Is Baldurs Gate 3's voice acting so great that it ruined other games for me?
Is Baldurs Gate 3's voice acting so great that it ruined other games for me?
Finished my first BG3 run, man the acting is great, especially at the when characters get their big emotional moments. I'm thinking "that's acting!", also recognised Omni Man immediately.
Now I'm on to Alan Wake 2 and omg I can't take the dialogue and voice acting. It feels jarring. The prior game I played was Silent Hill 2 and I remembered it was OK, the MC was very chill in a horror game but its kinda explained by the story
BG3 is a milestone in gaming. It may be a bit unfair to compare it to games that were produced at the same time, they couldn’t hope to compete lmao.
BG3 is great and all but there are other games with at least equal voice acting quality. For all its qualities I never felt like "wow, I've never seen voice acting like this in a game!" when I played BG3. It's really good and really consistent but nothing earth shattering.
I know I bring up Disco Elysium a lot, but that is one game where I got repeatedly shocked at the quality and diversity of the voice acting. With the exception of one single character I think it's acted to absolute perfection.
I also didn't really feel the same about Alan Wake 2 like, at all. I thought it had superb acting (both voice and full video segments) and probably hold the quality of its acting above BG3 personally. Alan Wake 1 less so.
I second Disco Elysium's voice acting and also all of Supergiant Games catalogue, especially Bastion, Transistor, and Hades. Portal 2 is the most hilarious video game of all time, and a major part of that is its voice acting.
The Stanley Parable, Borderlands 1/2, Prey, System Shock 1/2, the Bioshock series, SOMA, the new Doom games, Path of Exile, all elevated by their voice acting.
I'd also put Still Wakes the Deep on that list.
mass effect and the first few dragon age games had great acting, Kingdom come has great acting, most of the Sony exclusives have great acting, it's out there. It's just rare.
Disco Elysium was my first thought as well. Such great voice acting! It is easily my favorite game, and now I'm looking forward to Hopetown
Agreed. BG3 is outstanding but I loved AW2, thought the acting and Mocap etc was brilliant
Which character did you not like?
I don't think Ruby works well but I suspect it's a problem with direction rather than the voice actor themselves.
What makes BG3 so great is that it doesn‘t just have voice acting, it has full acting. The actor of Astarion worked for 4 years on it and claimed it was the equivalent to shooting 4 seasons of a TV show. It‘s a huge scope that almost nobody can or want to afford. I mean those studios who can just don‘t take that part very seriously and are eyeing with simply opting to use AI instead. I doubt it will ever be recreated, maybe not even by Larian themselves.
One thing I find jarring about BG3 is the lack of vo for the player character. It seems like a weird omission in this day and age. (Not counting the dumb 'I clicked here, so my player has to say something' vo. Like, shut the fuck up with your dumb chess references, Gale!)
I think the silent protagonist choice is valid in more of "sandbox" story like BG3. Speaking for myself, voiced protagonists tend to "lock" me into a specific role. I absolutely love the voice acting for Geralt of Rivia but when I play a witcher game I'm not inserting myself into the game, I'm becoming Geralt and making choices based on how I believe Geralt would make them.
I don't really see it being a sandbox. I mean, all answers are given, and you select from those choices. That's the same as other games that have pc vo. I feel like it would have made more sense to have no voice options at all, and to just get rid of the ridiculous quips. That way, you create your own voice in your head. In no universe would the character I created complain about having to put her hands onto everything before opening a door.
Anyway, not a big deal, but like I said, it was a bit jarring.
I played BG3 straight after Cyberpunk and that really stood out to me as well. The immersion and emotional impact of voiced protagonist lines really got me invested in Cyberpunk in a way I missed in BG3.
It's supposed to be immersive, I think, so as not to force a voice that doesn't match the roleplaying in your head.
I'm with you, though, I'd much prefer VA.
I am in the other camp, I like the immersion.
I also have a tendency to not bother with VA, though, and to just click through the second I finish reading the dialogue, except for lines in particularly dramatic parts of the story. Sometimes not even then. Just figure I'd offer a counter opinion especially since this thread is probably going to be full of people who always choose voice acting when it is an option, given the thread is all about it. I am glad so many people derive joy from it, just because it is Not For Me doesn't mean I think it's Bad And Worthless :)
They recorded some lines for the custom character. They think aloud when you approach the gith gank squad.
They also reverted a decision to have all the origin characters do a bizarre past tense narration in favor of the present universal narration the familiar narrator VA does present tense. Maybe they abandoned having the player character speak when they changed that course.
FemV in CP2077 totally killed it. Her voice acting was one of my favorite parts of the game.
AC Odyssey didn't have as many emotional beats, but Kassanda was still way better than her brother.
And of course Jennifer Hale as FemShep... I'm starting to see a pattern here, lol.
and mShep, and Mordin, and Liara.... the ME series just had a whoooole lotta amazing voice acting.
BG3 is definitely one of those games with good (even great) voice acting. But there are more of them out there.
RDR2 has some of the best writing and acting performances I’ve ever encountered in a game. The Last of Us is in a similar vein. The Uncharted series has some of my favourite voice acting, especially Claudia Black (Chloe) and of course Nolan North (Nathan).
Claudia Black also voices Morrigan in Dragon Age Origins, which is chock full of stellar voice performances. I’d argue that Dragon Age 2 and even Inquisition had some memorable performances but The Veilguard sucked.
Voice acting? Reject modernity, embrace Dwarf Fortress.
embrace !crpg@lemmy.world, !visualnovels@ani.social, and !otomegames@ani.social, except you mash past all the voice acting because you can read faster than the lines are acted out
I felt this way after playing God of War 2018 and ragnarok. Everything else just felt pretty boring for a while. Currently enjoying my first play through of Red Dead Redemption 2.
BOY
I've got my issues with RDR2, but definitely not with the writing and performances.
Kingdome Come 2 has great voice acting too. Some really funny characters (Adder is my favorite crazy Pollack) . They suffer from a lack of voice actors though so some characters have the same actor.
Honestly, for the most part I really enjoyed the voice acting in Guild Wars 2. But femme V is probably my favourite as of late.
Femme V really nails the emotional arc of V's story in ways that the VA for masc V doesn't, to the point that I'm truthfully less invested in my current playthrough (male street kid origin) than I was in my original (female corpo).
That said, everybody who did voice work in BG3 did fantastic in ways that have made other things I've touched feel hit-and-miss -- I nearly dropped Avowed due to some early mid voice work making me worry about the overall quality -- but Neil Newborn has been rightfully getting acclaim for Astarion, and you have to hand it to him -- they gave him the character, but he was the one who decided "I'm gonna chew the scenery so hard I shit splinters" and made it work so damn well.
Alan Wake 2 is very x-files/zany in its own way. They don’t play it as serious in some ways.
Now that I think about it, the marvellous thing about BG3 isn't just the acting of the main characters but of the minor NPCs as well. It shows an unprecedented attention to detail and love and care.
I think the only "bad" acting I encountered in the game was that one kid who was apparently voiced by one of the staff's kids. And that's only because the model looked too old, for which I suspect that the kid chose their own model.
Agreed. Great voice acting is one thing. Quality voicing a cast that gigantic is another. I first noticed with that frog in the hag's area. You don't even get it if you don't cast speak with animals and talk to this random frog hopping around, but if you bother to, you get this short, amazingly acted dialogue.
The attention to detail is just off the charts.
Oh really Alan Wake 2? Haven't played it yet but I thought Control voice acting and face expressions were well done?
Alan Wake 2 has great voice acting. I think the main character is just naturally more subdued and when compared with the theatricality of BG3 it just seems worse if you're expecting that style.
The Alice videos in AW2 are some of the best acting I've seen in a video game.
I keep hearing this, but I honestly don't like both VA & facial expressions in Control. Both are usually incredibly wooden and stiff, with the facial expressions veering hard into the uncanny valley, but without redeeming stylized highlights.
Well dont play The Last of Us part 1/2 or it will ruin gaming for you.
At least Silent Hill 2 was great as well. Lae'zel's actress Devora Wilde actually did some mocap for it. She did some Maria and some of the monsters.
She's streaming her own playthrough on Twitch. It's hilarious and painful. BG3 was the first video game she's ever played since the Sims back then.
But yeah, they really upped the game. And apparently they got Liv Tyler interested in doing games as well.
We're really living through the time gaming is growing up.
Baldur’s Gate 3 ruined Solasta for me…
Legacy of Kain: Defiance. They got actual stage actors and real acting veterans to voice a lot of the major roles in that game. It feels like you're playing through some epic dark fantasy movie because of it.
Also, it may sound weird, but some of the audio logs in Prototype 2 actually fucked me up because they did such an amazing job. The one that's stuck with me the most is one you can find fairly early on in the game, where a mom is trying to stop a government soldier from shooting her son because he's nonverbal (and therefore can't "prove" he's not infected), and it's absolutely gut wrenching. I had to stop playing for a few minutes after I heard because it was so intense. Here's the recording if any of you were curious.
JK Simmons performance was absolute dogshit