on writing games

my problem with voice acting

It is assumed that a game with voices is preferable to a pure text one.

I believe that most “talkie” games have an inherent problem that remains to be solved.

I don’t know if it’s just me, or if it’s a problem that many of us suffer from, but many games with multiple dialogue options break immersion big time.

When I am exploring different dialogue options, the intonation is designed to work with a given order, a cadence as one delves into the conversation.

And many times, the order in which one chooses the options makes the intonations sound unnatural.

This is especially true when there are many “root” options, meaning options that are not 100% related between them, and can be chosen in any order.

Here I found an example (not very good) in Stray Gods.

Notice how every time an option from the root of the dialogue tree is selected, it feels like a new conversation is starting from scratch.

This is understandable, voice actors record all the dialogue once and they don’t know the intonation that the conversation should have at any given point.

Maybe this is something that will be solved when text-to-speech becomes ubiquitous, but for now there isn’t much of a solution.

Unless our game is pure text.

We can greatly improve immersion by considering where the conversation is coming from and how we can continue it in a more natural way.

Instead of having all these discrete paths, react to the state, knowing which options were chosen, and change both the questions and the continuations of the dialogues a little so that they flow better.

I don’t know, just an idea to explore…

Do you suffer from this issue with talkie games?

I’m wondering if I’m just too picky 🤣