WotC More info on Baldur's Gate 3 coming February 27 2020

In this brief clip we see some voice acting for Volo and a quote, some motion capture, orchestra, some photography that I'm not sure how it would be used in a video game and lastly a date February 27 2020, which happens to be the date of Pax East.

Speculate away.

 

[generic]

Man gamers are picky.

If I'm getting under 300 fps, and my CPU isn't 70 degrees Celsius, I'm doing something wrong! 4K graphics or the game is dead to me!

 

[generic]

@gyor, the sad part is that I have become picky, very picky, about my games...

 

[gyor]

@gyor, the sad part is that I have become picky, very picky, about my games...

Let's no jump to conclusions yet.

 

[generic]

Let's no jump to conclusions yet.

After all, they're just announcing the announcement!

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The sound quality is literally bad - as I said, it sounds like it was recorded in a small room with relatively hard walls - you should never be able to hear that in an AAA game unless you're an expert. And I'm not, but I do have ears. And he's straight-up overacting in a way that is frankly embarrassing and is going to look really silly if the entire game is like that (I doubt it is, but D:OS1 absolutely was, and D:OS2 improved a lot but still had quite a number of just-outright-terrible and over-the-top-in-a-bad-way voiced bits).

I was referring to the sound quality complaint. I don’t care either way about announcements.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I was referring to the sound quality complaint. I don’t care either way about announcements.

It's not difficult to do voice-acting right (dialogue is a whole other discussion). You only two things:

1) A director who prevents overacting and gets the tone of the piece right. About 80% of AAA studios fairly consistently manage this. Close to 100% when we're talking AAA CRPGs - Larian however do not have a good track record.

2) To get the VA done in an appropriate environment, which usually means an actual studio.

That's really it. They didn't do that here. I wouldn't have cared, because this is an announcement for announcement (repeat ad nauseam), but I was told it was "useful info" so I paid attention to it, and the info I'm deriving is that, at least in this case, they did the two things you can do wrong with voice-acting - i.e. they went with wild overacting, and with poor sound quality from an inappropriate environment. And if I can hear that, on my TV speakers, and not being particularly sharp at that kind of thing, you can guarantee a whole lot more people would pick up on it in an actual game, where there might be countless hours of speech.

If this was some small indie studio with their first game or something, well, yeah, okay, maybe they don't have the money to deal with it. But this is Larian, who sold millions of copies of their last two games, and have multiple dev studios in multiple countries as a result, and are dealing with a licence that stands to make them $$$.

Hopefully they just did this because it's an announcement for an announcement and I only even noticed because I got pointed at it.

 

[generic]

It's not difficult to do voice-acting right (dialogue is a whole other discussion). You only two things:

1) A director who prevents overacting and gets the tone of the piece right. About 90% of AAA studios fairly consistently manage this.

Breath of the Wild is an AAA game with horrible VA, lol. It varies a lot, even in AAA games.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Breath of the Wild is an AA game with horrible VA, lol. It varies a lot, even in AA games.

To be fair I should have specified WESTERN studios. It's definitely true that Japanese games coming to the Western market, even big ones, are often terrible or at least "very anime".

But AAA Western CRPGs or close relatives of CRPGs (like RDR2)? Tend to have good-to-great VA. Larian's previous games well, D:OS1 has mediocre or bad VA in all the ways it is possible for VA to be mediocre or bad, and D:OS2 is a mixed bag, and well below what's typical in this field. Even AA ones are typically decent to amazing - c.f. all Obsidian's games.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It's not difficult to do voice-acting right (dialogue is a whole other discussion). You only two things:

1) A director who prevents overacting and gets the tone of the piece right. About 80% of AAA studios fairly consistently manage this. Close to 100% when we're talking AAA CRPGs - Larian however do not have a good track record.

2) To get the VA done in an appropriate environment, which usually means an actual studio.

That's really it. They didn't do that here. I wouldn't have cared, because this is an announcement for announcement (repeat ad nauseam), but I was told it was "useful info" so I paid attention to it, and the info I'm deriving is that, at least in this case, they did the two things you can do wrong with voice-acting - i.e. they went with wild overacting, and with poor sound quality from an inappropriate environment. And if I can hear that, on my TV speakers, and not being particularly sharp at that kind of thing, you can guarantee a whole lot more people would pick up on it in an actual game, where there might be countless hours of speech.

If this was some small indie studio with their first game or something, well, yeah, okay, maybe they don't have the money to deal with it. But this is Larian, who sold millions of copies of their last two games, and have multiple dev studios in multiple countries as a result, and are dealing with a licence that stands to make them $$$.

Hopefully they just did this because it's an announcement for an announcement and I only even noticed because I got pointed at it.

Nope. It isn’t wildly overacted, nor is the quality especially bad.

 

[Xenonnonex]

To be fair I should have specified WESTERN studios. It's definitely true that Japanese games coming to the Western market, even big ones, are often terrible or at least "very anime".

And you should have also specified the English language dubs of Japanese games coming to the Western market are often terrible. But in some cases are definitely improving.

Japanese VAs are incredible.