More adult games should embrace voice acting.

Sphere42

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Sep 9, 2018
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What's the overhead and RoI on that though? How do you even find someone willing to do something as personal as voicework while also somewhat matching the character? I'd rather have the "teen roommate" character be silent than sound like a dude in his 30s after inhaling some helium.
 

Ramen-

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Aug 28, 2018
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That would even more decrease the speed as well as the amount of content we would get. It's also another potential reason a for a game to get abandoned. you shouldn't forget it costs money to hire voice actors to do that, or you know women (lots) who would willingly do that. The Fate Of Irnia is a great game that has voice acting and it sucks mature balls, especially because I can't turn that off.

In short, too much extra work, money to invest and other problems for small "advantages" only a minority of an already niche group of people ("players" of adult games) appreciates.
 

applepie123

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Aug 3, 2017
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What's the overhead and RoI on that though? How do you even find someone willing to do something as personal as voicework while also somewhat matching the character? I'd rather have the "teen roommate" character be silent than sound like a dude in his 30s after inhaling some helium.
Dev of The Awakening hire from Fiverr I believe. Male characters are not voiced, only females. This is a standard in eroge and other voiced western adult games I came across.
 

applepie123

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Aug 3, 2017
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That would even more decrease the speed as well as the amount of content we would get. It's also another potential reason a for a game to get abandoned. you shouldn't forget it costs money to hire voice actors to do that, or you know women (lots) who would willingly do that. The Fate Of Irnia is a great game that has voice acting and it sucks mature balls, especially because I can't turn that off.

In short, too much extra work, money to invest and other problems for small "advantages" only a minority of an already niche group of people ("players" of adult games) appreciates.
Quality over quantity.

There's a reason why mainstream games have increasingly more voice acting in their games. Voice acting brings your characters to life, especially if well acted. Of course it costs to have voice acting, but at least for me, having less lines in a game that are voiced is more immersive than bunch of them that are just text. People do things to earn money, man or woman. There are women doing freelance voice work who would work on adult material.

Do you know that japanese visual novel have a lot of voice acting? Why do you think that is?
 
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baneini

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Jun 28, 2017
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If the game has no voice acting that saves the step of bothering to disable it thus making it a better product.
Why would you want c-tier actors saying cringe inducing lines that get cut off mid-sentence while skipping text?
Sparse voice acting where only certain sounds are va'd while most of dialogue is silent can work.
 
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Sphere42

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Male characters are not voiced, only females. This is a standard in eroge and other voiced western adult games I came across.
A) that's sexist ;) and B) I meant a female "roommate" - voiced by a male because the 2.5man dev team couldn't afford a sexy woman.

Voice acting brings your characters to life, especially if well acted. Of course it costs to have voice acting, but at least for me, having less lines in a game that are voiced is more immersive than bunch of them that are just text. People do things to earn money, man or woman. There are women doing freelance voice work who would work on adult material.
(emphasis mine) There lies the problem. A game has a certain minimum line requirement for bare-bones functionality plenty of which will be non-sexual. But where VFX and non-voice SFX can be stitched together from multiple sources or designed with clever overlays all lines spoken by one character need to be voiced by the same actress, and any actress willing to do the adult scenes can probably earn more money doing streams, phone sex or standalone audio erotica.

Plus with how even large non-adult game studios try to save on voicework and at the very least save it for last when all creative direction and scriptwriting has been completed you simply won't see anyone make the investment in the "Patreon-supported development" stage.
 

monroe

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English adult voice-acting is relatively a new concept so its no surprise it isn't held to the same high standard as the acting in Japanese games for example.

The Fate Of Irnia is a great game that has voice acting and it sucks mature balls, especially because I can't turn that off.
You know you're doing something wrong when you hire a girl that sounds like she is in her early 20s to voice the elderly mom character.
 

Winterfire

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Voice acting in a game that is not completed is one of the biggest mistake you can make.

A game in development can take years and there's no guarantee that you will find the same voice actor again, especially if he's not under a contract with you, so that would make the game end up having two different voices for the same characters, not good.

Also, voice acting limits how much you can write and even the possibility to overhaul/change said dialogue because suddenly each word you type is literally a cost.

AAA Companies took years to turn their games into full voiced and even with all that money, you can see how that limited their writing... Just compare Morrowind (Partial voiced) with Oblivion/Skyrim.
 

Hadley

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Sep 18, 2017
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Its hard, you need to find the right girls to do it. If you have the typical younger sister, she needs to sound like that. Same for the mature mom. If the devs just let their girlfriends voice-act (if they even speak english) its not going to be that great.

I would first of all try to focus on the dialogue and story and maybe if the game is complete or nearly complete think about adding voice-acting.
 

phone999

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Tenant, why are you touch hard peepee? Oh it been so long since I have hard peepee in vageen. Oh I want suck tenant peepee now. What the fuck I am addicted to tenant peepee now. End of update.
 

polywog

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May 19, 2017
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It only requires a few seconds of voice sampling to create an artificial voice.


Famous people aren't happy about hearing their voice being used, but because the voice is being created electronically, there isn't much they can do about it.
emma-watson-t.jpg

 
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As an idea, it would be great, but it's mostly soooooo terrible. My guess is that getting quality, professional voice talent is out of the question, cost-wise, for most devs. So your choice is either skip it, or hope the bargain/free voice you use sounds right for the character and can deliver a line. Pretty unlikely.
 

Sphere42

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Sep 9, 2018
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hope the bargain/free voice you use sounds right for the character and can deliver a line.
Well there is one decent use I've encountered: slipping one-liners from the original game into parody works. With the possible exception of Ahri's death cry this is purely for immersion and humor though and only really works if both the source material and the parody don't take themselves too serious.
 

JRD

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Feb 4, 2018
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For management/sandbox games it's probably easier for the devs to use stock audio instead of voice acting, as there aren't formal lines. I much prefer to imagine the voice that goes with the text rather than have (as others above have said) someone try to voice act the parts in VN's. I've tried a few voice acted games, but they always seem a bit disappointing and if possible I disable the voice feature.

If I were a one-man dev team I'd much rather spend my resources on visual assets, software andhardware upgrades to make creating and rendering faster and higher quality rather than on voice actors.
 

megaplayboy10k

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Apr 16, 2018
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Well, Snow Daze handles voice acting really well, but I can't think of any other games offhand. Yeah, hiring a professional voice actress or three to do voices for major characters would be pricey, but presumably so is hiring someone to create a soundtrack, or code the game, or do your renders. Generally even games with voice acting don't do it for every single piece of dialogue.