[Josho]

Originally Posted by fov

I'm curious, Josh, since KQ5 was one of the really early 'talkie' games and voices were being added after the game had been released without them... was there anything very different about the process than there would be for a game today? I imagine voice acting for a game that was not written with voices in mind would be somewhat different than voice acting for a game that was written with no question of the inclusion of voice acting...?

-emily

ps Off-topic - I am playing Callahan's Crosstime Saloon right now and really enjoying it. I rarely laugh out loud at game dialogue... it's even rarer for me to laugh out loud as often as I have been with this one.

Hi, Emily,

I'm really glad you're playing CCS and enjoying it! I didn't know ANYone was still playing it anymore. :-)

I didn't recall that the no-voice version of KQ5 was released prior to the talkie version. But I specifically recall that KQ5 was always intended to be a talkie, and that there was a lot of work being done on the voices long before the game was completed. Perhaps the disk version was released in advance to get some money into the pipeline. That's a guess, but it wouldn't have been unusual; the KQ games were always so technologically ambitious that they routinely went over schedule, which didn't sit well with people on the sales end of thing -- not to mention greatly increasing marketing expenses. So releasing a downgraded version earlier, if that's what happened, might''ve helped ease the situation.

Writing dialogue that's meant to be voiced is a specialty, and many successful writers don't write dialogue that rings true when spoken aloud. (Such dialogue can actually be difficult to read, which you may've observed if you've ever read a verbatim transcript of a conversation.)

For instance, people don't really speak in as organized and expositional a style as they so often do in poorly-written game dialogue. There's also subtext: in real life, people rarely say EXACTLY what's on their mind. But in so many games, only the villain is written with subtext, and everybody else wears their emotions and thoughts on their sleeve.

People also interrupt each other frequently in real life, and virtually never in games --- at least, not convincingly (instead, you usually get a line that goes up to a point and STOPS DEAD before the other person's line starts). In Callahan's, in fact, I asked for, and was told we'd be able to do, interruptions, and I wrote to that...but then, when the time came, the programming couldn't accommodate it, and thus we ended up with some of those awkward stops. It seems that most designers avoid interruptions entirely, and I think that makes for unnatural-sounding dialogue that goes back and forth like a ping-pong game, instead of a messy tug-of-war, as it is in real life.

If a game was initially written not to have voices, it would be an enormous mistake to go ahead and record it without a careful and thorough rewrite.

--Josh

[fov]

Thanks for the insight! I work really hard, in my own writing, to make dialogue sound as natural as possible (with all the subtext, interruptions, etc. that you mentioned) so I can see how dialogue that wasn't written to be that way would cause problems. And if voice actors aren't even in the same place when they're recording their lines... that would make the interruptions even trickier.

Some games do it better than others, but I still often come away from an adventure game feeling like the dialogue is a bit wooden. That may just be something I watch for and focus on, though.

Originally Posted by Josho

I didn't recall that the no-voice version of KQ5 was released prior to the talkie version. But I specifically recall that KQ5 was always intended to be a talkie, and that there was a lot of work being done on the voices long before the game was completed. Perhaps the disk version was released in advance to get some money into the pipeline.

I played a disk-only, non-talkie version of King's Quest 5 in March of 1992 (I remember so vividly because I got it for my 14th birthday ). It was for the Mac. I always thought that the game was first released on disks and later as a talkie on CD, but no talkie version was ever released for the Mac so it could be I just have a selective memory. I do have a DOS version on floppies that's packaged in a Sierra Award Winners box with Red Baron and Rise of the Dragon (like this one)... I'd have to check the year, but I'd think that if the disk version was considered an award winner, there must have been some lag time between its release and the talkie version on CD. I also have a non voice version of Police Quest 4 for DOS that I was really surprised to find (another thrift shop bargain!), because that one was released for the Mac on CD as a talkie, and never (as far as I know) came out for the Mac on floppies.

I always like hearing stories from people who worked at Sierra, so thanks for indulging me.

-emily