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Friday Fun Thread for April 26, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I think there's a significant difference between VA in a game like TF2, versus a game like BG3. In the latter case developers inevitably have to decide between a) having only some lines voice acted, b) the budget ballooning to get all the VA work paid for, or c) cutting content. RPGs have a lot of dialogue which often branches, that's really hard to do VA for.

Haven't played BG3 so I can't comment on the quality of VA there.

Generally speaking, there is a special effect of the human voice that you can't get with walls of text. Obviously it can be poorly executed, however.

Nevertheless I suspect that with AI speech generation this will be largely moot in the next decade.

The VA is great in BG3, because they went for option 2. Everything gets voice acting and it's really nice, but I just don't think that's sustainable for most games. You're right that AI generated voice work will probably render it moot though.