an extent. Also the possibility of using lines already in the game exist, though as much work perhaps to find fitting lines for the sole survivor to say in response to the voiced NPCs.

 

There has been a great deal of talk about this between some modders already. I look forward to the release of the official tools to see what can be done. I have no doubt the modders can overcome this (even if in a limited way) and make voice mods. The Sole Survivor doesn't have to be the mouthy one, after all. :)

[PoliteRaider]

Using the existing lines is probably my personal preference. We've got 13,000 lines of spoken dialogue to choose from and you can enhance that by editing lines a little although there are definite limits there. Maybe even get a voice actor to impersonate the sole survivor's voice actor for a couple of lines that you can mix in with the genuine ones to expand your options.

[TeamBacon]

Modern sound engineering is great.

[Deleted31449895User]

I still think quite a few will stick with New Vegas for a while. despite being a near 6 year old game it has aged rather well, especially with mods. Plus, it has features that 4 doesn't, such as the Skill system.

[Boombro]

You and many others will have to handle the PC being quiet sadly.

[GnatGoSplat]

You can probably cut & splice existing dialog and make it sound fairly decent. That was done on the Bittercup companion for FO3 and I expanded on that when I ported her for FONV and added more dialog options. It may have sounded a bit William Shatner-ish, but overall quite passable.

[llamaRCA]

I think most modders will reuse vanilla dialogue for the player because that's easiest, although very limiting.

 

Some will find voice actors that can adequately mimic the original voice actors so they can add additional dialogue above and beyond reused vanilla dialogue which will give them more scope for storytelling.

 

Neither solution, imo, is ideal, but it's what we're stuck with and those of us who write a lot of dialogue will have to get creative and do the best we can with what we've been given.

[MLeonhardt]

Honestly, as purely a Mod consumer, I don't mind at all if the Protag is silent if I get new characters for them to talk to.

[Testudini]

I've been planning a mod that features both quests and a companion. Here's how I'm planning on dealing with the voiced protagonist:

 

1. For the quests, the protagonist will be completely silent. For the dialogue, I'll have two actual "lines" per choice. The brief summary of the option that you get in the vanilla game (and sort of like Oblivion's dialogue, where the dialogue was just "Jauffre", "Kvatch", "Amulet", etc.) and then the detailed subtitles you'd get if the character actually had a voice. If you have a mod that displays the full line of dialogue, you'll see the full line in my mod. Otherwise, you'll see the brief summary. I don't know how reliable this method will be though.

 

2. For the companion, I will use the method above for unique dialogue (such as for his introduction and companion quest), but for general running around and interaction (trading, asking about relationship, etc.) I'll re-use generic dialogue.

 

So, in a way, I'm going for a sort of hybrid system. Silent dialogue for quests and generic dialogue for generic prompts. Hopefully it'll work out well.