How important is voice acting for YOUR immersion?

Post by Adelissa on 2022-06-09 15:36:08

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Post by Azherae on 2022-06-09 17:40:33

Voice Acting is a negative for my immersion.

If a character is fighting, being hit, or considering something, I will accept 'battle cries', 'hmm', and maybe key signature phrases so that I 'have a mental model of what they sound like' to use for everything I read 'in their voice'.

Other than that, it generally breaks my immersion even if it is above average, because it's so hard for most voice actors to stay in character or understand the full scope of their character for an MMO, I guess.

If I had the option to turn off voiced cutscenes but leave 'battle cries', that's what I'd do always.

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Post by SongRune on 2022-06-10 13:56:07

It's normally negative, to me. It creates jarring transitions between the interactions that have it, and the ones that don't. It's not feasible to give it to shops, or every minor quest or in game interaction to try to offset this, and the quality requirement for it not to feel strange is high.

It's then FAR worse if you have my own character speak. Unless you manage a voice I can consider my own, and then match my feelings, tone, inflection, it is going to immediately shift me out of phase with my own character, and push me out of the game stronger than anything else can, ripping me away and isolating me from the moments that are supposed to most immerse and engage me, and create actual emotional connection to the story and the world. If nothing else, please, please don't do THIS.

I'll happily take battle cries and the like if you give me some varied choice of voices on the character selection screen, and this works well in every game I've played, but telling me that some stories are important, and by contrast reminding me that others that I might care quite a bit about, are not, will never really work out.

If you want clear emotional engagement and context in cutscenes? Use music. Music can shift players' emotional states very strongly and clearly, keep them on-beat as things shift, and give that solid background connection without any of the downsides of voice acting. I fully admit it can be done poorly, but it's also far more flexible, and becomes more potent, not less, when a well-chosen set of music is consistently reused and judiciously applied to the proper emotional spaces. The pure simplicity of this makes it a cheap and effective option that can be applied over far more than just "main story" cutscenes, and when done properly, you don't really even miss it when it's not used.

Music, not voice acting, is the way to go to enhance immersion and strengthen experiences, without requiring the extreme precision and high costs and luck that voice acting requires to function well as a baseline.

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