Might just be me looking at the game with rose colored glasses and the game may not have aged well - but I remember having a blast playing Golden Sun as a kid. I think you’d enjoy it if you like JRPGs.
Na, no rose colored glasses needed! The first Golden Sun is one of my favorite top down “classic” jrpg. I replayed it a couple of years ago on my old Ds (the one where you can play your Game Boy Advance games) and it aged really great!
The only thing I can think of not aging well by today’s standards is the level grinding. I recall having to do quite a bit of it my first time playing it, just to keep up with the difficulty curve, and it’s not like I was skipping all the sidequests. That was a fairly common aspect for RPGs of the era, I think.
It’s also possible I wasn’t very good at the game, I was like 11 or 12 at the time.
I'm curious what AI Shark is supposed to do. If it's just an LLM with hints that's not gonna "eclipse the original GameShark's triumphs tenfold". I'd still rather have a cheat tool than a glorified Clippy for walkthroughs.
Bit sad they aren’t exploring removing the - IMO unnecessary - broadness of the item + skill-up system for something like the talents HotS had (or even better some sort of small branching talent tree), just to keep evolving the genre.
But I can also understand it, since well, they have an established playerbase and this is probably more a refresh than a “true” successor.
It’s a pretty good guess tbh… At worst is October or similar but I expect later on the year but earlier enough so it’s before the holidays but after they showed demos and games in summer conferences.
This assumes they have inside knowledge (which maybe they do), but they could also just be guessing, I think everyone thinks its going to release in sept-nov this year.
I feel like if this was truly an accident because the character was overlooked, then wouldn't they just not have any voice at all? Even copy/pasting dialogue into some (free, according to the article) software and then inserting it into the game takes some effort.
The article says that often during development they’ll put in simple text to speech stuff for characters as a placeholder. I’d imagine to make sure certain audio hooks work and sound isnt broken
A bad voice probably also just feels much better and complete than having no voice at all. At least based on the observations I’ve made when adding sound effects to my games as a hobbyist. A silent game just feels bad.
I’m reminded of old video games where they had the developers help out with the voice acting. Like, couldn’t you do this here? Just have someone who happens to have a high quality microphone do the lines? Maybe even pay a starving artist on one of those “voice acting for hire” sites?
I get that deadlines are usually way too tight on games, but this is just poor quality control. I guess that is the AAA games industry noways though.
While we really dug the game (you can check out our review for more on that), there’s one odd detail that stuck out we can’t help but give its own article: one of the game’s minor NPCs will be voiced by a text-to-speech program at launch, seemingly because someone — probably Ubisoft — forgot to record and add a human being’s voice for the role.
what a… weird thing to have happen. i’m not sure what the utility of it would be for one minor NPC but this being an accident honestly strains charitability, i think
Now, on a scale from 1 to 10, please tell us how strongly you feel about this. And, hypothetically, whether you’d mind if a few dozens more NPC were like that too.”
“On a scale from 0% to 500%, how much more would you pay for a game where main characters used [insert your favorite actors/people]'s AI cloned voices?”
Yep, looks really suspect. Even if it’s true that they forgot to get someone to record the lines, it does seem implausible that they couldn’t source any voice actor (or even someone on their own staff) to record the dialogue and get it added to the game, even at short notice.
Not saying this was a honest mistake, but I do see how that could happen:
Game story gets written
Dialogs are worked on
TTS versions of all dialogs are generated
Once they get approved, talent is cast
Talent is scheduled to record the dialogs and get paid
Final dialogs get included in the game
Knowing how game studios love to push everyone into “rush mode” the months before launch, I can see how, for a minor NPC, someone could have forgotten to cast and/or book a recording of some dialogs… while everyone is getting pressured to release NOW OR ELSE!!1!
Honestly, I wonder how many minor NPCs in games have been TTS all along, and nobody noticed or cared.
ign.com
Aktywne