The Value of Voice Acting in Video Games - Article
by Taneli Palola , posted on 17 June 2016 / 11,270 Views
I recently wrote an article about some of the worst instances of voice acting in video games and it got me thinking about the importance of voice acting in general, and the effect the quality of the voice acting can have on a video game. Today, great voice acting in video games is often taken for granted, creating situations in which its actual importance is severely underrated.
Good examples of this would be games like the Uncharted or Mass Effect series, which are often seen as containing some of the best voice acting in the industry. And yes they do, but despite these and other titles featuring such talented voice acting in just about every role, they rarely get the recognition they truly deserve in helping to make the overall gaming experience as enjoyable as possible.
The thing is, bad voice acting can completely ruin the experience a video game is trying to convey, while at the same time good voice acting seems to have become accepted (and expected) as the norm, when that is far from the truth. I can recall several times even during the past five years where horrendous voice acting has almost made me stop playing a game, simply because the voices made the characters unbearable to listen to.
The Early Days of Voice Acting
Back in the early days of voice acting in games, which came along with the advent of CD technology, quality voice acting was pretty much an anomaly. In fact, it wasn't until well into the 2000s that video game voice acting got to the point where the basic expectation was no longer "average at best". Up to that point everyone playing video games simply had to accept bad voice acting as a necessary evil.
Naturally there were exceptions to this even during the 90s and early 2000s with games like Baldur's Gate 2, Quest for Glory IV, and Metal Gear Solid 2 having voice acting that for the most part still holds up well. However, for every game like that there were a dozen games like Resident Evil, Grandia, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which featured somewhat less stellar voice acting, to put it kindly.
Even if the games in question were otherwise very good, like the three I just mentioned, the poor voice acting often detracted from them, and often had the complete opposite effect of what was likely intended by the game's developer. Having a supposedly sombre become unintentionally hilarious simply due to bad voice acting is rarely a positive thing for a game.
Why Voice Acting Matters
The games mentioned above demonstrate how powerful voice acting can be in conveying a game's mood or atmosphere, both in the positive and negative light. Of course, it is not the only thing that matters, but its impact should not be understated. Great voice acting performances can carry a scene even through poorly written dialogue, while bad voice acting can very easily ruin even the best written narratives.
A great example of a game with bad writing saved to a certain extent by competent voice acting is Platinum Games' Vanquish. The writing in the game could charitably be called corny. Descriptors like poorly written and stupid also come to mind. Fortunately, the voice actors managed to make the dialogue work, mostly by embracing the silliness instead of trying to make it too serious.
On the flipside, there are numerous games which, while well written, suffer immensely from poor voice acting. Shenmue is a prime example of this, and it's not alone. Still, games like that survive or even thrive thanks to the overall quality of the product in other areas, like gameplay and story. Real problems arise, however, when a game doesn't necessarily have (m)any of those other things to rely on and compensate for poor voice acting. This can quickly make the game rather unappealing, even if some parts of it are very good.
The best example of a game like this that I can think of, for me personally at least, is Star Ocean: The Last Hope. It has a decent story, albeit one that suffers from lack of originality, a good soundtrack, above average graphics for the time, and a cast of characters that for the most part fill their respective stereotypical roles found in about half of all JRPGs on the market at any given time, from the stoic badass to the hyperactive teenage girl. The one saving grace for the game was its battle system, which is still among the best I've ever seen in an RPG. It was thanks to it that I eventually managed to play the game all the way through.
The one thing that almost made me stop playing the game for good was the voice acting. I should emphasize that not all of the performance were bad - some of them were just mediocre and lacking in emotion - but the few that were bad were truly atrocious. Star Ocean: The Last Hope is still the only game I've ever played where I genuinely wished that a character I met in the game would stay as far away as possible from my group. Naturally, of course, she became a key character for the rest of the game.
I played the PS3 version of Star Ocean: The Last Hope, which came with both the English and Japanese voice overs. After suffering with the English language version for a few hours I briefly felt sorry for everyone who was playing the game on the Xbox 360 before switching to the Japanese voices. For a while it seemed like a good choice. The voice acting wasn't anything special, but at least it didn't make me want to mute the game all of the time... at least until I came across the character I mentioned above – Sarah. Never before or since have I encountered a character in a game who I couldn't stand purely because of the horrendous voice acting.
Star Ocean: The Last Hope is also the game that largely inspired the writing of this article. It was the game that truly made me aware of the impact and importance of good voice acting on a video game. It also made me think more closely about how much voice acting can influence the quality of a game. Great voice acting can make a bad game tolerable, while bad voice acting can nearly ruin a decent one.
A Thankless Job
This is why I feel that we should give more credit to those voice actors who are able to create genuinely great performances, even when the material they have to work with isn't necessarily up to par. One such actor who at one point was overly critisized for his work in my opinion is Nolan North. It's true that between 2007 and 2012 he was perhaps a bit overused, appearing in a huge number of games during that time, but I feel this alone was the main reason he was critiqued so heavily and the unfair notion that he always sounded the same in every role was able to be built up.
For example of North's talent, in Portal 2 he actually played all of the different personality cores and the defective turrets, and in Batman: Arkham City he played both the Black Mask and the Penguin, being almost completely unrecognisable in the latter role.
The fact is, North was used so much because he was, and still is, one of the best voice actors working today and should be appreciated as such, along with other excellent voice actors working to bring characters in video games alive through their performances. It's great that voice acting has been getting more recognition within the last decade, but I still think it often gets overlooked in favour of almost every other aspect of a game that is more readily apparent, such as a game's graphical quality.
Ultimately, the main point of this article is to play a very small part in bringing a bit more attention to one of the most underrated aspects of modern video games. Voice acting is something that we come across in almost every single new video game that we play nowadays, but still many rarely seem to pay much attention to it beyond acknowledging its existence. This is especially unfortunate when the acting in a video game is truly great, but still gets little-to-no attention from the people who play it.
Quite possibly the clearest sign of the lack of respect voice acting still receives is how most voice actors remain unknown to a large portion of the gaming community. For example, the voices of Winston in Overwatch, Balder in Bayonetta 2, Ares in God of War III, and Albedo in the Xenosaga trilogy were all performed by the same voice actor - Crispin Freeman. But how many gamers would honestly recognise his name? That kind of talent should be respected and recognised.
I hope you've enjoyed reading my thoughts on voice acting in video games. I would also like to know if you've ever had any experiences with voice acting that have notably affected your enjoyment of a video game, be it positively or negatively. If so, please share them in the comments below, and as always, thanks for reading.
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I have so much respect and admiration for voice actors, whether it's versatile character actors like Billy West or Scott McNeil or voice-acting god Frank Welker. And while I don't find voice acting essential in video games, I do appreciate it. The performances in Uncharted 4, for example, were spectacular.
Uncharted 4's performances were in my opinion THE perfect example of voice acting thus far. Then agian, they actually aren't just voice acting, they're doing mocap as well, and normally both at once. Maybe it's not fair to call it simply voice acting at that point.
I recall Steven Ogg (Trevor in GTA V) wrote an opinion piece talking about how he feels many modern VAs are actually doing MORE than other actors. He never said it in such certain terms (he was very generous to the acting community, and never tried to overstep), but he did bring up that he was doing "real" acting, except EVERYTHING was green-screened. Even him! I know modern acting is primarily green screen nowadays, but the actors are at least blessed with SOME live sets and actual clothes. VMAs (a phrase I'm coining for Voice-Mocap Actors right now) have it insanely tough, and in general they're even less appreciated than regular voice actors right now!
Some of the low opinions on voice actors out there really bother me. Most people have no idea the talent it takes to get to the top of this field.
On the flip side: The Value of Text in Video Games -
- Presents a sense of imagination for the reader so the reader may imagine how the voice of a character sounds to their own whim. This can change over time, but it's also all up to the reader to decide for themselves how a character sounds. They may change their mind and mold it to their whim say 10 years after playing the game for the first time..and to their benefit as well.
- Reduces resources for a game needed decreasing development time. This includes localization time as well.
- As a continuation of the above, lesser cost than voice acting. Less need for sound quality teams as well for voice acting.
- Maybe the most important advantage: More story can be added due to the lesser cost. More dialogue and more characters since there isn't really much of a cost to amount of dialogue put in a game.
Whoa, that didn't come out in the format I had intended lol
Yeah, I agree. Voice acting is by no means necessary for a video game, as quite often the same goal can be achieved by simply having good writing in the game. If the text in a game is well written, it can often convey as much or even more than can be achieved through voice acting.
Really depends on the game for me. Depends what the focus is. In The Last of Us, they really needed good voice acting. In Call of Duty, I don't really care.
I still love just how terrible the voice acting is in House of the Dead 2 on the Dreamcast. Every once in a while my buddy and I play that again (we been playing it since the day it released haha) and just crack up at, no joke, voice acting that's honestly worse than what a group of 5th graders could produce.
You say voice actings early days was with the advent of CDs... hmmm while they were short the SNES had some clips which took me by surprise, the Ending of StarWing came out of nowhere after having the animal chatter throughout the game only to have full voiced dialogue between Pepper and Fox before you fly back to Corneria, I remember being blown away by that back in the 90s.
Youtube it! they have a little chat, short but for a cart in the 90s massive!
Even Populous congratulating you after each of its 999 stages, every 100 stages granted you a new title which would be spoken out to you, such a great game, years ahead of its time.
if interested, youtube Starwing ending and the voice clip is at 4min into the video, like I said, short sweet but for the cartridges we only knew to be able to scream SEEEEEEEEEEEEEGAAAAAA at us, it was a huge leap.
True, there are some notable examples of voice acting in video game well before CDs became a thing. Still, voice acting only really started to catch on when the CD-Rom technology allowed for much data storage. But yes, you're right that voice acting in video games does go back further than that.
I'm a bit fond of games like Undertale that have the voices replaced by little sound effects which help you imagine what the voices sound like.
I've always looked up to VA's a lot more than I have for movie actors. I grew up with VA's since childhood in the late 80's and all the way to the current time. VA's like Frank Welker, Steve Blum, Crispin Freeman, Scott McNeil, Billy West, Tara Strong, Grey DeLisle, Vic Mignogna and more have entertained my life for years and have me greatly appreciating their fine talents as VA's that are able to breathe life into the many characters they have portrayed over the years, especially Frank Welker and his history of animal voices and animal sound FX which I once though was impossible for a human to accomplish but Frank proved me wrong.
Quality of Voice acting is irrelevant to me, i just want to have voice acting in the first place. Not every game is only in english but many are in japanese or german, so i have a hard time destiguishing what is good voice acting and what isnt.
Voice acting is something people don't notice until it's gone horribly wrong. I'd however, would have mentioned some extremely good pieces from Skyrim (Molag Bal's voice) or Dragon Age Inquisition voice acting, Bloodborne, Geralt of Rivia's unmistakable and genuinely loved voice by millions... of course this example is a bit self-explanatory but voice actors need more appreciation and more love. Recently there was a movement on Twitter when they expressed how much the video game industry handles them like disposable utilities. They get so little money for video game voice acting one would assume they do it for candies. Steve Valentine was one major figure in the movement and I completely agree with his statements.
It's an important part of enjoying the game indeed and I felt the same playing Star Ocean... I for one did not like the voice acting in Horizon as they showed at e3. I didn't feel the character. Also, the writing could have been better.
Just finished Bloodborne a while back and the voice acting in it was phenomenal.
I'm not going to full detail, but I don't care about voice acting :P.
