As a guess, I'd say any voices will be free assets taken from the internet. With a rare few being voiced.

I'm hoping for conversations to be mostly text based. No offense to any games that may come to mind, but I don't want every npc to have the same voice and dialogue options.

Vision in my head is Elder scrolls 3 style. NPC says an opening line that sounds similar based on race, and then all the conversation is text based.

"Hello Outlander"

Good luck having voice actors say the names from the name generator

Yea, I doubt we'll have voice for more than greeting and maybe getting attention. Or there will just be random gibberish voice to indicate people are talking, like in the SIMS. A text-voice link just doesnt seem viable for the amount of different texts and the budget. Or it will just be AI-voice.

I don't mind giving my voice for free, and no: I am not a female :)

because of how many voice lines there can be I think it will be very expensive and long to voice every NPC, sure for NPC to reply all the dialogue must be written in code, it won't magically appear, but it's always easy to tweak text and add more lines in needed without having to worry about voicing it.

Only thing I'd like to be voiced is snipehunter as the narrator

I prefer no sound as then I don't need associate certain voices with character.

I don't think it would be feasible given the budget the studio is working with. There will be potentially hundreds of thousands of NPCs? Not to mention, players spark into NPCs so voice overs are of very limited value. This is something just better suited to single player games I think where you might only interact with a few dozen NPCs at most.

The only exception I'd make is for any NPC dukes. And for those, I'd nominate members of the studio to do the voice overs, mostly for the shits and giggles. I think Caspian at one point said that each tribe would have an advocate at SBS, and if so, there's their chance for a bit of immortality.

Posted By Gromschlog at 03:25 AM - Sat Dec 01 2018

Yea, I doubt we'll have voice for more than greeting and maybe getting attention. Or there will just be random gibberish voice to indicate people are talking, like in the SIMS. A text-voice link just doesnt seem viable for the amount of different texts and the budget. Or it will just be AI-voice.

This is what I was thinking too. With all the different languages, that's just too much work. Having nonsense like the Sims would have to be the way to go. Maybe even in different dialects based on which language was being spoken. Do a female version and a male version, then randomly choose a pitch on creation for NPC's. Procedurally generated voices! That could actually work if they aren't speaking real words.

Posted By Ravenlute at 10:57 PM - Sat Dec 01 2018

Posted By Gromschlog at 03:25 AM - Sat Dec 01 2018

Yea, I doubt we'll have voice for more than greeting and maybe getting attention. Or there will just be random gibberish voice to indicate people are talking, like in the SIMS. A text-voice link just doesnt seem viable for the amount of different texts and the budget. Or it will just be AI-voice.

This is what I was thinking too. With all the different languages, that's just too much work. Having nonsense like the Sims would have to be the way to go. Maybe even in different dialects based on which language was being spoken. Do a female version and a male version, then randomly choose a pitch on creation for NPC's. Procedurally generated voices! That could actually work if they aren't speaking real words.

Wish I could give this more upvotes! Love, love, love, the idea of a sim-like voice generator. It would flesh out the world and add a depth of immersion without everyone sounding the same. And it would not be doing so in an unnecessarily complicated or expensive way, given there will be thousands of randomly generated characters over time.

Sound is an important part of environment in any video game setting and it would be ashame (and a bit weird) if all the characters were either completely silent or sounded completely the same. Given most of the sound from mann we would hear outside of text dialogue would probably be some form of grunts, screaming, or exclamations (from combat, parkour, surprising events, etc)—generator with pitch variation sounds like a great compromise to me!

I think there wont be much voice at all, if any. There isn't standard quests with scripts that could be voiced, as the story nature of the game, npc interactions, makes the speech to each pc different depending on their part in the story. I guess there might be frequent thing's npc's could say randomly when just going about their business, but I agree with some of the other posters, budget may not allow this even.

I have gotten so used to hearing voices in my games, this didn't even occur to me.

As much as I would like to try my hand at voice acting, I think procedurally generated voices is more inline with the engine design in general.

Since we would sometimes understand the other people, it would be interesting if we heard their native tongue unless we were adept at the language; and heard our IRL native tongue if we were. Can't remember which game it was, but I seem to remember something many years ago where your proficiency determined how many words were auto-translated.

I dont think we'll see voice acting aside from MAYBE (big maybe) a handful of emotes from each tribe, basic things like a laugh or greeting, jokes perhaps, and this would just be silly flavor.

Something to keep in mind is NPCs are supposed to try and get as close to being seen as a player as possible, and since the average player wont have voice coms or voice acted characters I doubt we will see voice acted NPC's even important ones like dukes etc.

One other possibility is maybe voice acting for really big story events that involve beings players wont be able to play, or perhaps large events could get a cut scene that was just narrated, but all while possible I doubt we'll even see voice acting or narration take this form.

I really hope they have voice actors, otherwise I never listen to the quests.

Posted By Higuy333 at 12:14 PM - Sun Dec 02 2018

I really hope they have voice actors, otherwise I never listen to the quests.

I think that is a big part of the argument though Higuy, there are no "quests" there are contracts to complete things which are given by anyone, for anything, including other players.

This and the fact that the goal is to have most of the worlds population be players, who would the voices be for?

I have to agree with everyone saying there might be minimal at best voice acting in this game.