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[FieryDove]

Requiem1289 wrote...

The creepy silence and apathetic stare of the Warden in Origins 

Those do not have to go hand in hand. I remember being angry/sad/happy in JE and that was without full voice on the PC. If I remember right it did have battle/other comments like the warden can have if you selected a voice in the cc. But its been awhile since I played JE.

[T764]

The facial animations in JE changed as you highlighted responses, which only worked because it allowed you to see your characters face, Origins focusses on the voiced characters in conversations.
The Spirit Monk's battle voice was just grunts and groans i think.

And now that i think back kotor had far more animation to the PC's face, compared to the PC's in those older games the warden is rather lifeless.

[FieryDove]

T764 wrote...

The facial animations in JE changed as you highlighted responses, which only worked because it allowed you to see your characters face, Origins focusses on the voiced characters in conversations.
The Spirit Monk's battle voice was just grunts and groans i think.

And now that i think back kotor had far more animation to the PC's face, compared to the PC's in those older games the warden is rather lifeless.

I played the SE edition, maybe it was different? When I changed styles she/he would say "Leaping Tiger!" and what not.

[T764]

FieryDove wrote...

I played the SE edition, maybe it was different? When I changed styles she/he would say "Leaping Tiger!" and what not.

I went and checked and you're right, its one voice per gender and the style changes are it, no actual speech.

[Sylvius the Mad]

The lack of facial animations is something I specifically enjoyed in DAO. I like playing stoic characters.

And any facial animations that occur without my direct input are worse than having no facial animations at all. If the face is always the same, then it can more easily be viewed simply as an abstraction of a face rather than the face itself.

[Huntress]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

The lack of facial animations is something I specifically enjoyed in DAO. I like playing stoic characters.

And any facial animations that occur without my direct input are worse than having no facial animations at all. If the face is always the same, then it can more easily be viewed simply as an abstraction of a face rather than the face itself.

Right Alistair make a joke./stare
zev make a joke.. /stare
Leliana sing.. /stare

Thats fine? you never smile to a joke? or get slightly sad by a song? <_<

Modifié par Huntress, 03 août 2011 - 05:10 .

[T764]

@ sylvius the mad.

Don't know if you played JE or not so i'll assume not.

The facial animations worked like the symbol in the middle of DA2's wheel, as you highlighted an option the face would change to match the tone that the sentence was written in, smile for a joke, angry face for aggressive and so on.

The inclusion of the animations in the older games is not the only thing i liked about them it was that in a conversation i could see my characters face, i hate the over the shoulder conversations, they might as well be in a first person view (also it looks like more care and effort went into it).

[Sylvius the Mad]

I have played JE. Good game. I'll admit I didn't even notice that facial expression feature in JE when I was playing it because I was reading the text, not watching the faces.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Huntress wrote...

Right Alistair make a joke./stare
zev make a joke.. /stare
Leliana sing.. /stare

Thats fine? you never smile to a joke? or get slightly sad by a song? <_<

Regardless of whether I react in those ways (and even if I did, would those emotions necessarily have to show on my face), designing the game like DA2 forces every one of my characters to react in the same way to any given event.  That's a huge problem.

I might play a character who would smile or cry in response to a song, but then I might play another who sees music as a frivolous waste of time and is never touched by it.  Any animation that forced upon the PC will break one of those characters, so it's better not to show the character's facial reaction at all.

[Huntress]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

Huntress wrote...

Right Alistair make a joke./stare
zev make a joke.. /stare
Leliana sing.. /stare

Thats fine? you never smile to a joke? or get slightly sad by a song? <_<

Regardless of whether I react in those ways (and even if I did, would those emotions necessarily have to show on my face), designing the game like DA2 forces every one of my characters to react in the same way to any given event.  That's a huge problem.

I might play a character who would smile or cry in response to a song, but then I might play another who sees music as a frivolous waste of time and is never touched by it.  Any animation that forced upon the PC will break one of those characters, so it's better not to show the character's facial reaction at all.

A huge problem to smile to a joke or get sad, a Huge problem to show emotions? You want an emotionless character I get it. But why ? because thats how you like it? what planet are you from?
Even if you're character do not care for a song it show disdein, even if the character see others  as a waste of a good space it show  by the way it talk and interact with them and the tone it uses while interacting with others.
That is called EMOTION.
You're play style get ruined the moment you even ask questions about something, it shows interest, interest come with curiousity, to feel curious about something shows that you're interested for something and yet again it conflict with a character that should NOT have any type of emotions. You fail you're own roll.

Hate, disdain, love, happy, outrage, apathy are emotions and everyone  show them because thats what drive us and shape us.

A character without any type of emotion is incomplete, wrong and it won't graps what really need to be done, it doesn't understand how urgent something can be, it doesn't comprehend about people having feeling or feeling connected to something or someone and more important it don't give a RAT about it.


Characters react same way in same conditions, you find funny when a clown  fall in his butt.s, later you go out, with a group of friends, one of them fall you find it just as funny even tho and he is NOT a clown. samething thing different characters.

Modifié par Huntress, 03 août 2011 - 10:18 .

[Sylvius the Mad]

Huntress wrote...

A huge problem to smile to a joke or get sad, a Huge problem to show emotions? You want an emotionless character I get it. But why ? because thats how you like it? what planet are you from?

No, you misunderstand.  I want a character whose emotions are mine to design.

If I design an emotionless character, I get an emotionless character.  If I design an emotive character, then I would need control over each and every display of emotion.

Having no emotions displayed is a smaller problem.  Having some fixed set ofemotions displayed is a much bigger problem.

I opt for the smaller problem.

[Baiolit]

Definitely silent, I have an imagination and I love to use it. Also beyond that, I personally find that I am more often surprised by the outcome of the discussion without a voiced character. I liked getting misunderstood. It made try and be more considerate of what option i chose.

In only one video game series has my opinion been rectified and that is the voice acting for the male Commander Shepard in Mass Effect. He's nothing short of superb.

[SilentK]

Baiolit wrote...

Definitely silent, I have an imagination and I love to use it. Also beyond that, I personally find that I am more often surprised by the outcome of the discussion without a voiced character. I liked getting misunderstood. It made try and be more considerate of what option i chose.

In only one video game series has my opinion been rectified and that is the voice acting for the male Commander Shepard in Mass Effect. He's nothing short of superb.

Hope you're not saying that people who prefer a voiced char have no imagination. I prefer a voiced char, have an imagination and also love to use it     


Hmmm... We differ in the way that I do not like to be misunderstood. It happens to me far to often when I'm playing a silent char. If I don't hear how something is said then I don't know what the person I'm talking to is reacting to. My husband had this problem a few times. It went something like this.

Warden: *saying something sweet*    (Here hubbby thinks his warden is flirting with Leliana)
Leliana: *says something sweet in response*

Hubby thought that his warden romanced Leliana, but apparently he was only saying something sweet from the list of possible responses but it wasn't romantic enough. Well, this could have been helped with symbols already in DA:O. A hearth beside romance-continuation-lines. But it's so much easier for me when I hear my voice.

I have had the experience a couple of times when I think that I have said something in a polite way and it wasn't recieved as such. Then I have to sit and try to tell the line afterwards in order to understand how it could be taken for that reaction to occur. I stop playing my warden at that point and start a guessing-game.

Hmmm....  It is interesting to read how other people play their games. I try to get a feel for how a person who prefers a silent char plays the game. I can see the appeal in getting to choose the voice and tone yourself, that would be wonderful. But for me it falls short when the npc reacts in a very different way and I'm left guessing at what happend.

For me the different tones were a godsend. I get to hear the intonation and I have a way of directing the tone. I love the wheel and the symbols. Like to experiment to see what the different outcomes are for different dialouge choices.

Modifié par SilentK, 04 août 2011 - 08:50 .

[Dubya75]

Say for argument's sake, we got DA3 with a toggle to choose between silent protagnist and voiced.
With the silent having the same lines as the voiced, but with the obvious annotated dialogue choices for voiced.
How many people will switch the toggle to silent? Very few I would suspect as there would be no logical reason to do this.
I am also quite confident that BioWare will not revert back to a silent protagonist. That would be a stupid thing to do, like downgrading your car from a new BMW to an old VW.

[Nighteye2]

SilentK wrote...

Baiolit wrote...

Definitely silent, I have an imagination and I love to use it. Also beyond that, I personally find that I am more often surprised by the outcome of the discussion without a voiced character. I liked getting misunderstood. It made try and be more considerate of what option i chose.

In only one video game series has my opinion been rectified and that is the voice acting for the male Commander Shepard in Mass Effect. He's nothing short of superb.

Hope you're not saying that people who prefer a voiced char have no imagination. I prefer a voiced char, have an imagination and also love to use it     


Hmmm... We differ in the way that I do not like to be misunderstood. It happens to me far to often when I'm playing a silent char. If I don't hear how something is said then I don't know what the person I'm talking to is reacting to. My husband had this problem a few times. It went something like this.

Warden: *saying something sweet*    (Here hubbby thinks his warden is flirting with Leliana)
Leliana: *says something sweet in response*

Hubby thought that his warden romanced Leliana, but apparently he was only saying something sweet from the list of possible responses but it wasn't romantic enough. Well, this could have been helped with symbols already in DA:O. A hearth beside romance-continuation-lines. But it's so much easier for me when I hear my voice.

I have had the experience a couple of times when I think that I have said something in a polite way and it wasn't recieved as such. Then I have to sit and try to tell the line afterwards in order to understand how it could be taken for that reaction to occur. I stop playing my warden at that point and start a guessing-game.

Voiced characters don't help you much, there: you only get to hear the intonation *after* you've selected the line to say, when it's already too late.

I don't mind the addition of symbols to a silent PC, though - that would solve your issue while still leaving plenty of room for imagination.

SilentK wrote...
Hmmm....  It is interesting to read how other people play their games. I try to get a feel for how a person who prefers a silent char plays the game. I can see the appeal in getting to choose the voice and tone yourself, that would be wonderful. But for me it falls short when the npc reacts in a very different way and I'm left guessing at what happend.

For me the different tones were a godsend. I get to hear the intonation and I have a way of directing the tone. I love the wheel and the symbols. Like to experiment to see what the different outcomes are for different dialouge choices.

I never had to guess - with full-text dialogue options, thus far, I was almost always able to guess the intent and how it would be received. Unlike the paraphrases on the wheel, which gave hardly any information at all and felt more like rolling dice rather than carefully choosing a response.

[craigdolphin]

I think, on balance, I like voiced protagonist. But I will confess that after playing DA2, and deciding that I really felt like the game was Hawke's story rather than MY story (playing as Hawke), that something really isn't working right to make me identify with/as the protagonist.

My first thought was the voicing of lines might be the disconnecting aspect. But I think I've come around to the thought that instead, it's the paraphrase system itself.

When I select the whole line of dialog, I own the choice. When I select a short paraphrase, Hawke decides what is actually said, not me. I'm not directing, I'm making suggestions, as it were.

So, I think I'd rather have silent/full text, than voiced/paraphrase. But better still would be voiced/full text. At least, that's my take on it.

[happy_daiz]

It does seem to come back to the bad paraphrasing in the end. If the summary was closer to being what is actually said, it would be a small victory for everyone, I think.

I am surprised sometimes how many people like the silent protagonist. My first introduction to a BioWare game was Mass Effect 1, so by the time I played Dragon Age, a voice seemed "normal"...and DAO seemed strange to me. It kinda reminded me of Folklore (great PS3 game, btw), because in places where you would expect there to be talking, there were only words.

Anyway...

[Sylvius the Mad]

SilentK wrote...

Hmmm....  It is interesting to read how other people play their games. I try to get a feel for how a person who prefers a silent char plays the game. I can see the appeal in getting to choose the voice and tone yourself, that would be wonderful. But for me it falls short when the npc reacts in a very different way and I'm left guessing at what happend.

The way I play, that can't ever happen.

Since, with a silent protagonist, I can choose how each line is delivered, and once I've done that I know how the line was delivered, then I interpret all subsequent events from within that context.

So, if an NPC has an unusual reaction, that's not evidence that I don't know how my PC said the line, because I know how my PC said the line.  The only confusion that can arise from that is that I don't know the NPC very well, but that's hardly a surprise - I probably haven't known him for more than a few dozen hours.

[tmp7704]

Dubya75 wrote...

Say for argument's sake, we got DA3 with a toggle to choose between silent protagnist and voiced.
With the silent having the same lines as the voiced, but with the obvious annotated dialogue choices for voiced.
How many people will switch the toggle to silent? Very few I would suspect as there would be no logical reason to do this.

Personally i'm fond mostly of the less simplified/more nuanced selection of dialogue lines in the older title, than the PC character being silent per se. If he/she has to talk then so be it, but i wish the choices of what can be said extended beyond the goody-two-shoes/douchebag/**** trio.

Or maybe it's just the "neutral" option that i miss and would like to see back as part of the choices.

Modifié par tmp7704, 04 août 2011 - 09:19 .

[Ianamus]

I have no problem with a voiced protagonist, but I was not happy with how limited dialogue options were, and I think that the voiced protagonist was to blame for it.
Howevermuch they may have said that a dialogue wheel was just a list, but in a circle shape, it was not. There were only three options most of the time. In Origins you could have long conversations with companions about their past whenever you were in camp. In DA2 you could only speak to them when it was allowed, and could talk about such limnited things that I never knew things I always wanted to ask.
Varric was supposed to be a storyteller, but so far Leliana has been the only storyteller who actually told me stories when I asked.  I still remember the story about Aveline.

So no, I have no problem with a voiced protagonist. But I do have a problem with the limited dialogue choices that it led to.

[Huntress]

Varric story was HAWKE, yes you played varric story gosh.. slow today?

[Ianamus]

Huntress wrote...

Varric story was HAWKE, yes you played varric story gosh.. slow today?

I know that, but if he was a storyteller why couldn't he tell my Hawke stories? Leliana had like 5 she could tell you, and they were really interesting. Varric was telling this story to Cassandra, yes, but it's not the same as having Varric sitting at a fire, telling you and your companions far-fetched tales.

Thinking about it, that would have been really good. Merrill would sit there wide-eyed, Aveline would roll her eyes and Isabela would make witty comments. Anders and Fenris can be off somewhere arguing about mages. Maybe a new DLC, where Varric is making a story about all of you, and you can see everyones reactions to it as it goes along, like the Varric-Cassandra moments...

Modifié par EJ107, 04 août 2011 - 11:43 .

[SilentK]

happy_daiz wrote...

It does seem to come back to the bad paraphrasing in the end. If the summary was closer to being what is actually said, it would be a small victory for everyone, I think.

I am surprised sometimes how many people like the silent protagonist. My first introduction to a BioWare game was Mass Effect 1, so by the time I played Dragon Age, a voice seemed "normal"...and DAO seemed strange to me. It kinda reminded me of Folklore (great PS3 game, btw), because in places where you would expect there to be talking, there were only words.

Anyway...

lol, I guess that I'm back being different again. I really really like paraphrasing. I just remember the lines when I see them written out too well and that makes it less fun to replay. My memory for what people actually says is much worse which makes it more fun to play this way. I don't know every single conversation in advance. I'm perhaps a little weird.
But that which works very well for me clearly is making quite a few people less happy. Think we talked earlier on this thread about the whole line being visible if you moused over that paraphrase. Don't know about you but I could see that as a option. I  might even use that myself on a few places even if I prefer the short bits. Hmmm..... difficult things    =)

edit:   augh.... removed a bit and that left one scentence blended...

Modifié par SilentK, 05 août 2011 - 05:24 .

[vallore]

Dubya75 wrote...

Say for argument's sake, we got DA3 with a toggle to choose between silent protagnist and voiced.
With the silent having the same lines as the voiced, but with the obvious annotated dialogue choices for voiced.
How many people will switch the toggle to silent? Very few I would suspect as there would be no logical reason to do this.
I am also quite confident that BioWare will not revert back to a silent protagonist. That would be a stupid thing to do, like downgrading your car from a new BMW to an old VW.

There would be no reason for you, you mean.

Imagine you don’t like the voice acting; what then? With a toggle you can simply mute it and still play the game. It is not perfect, but it is better than not playing it. An example?

If ME series had a voice toggle I would have been able to play male Shepard, as it is I haven’t. Had female Shepard been similar I would have gave up ME1 and would never had bought ME2.

Another? I found female Hawke VA annoying. Had I the chance of mute it I would have, as that would have made the game more enjoyable for me, not less.

Further, even if one enjoys VA in general and the one in the game in particular, muting a character offers the possibility of  roleplaying
the game differently; attributing to the character a different style of
delivery than the ones employed within game. This creates replayability.

[happy_daiz]

SilentK wrote...

happy_daiz wrote...

It does seem to come back to the bad paraphrasing in the end. If the summary was closer to being what is actually said, it would be a small victory for everyone, I think.

I am surprised sometimes how many people like the silent protagonist. My first introduction to a BioWare game was Mass Effect 1, so by the time I played Dragon Age, a voice seemed "normal"...and DAO seemed strange to me. It kinda reminded me of Folklore (great PS3 game, btw), because in places where you would expect there to be talking, there were only words.

Anyway...

lol, I guess that I'm back being different again. I really really like paraphrasing. I just remember the lines when I see them written out too well and that makes it less fun to replay. My memory for what people actually says is much worse which makes it more fun to play this way. I don't know every single conversation in advance. I'm perhaps a little weird.
But that which works really well for me clearly works is making quite a few less happy. Think we talked earlier on this thread about the whole line being visible if you moused over that paraphrase. Don't know about you but I could see that as a option. I  might even use that myself on a few places even if I prefer the short bits. Hmmm..... difficult things    =)

I like your mouseover idea, but how would you accomplish that on a console? Personally, I'd rather have a voiced protagonist instead.