Chris McRisk here, coming at you with my first ever post!
In times of late, particularly whilst reading through the Patch 0.8.4 Preview post, I noticed Eleventh Hour Games saying they’re focusing on bringing various areas of the game up to their ‘current standards’. This is great because they’ve clearly set the bar high and have a certain standard in their minds, and want to meet that standard across the entire game.
Personally, I’m hoping one of those standards is voice acting. I feel like quality voice acting for all dialogue, especially for a game that appears to care deeply about it’s story and lore, will really benefit the game and it’s immersion. It can really set the desired tone and engage players, especially those not keen on reading through a lot of text. I feel like Path of Exile does this very well. The voice acting and music really pulls you into the story and lore. It can be skipped of course, for those who aren’t interested in story.
I appreciate voice acting is likely expensive. I do feel it can elevate a game to the next level though. For me personally, it really engages me. I think lore books and scriptures found throughout the game can be text based. But at the least, NPC’s should be voice acted. A mixture of both text and voice acting across NPC’s feels inconsistent and unpolished in my opinion.
Can I ask, Eleventh Hour Games, if this is something in the pipeline you’re intending on focusing on?
PS - I really like the voice that calls out during the Temple of Eterra! Feels very immersive and sets a great tone!
I’m not with the EHG staff, but I feel that I could answer your question.
In chapter 9 (Majasa) you can get an impression how it will look like for the finished product. Zerricks dialogs are fully voiced and also there are some ingame sequences.
EHG stated in the past that they are going to do a voiceover pass in the late stages of the game development. This is more efficient for them.
I also love good voice acting because of the immersion it adds. And I’m confident that we will in the end have a similar standard compared to PoE.
Some additions we will most likely see with the coming content patch.
Hi, very interesting. I didn’t really notice this with Zerricks voice acting, but now that you mention it, it explains why Zerrick feels much more alive and tangible than the other characters despite playing many times through the Campaign. Also underlines the point of the OP.
It’s basically this. And they’ve said they would invest more in VA once the game content is more stablised for 1.0. They are still constantly refining the content and story, so I can appreciate why they wont want to invest too much into VA atm when alot of materials are not finalised.
