Hearing Voices

Was having a discussion with the audio programmer yesterday, and we had a moment of commiseration on the prevalence of voice over in current-gen games.

VO, done correctly, can certainly add a lot to a game - not the least being making it more 'movie-like', which seems to the ambition of a great many games developers.  But I'm growing ever more of the opinion that the payoff is not commensurate to the cost.  VO can be a hugely expensive endeavour, particularly if you're hiring big-name actors.  On top of that cost is the extra manpower required to implement, test, localise - and we can't forget the game memory it takes, particularly on older hardware.  That's memory taken away from sound effects, music, and potentially a whole range of other assets.

But is it really worth it, when hardly anyone is going to sit through the character telling you what button to press?  I guarantee you the vast majority of players will be reading the text and skipping it before it's halfway through.  I certainly do, sometimes even on games with voices I really like.

It seems at times that nearly every game I've worked on winds up having voice over everywhere. The characters will exchange witticisms at every point in their journey, taunt their opponents, encourage their friends, react to every obstacle or event.  This is not even including shops, or cutscenes, and let's not forget the last-minute monster that is tutorials.  

If you implement every bit of it, your characters become chatterboxes who don't shut up for more than five seconds.  They're talking over music, over sound effects, over action.  How many action movies have the hero delivering one liners every second time he does something?  Wait, scratch that - how many good action movies?  

This will also get repetitive very very quickly - and if it's a frequent enough action, no number of variations (more expense) will rescue it.  

Sometimes, with sound design, what you leave out is just as important as what you leave in.  It should be okay to have moments of silence.  Those moments lend more dynamics to your mix - they make the moments of frenzied cacophony have so much more impact.

Some food for thought.  The trend is unlikely to go away soon.  But I hope in the future we will be able to exercise restraint with voice over, much in the same way games have to learned to restrain themselves with bloom and coloured lighting.