Would you be willing to have less voice acting in exchange for more choices?

[Samz707]

I know IS probably won't read this but I'm curious if anyone agrees with me here. (Also kinda writing this out a bit late where I live so I may not exactly do this great.)

While it's not quite a justification for how little meaningful dialogue choices there are in 3H (Look at any RPG with voice acting.) would you be okay with there being less voice acting overall (Such as for the Monastery ) if it resulted in you having more choices in dialogue?

I've noticed that a few good text adventures tend to give the player a decent-to-large amount of options and having only text (or less voiced dialogue at least, basically not having every little interaction being voiced.) would no doubt make this somewhat more plausible for an FE game.

 

I feel a good example of why I'm so disapointed (and wondering if FE should take after Text Adventures) is the Ball from 3H.

I'm going to compare it to a similar event in Guenevere, an in-development Choice of Games Text Adventure, written by one person about playing as Guenevere in the King Arthur Myth. (But has the advantage of being a text adventure so only really text but I believe a big game studio could probably do this in something like 3H, especially given 3H fondness for cutting corners as much as humanly possible in terms of interacting with people.)

In Guenevere, this event is a Wedding Banquet for Guenevere and Arthur's arranged wedding, which happens to also involve alot of dancing so I consider it a comparable event. (Granted this is the first real event of Guenevere so it'd kinda probably get the most effort but this was important enough to get a CG cutscene in 3H which is a much longer game with much more developers and budget.)

For starters, Byleth is pretty much stated by Sothis to dislike it regardless, while Genevere's attitude towards it is decided by the player. (Minor but a choice none the less.)

In 3H we see some dancing, Claude takes our hand...and it's over, it feels more like an excuse for the shipping moment in the Goddess tower to be honest.

In Genevere, we get to decide how we approach this, we can be cheerful and dance with everyone, dance a little or decide you're going to do the one dance everyone expects with Arthur then find a chair because you're not a fan of this.

You then get to decide if you chat with a few named characters with dialogue and some interactions. (Though you can only interact with at max 2 before the Ball ends.)

(Also if say, Lancelot was to do the Claude thing and grab your hand, you'd have the option to decline, accept or potentially, on instinct throw/nearly throw Claude to the ground because you're a hardened mercenary and you're kinda used to people grabbing you during a fight and therefore make a bit of a scene, and potentially add an extra Seteth/Rhea scene at some point where they chew you out for this, since a kinda similar interaction can happen later on in Guenevere and this event is decently long into 3H.)

Afterwards, you get to decide if you tag along with Arthur/Lancelot stealing fireworks from Merlin or talk with Arthur's Half-Sister Morgana or decline both and simply try to go to bed.

So if this was 3H, you'd also get to decide if Byleth actually goes to the Goddess Tower or just goes off to bed. (And in the case of a few similar Choice of Games, perhaps have the option to do something dumb earlier and challenge Manuela to a drinking contest, then miss out on the rest of the event because what did you expect was going to happen and wake up with a hang over tomorrow or even literally do just get the option to ask to guard the outside because you don't want to attend the Ball, then you skip it straight into the Goddes Tower choice.)

Guenevere also can potentially have an ominous dream you can have here but only if you go out of your way to avoid interacting with others a fair bit. (So in 3H terms you'd get another vision dream like the start or a Sothis interaction if you basically try to avoid interacting with anyone for the most part and have Byleth go to bed early.)

So while Guenevere has no voice acting (or even Graphics), it's Big Fancy Dance event feels like an involved fleshed out event with a good few choices that improve your relationship with characters as well as letting you decide if Guenevere is happy with/indifferent-ish or outright hates the Dance. (And a hidden little vision for those that go out of their way to be "I'm getting married against my will and I hate it.")

While in 3H it's a short cutscene that honestly doesn't matter, you could literally write in "Byleth was assigned to guard the Goddess Tower since Rhea saw they didn't want to dance." and aside from a short bit of ship-tease with Claude literally nothing would change, you wouldn't even miss out on support points by deciding to dance/chat with certain characters, it pretty much is eye-candy and nothing more.

Maybe it's just me but the lack of choices/skimming over anything that could allow for any (even something as minor as "Do you accept Claude's Dance?", is part why the whole focus on interactions 3H has falls completely flat for me.

While I doubt we'll get a Text Adventure FE-Spin-off (Though I would probably buy one.) I would honestly rather have more text-only dialogue if it allowed for more choices like this one text adventure, by one person.

Maybe it's just me but I was hoping 3H would at least have some choices like this and the sheer lack of it is honestly incredibly noticeable, I'm not saying every single possible choice here should have been present but the fact not even a single one is kinda shows. (At best you have "What out of two ways is Byleth feeling more down about?")

Edited August 6, 2021 by Samz707

[kradeelav]

I play 99% of games with the sound on mute, so it's an easy "yes" for me.

(And I like VG OST's, mind. Yamaoka-san's work for Silent Hill is my all time go-to. my TV just tends to be in common areas and I dislike mixing noise with other people.)

[Anathaco]

No for me. I’m never super invested in choices when I play games anyway, so if they cut back on choices to focus more on writing a linear story I would be pretty happy. And besides I honestly really value the voice acting, especially after how good it was in the last couple games.

[lenticular]

I don't think that going full branching paths could ever really work well in a Fire Emblem game. And not just because of things like voice acting and animated cut scenes and the costs of producing them, etc. I also think that one of the joys of text adventures and interactive fiction is the ease with which you can replay them and explore the other options. The good ones at least always leave a sense of the road not taken and make me want to play again and try taking different decisions to see where they lead. This is great in a text adventure which lets me quickly and easily skip over stuff that I've already read, but I can't imagine it working for something like Fire Emblem.

I can see three possible ways that could work. You could replay the whole game every time you want to try a single different decision, which would be the same problem that White Clouds has except magnified. Alternatively, the game could keep track of every node and branch that you've visited and let you restart from that point, but then you lose out on raising and customising your units up to that point, which is fairly core to Fire Emblem's identity. Finally, you could keep a whole lot of save files and use them to skip around navigate between different decisions, but that sounds incredibly fiddly and un-fun to me. Regardless, I just don't see it working.

If not branching paths, though, then what would extra choices actually do? They could be meaningless non-choices that very quickly converge back into the same scene and don't matter at all, but after Three Houses, I'm not sure there's anyone clamouring for more of that. They could also be tied to something more along the lines of a morality scale or a faction alignment system. For instance, I can easily imagine a system whereby you don't pick a house at the start of the game, but instead have shifting alignment and loyalties based on your decisions in part one, which then reflects which house you are permanently alligned with for part 2. I'd personally enjoy something like that, but I can see problems with it as well: How would it work for people who weren't interested in engaging with the system at all? How does it deal with the potential for your best units leaving your group? And so on.

Regardless, outside of a branching paths style of narative, I don't think that most other ways of handling narative choice would increase the requirement for voice acting by all that much. Probably by a little bit, for sure, but not to the extent that it would stop it from being practically viable. So I don't really think that the trade-off between voice acting and player choice really exists.

I will say, though, that full voice acting is pretty important to me. It's not the be all and end all, but the voice acting in Shadows of Valentia and Three Houses made me enjoy both of them considerably more than I would have done otherwise, and I would be sad if it went away for future titles.

[indigoasis]

Voice acting or not, if I can play the game, then I'm fine. I read faster than the voices, anyway. The addition of more choices doesn't really matter all that much to me.

I will say though... especially in 3H, dialogue feels so slow to me, so I often opt to skip it now; I didn't have that problem at all with SoV, but that's probably because it was a lot "simpler" compared to 3H (SoV was just still art with occasional face changes, whereas 3H has changing camera angles and character animations that it has to get through, so it doesn't feel as snappy, I guess).

[DarkSage861]

I don't think they're ever gonna take out less voice acting again, they been committed to this since Path of Radiance 

[Dark Holy Elf]

I basically agree with @lenticular on this.

I certainly enjoy visual novels/text adventures with choices but that's not what Three Houses is. As a game with a lengthy and mostly-linear progression of maps to be defeated, the number of choices that can be given to the player that actually matter is pretty limited (and I generally don't care about the type of dialog choices 3H has a lot of, which are often either two ways of saying the same thing or at most might trigger a slightly different reaction from the character Byleth is talking to but are then ignored).

I also really, really enjoy full voice acting. I think it brings characters to life in ways that text just doesn't (especially when combined with body language work). Three Houses is one of my absolute favourite games ever and it just wouldn't have hit me the same without voice acting; characters like Dimitri, Rhea, and Dorothea are particularly improved by their stellar voice work for me. So I don't want to give that up, at least not for cutscenes and supports.

Having said that I do actually agree that the ball scene in 3H could absolutely have been better, definitely a place where they ran out of budget pretty clearly (we get a video, but no actual interaction or even new costumes for the characters).

[Florete]

No, but it has little to do with voice acting. I just want a focused, coherent storyline. I think the concept of having all these choices that create branching storylines is overrated and just gives me more stress than enjoyment, because I'm constantly worried that I'm not making the "right" choice and will end up on a path I don't like. TH's choices were actually perfect for me, the impact was there but small enough to not need to worry much about it if I made the "wrong" choice.

[Ouzyxol]

If this hypothetical game is in traditional FE style: NO.  Turn- and Grid-based SRPGs just don't work well with the whole 'choose your own path' type games.

However, if we are talking about a semi-spinoff game in the vein of Heroes or a full spinoff like Warriors, then it could work.  Thing is that text-based games (as far as I am aware) are nearly only story based.  FE is not a story based game, it is a gameplay based game with a (sometimes) decent story.

[Azz]

Personally I wouldn't sacrifice the presentation for more choices tbh. Full voice acting has genuinely made me enjoy SoV and TH more than I think I would have without it. I would much prefer if FE focused on telling one decent coherent story with great gameplay and presentation. Like Florete said, I much prefer smaller choices that may affect a line of dialogue or two but don't have any massive bearing on the story or lead down branching paths. After two games where choices/routes were a big focus, I would much prefer if FE went back to telling one story, which I feel like would be better in the long run, and if there are route splits, to have them be in the same vain as FE5/6 or the Eirika/Ephraim split in FE8 rather have full blown route splits like Fates/TH.

[Gordin]

Nope. Besides a series as large as fire emblem wouldn't need that anyway. There's tons of 30-40 hour fully voiced visual novels on the switch and those don't have nearly as much sales (15-20k at most) so a series like fire emblem which has well over 3 million sales in their most recent game has no reason to cut corners on that either. Just get a bigger budget. You can afford it.

[joevar]

On 8/7/2021 at 5:32 AM, Samz707 said:

While it's not quite a justification for how little meaningful dialogue choices there are in 3H (Look at any RPG with voice acting.) would you be okay with there being less voice acting overall (Such as for the Monastery ) if it resulted in you having more choices in dialogue?

I've noticed that a few good text adventures tend to give the player a decent-to-large amount of options and having only text (or less voiced dialogue at least, basically not having every little interaction being voiced.) would no doubt make this somewhat more plausible for an FE game.

 

I feel a good example of why I'm so disapointed (and wondering if FE should take after Text Adventures) is the Ball from 3H.

short answer: NO

havent read all those text below what i quote, but im really curious as to why would you think less voice acting will affect choice that much? unless your example are limited to only JRPG, not including western RPG. and like other said, branching in FE so far has plenty of problem for it t work as good as everyone hoped

[UNLEASH IT]

I'm ok with full voice work. But it seems like, in the past 4-5 years, that full voice acting has become a must in videogames for some people. I understand that voice acting can elevate a game but for people but the inclusion/exclusion of full voice acting will never be a major factor in whether I consider a game to be good or bad. Going with a non-FE example, I think The Last of Us and its sequel have excellent voice work and Johnson, Baker and Bailey deserve all the awards and acclaim that they get, but those games would've still been excellent in my opinion even if they didn't have a single line of voiced dialogue.

Edited August 10, 2021 by UNLEASH IT

[Jotari]

I'd be willing to have less choices for a better story.

[AnonymousSpeed]

On 8/6/2021 at 6:32 PM, Samz707 said:

While it's not quite a justification for how little meaningful dialogue choices there are in 3H (Look at any RPG with voice acting.) would you be okay with there being less voice acting overall (Such as for the Monastery ) if it resulted in you having more choices in dialogue?

They choices would have to actually matter.

I would actual prefer there be no voice acting at all, regardless of whether that resulted in more choices or not.

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

I agree with @Dark Holy Elf's agreement with @lenticular on this point.

There's an inherent friction between "make whatever choices you want" and "you're leading an army of people with various interests". Basically, if you make a drastic decision that changes the course of your mission, one of two things can happen: either a bunch of your units abandon you (bad for gameplay), or your units "suck it up", and keep going regardless of their morals (bad for narrative). The former happens to some extent in 3H (i.e. Flayn leaving on CF), but the latter is prominent in some nonsensical recruitments (Ingrid on CF, Hilda on AM, Hapi on SS, etc.). In these cases, the characters' seeming defection from their homeland and/or values can only be justified by their abiding love for Avatar-kun. Thus magnifying the common criticism of Avatar characters, and the centralizing effect they have on the story.

Also, voice acting takes time and money, I'll grant that. But it doesn't necessarily follow that divesting from that area will mean a better story with more choices. They can hire Robbie Draymond and Abby Trott to make me fall in love with Hubert and Annette, sure, but they can't stick them behind a desk and ask them to code. Well, they could, but I'm not sure it would go well. Point is, more work for an existing team will take more time than work assigned to a new team working in parallel to an existing one.

Plus, I really like the voice acting, and the effect it has on presentation. I'm barely willing to do math, and now you want me to read, too? Forget it! ...A bit of a joke, but I at least appreciate getting to go "cinematic" with the supports.

[Ottservia]

I’m in the camp that Fire Emblem should just ditch the branching paths and such. I find that style of narrative only really works in VNs or if you have a “golden route” because otherwise it just becomes a mess both in gameplay and story. Personally I’d rather have one good linear narrative rather than 3-4 mediocre ones. Even so Voice acting has little to do with branching paths and dialogue choices anyway. Yeah sure voice acting takes time and money but so does creating those scenes in the first place. At that point the voice acting is just added window dressing. And beyond even that I’m pretty sure the developers would love having more excuses to utilize the voice talent they have. I mean if I also had Takehito Koyasu doing VA work in a thing I worked I’d want to milk that opportunity as much as I possibly could because it’s fucking Koyasu. The name recognition alone is enough to draw people to your product. My point is though it has nothing to do with not wanting to pay the voice actors more. No I bet they’re more than willing to do so but rather it has more to do with time constraints and lack of man power or just simply the writers just didn’t want to put those scenes in anyway because it didn’t fit with the story they were trying to tell. Who knows there’s a lot of shit that goes into triple A game development.

[Mylady]

As long it's something overall important to the story or gameplay. For example, I'd rather see split simultaneously paths with two lords, freedom to recruit characters to each side similar to o Tear Ring saga or the end of Radiant Dawn but adapting such features through the entire game, but this would imply more voice acting considering all possible alternatives.

 

As for the ball example you gave it's imo inconsequential but adds a bit to the role playing aspect, despite not being necessary. So my answer is yes, I like choices but mostly regarding to gameplay integrated to the story, not necessarily random ball scenes.  

Edited September 6, 2021 by Mylady