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.
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.
You lucky bastard.
I’ve got my issues with RDR2, but definitely not with the writing and performances.
BOY
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.
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.
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!)
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
Oh really Alan Wake 2? Haven’t played it yet but I thought Control voice acting and face expressions were well done?
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.
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.
JK Simmons performance was absolute dogshit
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.
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.
Voice acting? Reject modernity, embrace Dwarf Fortress.
embrace [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected], except you mash past all the voice acting because you can read faster than the lines are acted out
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.
Baldur’s Gate 3 ruined Solasta for me…
BG3 has great voice acting, but I don’t really think it’s that far beyond any other games. As a personal example, Cherami Leigh as Female V in Cyberpunk 2077 is probably my favorite voice actor in the last several years, even if BG3 is probably my favorite game in that same time.
Dude Cherami Leigh also voiced my favorite gaming character, Gaige the Mechromancer from Borderlands 2. She’s fucking phenomenal.
It’s a bummer none of the echo logs made it into the game, but they’re still great. The fact that she cuts her arm, and then instead of patching it up, she just slices her arm clean off and then builds a mecha arm WHILE she’s bleeding out is so fuckin hardcore. I love it
Cherami Leigh did a great job, but the script was sometimes such a cringefest, ugh.
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.
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.
