I get that record sessions are a huge hassle and simply paying VAs per AI-generated voice line is easier for everyone, but it somehow makes Paradox look a little careless to me.
Stories like these also set a precident. This is what voice ‘acting’ will be like for a moment before it becomes effectively eliminated because voice libraries will become diverse enough quickly and there will be no need for a single more voice actor to be included. It seems like VAs are basically forced to sell their voice to AI companies quickly to at least make a quick buck before they never get a job again.
There’s probably no stopping it, but that made this read all the more frustrating to me.
This is what (modern) voice acting has always been.
Actually read a few interviews with professional VAs or watch their streams if they do that. Two VAs actually interacting with each other and reacting is almost unheard of outside of very specific productions (and mostly are done as a stunt for some BTS footage). They read a dozen different takes of every line and go through like five different scripts worth of dialogue. And then they do “efforts” that are just general grunts and emoting that are used for the moment to moment gameplay and to pad out a scene that had heavy rewrites. It is why so many professional VAs can stream “their” games… because they genuinely have no idea what is going to happen.
Paying to train a limited use model off of a specific VA (or even a group of VAs) is the “logical” extension of that. And, arguably, it is a “good” one (with some MASSIVE caveats). Everyone lost their god damned mind over that FPS that came out last year where the announcer was (allegedly?) a model trained off of a VA. But it also meant that you could have stuff you would never have had otherwise. Nolan North isn’t going to get a paycheck to sit in a booth all day commenting on random matches. But a model that can read out a team’s name and string together different reactions? That is actually really cool and WAY better than the traditional sports game approach of “The Champion! just went through… A Table!”*
Like almost everything AI? The key is to focus on creators’ rights and control what can and can’t be used as training data. Because the genie is out of the bottle and ain’t going back in. But if we can protect the rights of what goes into training data? Then people are still paid for their effort/creation.
Do I think this was done “ethically”? I don’t know. But with everything Paradox has done in the past few years? I assume “not in the slightest”. But the concept is sound and one that we need to standardize sooner than later.
Of course, we also need UBI so that people’s lives aren’t tied to their jobs but that is a bigger mess.
*: Also, if you don’t think those aren’t already stitched and blended together with most of the same tech then I have a bridge to sell you
I’ll also add on that there are very good reasons to pay for models based on VAs. Brendan Fraser infamously permanently-ish hurt his vocal cords because of the performance that were expected of him in his prime. Same with a lot of VAs (I think David Hayter is one?) who basically need to smoke a pack a day when they are “in character” to get the right gravely voice. And while Stephanie Beatriz played it smart and made sure her “Rosa” voice was something she could maintain, a lot of actors and actresses basically can’t be the character they are famous for because it is killing them.
And pulling a solution out of my ass that is surely missing important aspects of the industry?
if I just want Nolan North or Felicia Day to voice a character then I buy the use of their model from their agency and am charged based on how much dialogue they have in a given game. If I want to use them as a character going forward (so what ANet tried with Felicia before they realized she was too expensive and decided to give Zojja permanent brain damage so she wouldn’t ever have dialogue again)? I can pay by line at a much cheaper rate.
But if I want Nolan North to do a voice that isn’t just Drake? Then I am paying him to train a new model and it gets a lot more expensive. And I can pay more to “own” that training data with the same caveats regarding future use. The main idea being that I want to make sure my Nolan North performance doesn’t end up in a competitor’s game next week.
Have any of the involved voice actors confirmed the claims made in the article? I’ve seen multiple articles on this game, and the only quotes are from the game’s director.
So far I’ve only seen one side claim this is ethical. That’s not enough.
I’m not really up-to-date on voice synthesis. Have we reached the point where we can get enough training data from just a handful of voice actors to train a model of this quality?
Or is this a case of them using those voice actors for fine-tuning a pretrained model and just being quiet about that?
Yeah, if Mozilla’s goal is 1200 clips/day and 2400 validations/day then I have a strong suspicion that Stellaris uses a pretrained model and there are no royalties for the people whose voices were used for the pretraining. Not that it would be feasible to spread royalties among that many people in the first place.
What could point against that suspicion though is that Stellaris doesn’t need a “perfect” model so maybe they can get away with much, much less. After all the whole gimmick is that it is in-universe AI. A (near-)flawless model would be (near-)indistinguishable from a regular voice actor. Then there would’ve been no need to hire a bunch of voice actors to train an AI in the first place.
Assuming that it is pretrained -> finetued though, the only hope is that those initial files were donated willingly and not scraped somewhere. Otherwise their “ethical” argument goes out the window.
You’re allowed to like and enjoy things, even bad things… Hell, theres entire fandoms around liking bad things (like B-Movies), that doesnt make them less fundamentally bad. and it doesnt make you wrong for liking them.
I’m wondering if better AI could save this genre. I always hated the fragility of any soldiers I wasn’t actively controlling, having idle workers, workers trying to chop wood in the middle of enemies, etc.
If the computer can take your high level commands but also put out logical low level ones, and maybe also punish high APM, it might restore some of the moderate-paced feel of the game.
It’s a question of whether to reward a player that can see that the opponent is using rock, take a step back, start building paper, and send them out even if they take time doing it; versus a player that just super-optimizes building an army of rock to send against armies of paper, and give them the best chance of winning by perfectly kiting every attack on the field.
There’s certainly an argument that some groups would like the tournament of APM, but I think a lot of people didn’t bother with high level StarCraft because they saw Koreans clicking 15 times a second and figured they can’t keep up. It’s like how fighting games work to demonstrate they’re not rewarding button mashing.
Deciding how to invest my resources, where to expand, when to attack, defend, or retreat, scouting and countering my opponent’s plans…
…but when it comes to the physical act of doing this stuff, it feels so horribly awkward that it’s like I’m fighting the UI more than my opponent.
Clicking and dragging selection boxes as if my troops are always in a rectangle formation? Right-clicking to attack but accidentally moving instead… And ugh, the endless series of tedious build queues.
The actual mechanics feel more like data entry — the kind with real bad RSI — than military leadership.
FYI, there are a handful of games that put unique spins on the genre out there. Most of the ones I can think of off the top of my head put you in control of a “cursor character” that’s like a commander. It puts a speed limit on APM, which I think gets the genre back to focusing on strategy. There’s also Northgard, which is like a cross between an RTS and a 4X game, and pieces of the map are tile-like, so rather than this unit moving to these coordinates, you’re commanding a unit to move from this tile to the one next to it. Then there’s the Total War series, where the battles are slow paced, and the macro level resources are handled in turn-based strategy.
Mount and Blade (Warband, WFAS, and Bannerlord) is another that I would say puts a unique spin on RTS. You are down on the ground with your troops and need to give orders like when to have certain troop groups attack, retreat, change formation, etc. You have the opportunity for your own skill as a fighter to matter, but once the battles reach a certain size, it becomes far more important to have a tactical advantage than to just be good at fighting yourself.
You may enjoy Zero-K more than most other RTS, at least. It’s in the Total Annihilation style like Supreme Commander or Beyond All Reason. One of the ways it sets itself apart is with a diverse array of commands you can issue to your units so they can micro themselves. I haven’t played much of it, so I can’t give a ton of examples, but it has commands to do stuff attack while maintaining distance, compared to how StarCraft 2 forced you to learn to stutter step your Marines, manually alternating between moving and shooting.
It’s also free and open source, based on the Spring engine, and available on Steam. It felt like it played well and was filled out well in terms of mechanics and units when I gave it a try a year or so ago, but I just haven’t been playing any RTS lately.
RTS games demand so much time and patience from the player to learn. What’s the proper build order? What’s the best unit composition? How many workers should get allocated for each resource? These things aren’t always obvious. And you don’t have time to read all descriptions because the time is ticking.
Not to mention good APM and battle tactics.
Shooters are much easier to understand: aim and shoot. You don’t need to follow YouTube guides to understand that.
Shooters are much easier to understand: aim and shoot. You don’t need to follow YouTube guides to understand that.
They demand so much time and patience. Whats the best weapon load out, where to move to be safe from fire, how to avoid enemy snipers, trying to figure out the excessive complexity of what WSAD does.
RTS games are much easier to understand. You drag a box around your units, and click the enemy and watch them blow up. You don’t need to follow youtube guides to understand that.
My point is that there’s usually an easier level of entry for other types of games. You aim and shoot, and you get instant feedback if you succeeded or not. You don’t need to understand advanced meta to get this, although it can help.
For many RTS games it can all be dependent on how fast you expanded your economy, not on how you play your units. You can fail the entire game because of bad gameplay early.
You don’t meed to have any advanced meta knowledge to play most games. There are options like playing against easier ai’s or similarly skilled players.
Look at some Low Elo Legends from the game Age of Empires 2 on Youtube from T90. Most don’t use advanced meta.
Heck, I as a kid never used advanced meta and had loads of fun.
The internet TELLS you that the latest meta is necessary and that you play suboptimally. But they’re just optimizing the fun out of the game for you if you’re not that kind of player.
This mentality is even worse in competetive shooters. People playing the latest “meta” even though they don’t realize they don’t even have the skill to pull that meta off. I wish the “internet” would just let players have fun in their own way. And that playing games “suboptimally” can still be just as fun and rewarding an experience.
I think the key difference is that it’s “easier” to apply a meta to a RTS game. In shooters, the meta often involves quick reflex decisions, where to hide, where to shoot etc. This is hard, and requires practice. It also means there is a significant number of players not applying it, or doing so sub-optimally.
With RTS games, the metas are easier to apply. This means that, in human Vs human games, the newer players often get flattened. It also means that far more complex metas can be developed and applied.
Shooters tend to back load the difficulty curve. It’s easy to get into them, and not do badly, but hard to do well. RTS games tend to front load the difficulty. You need to get over the initial hump to get “ok” with it. Once over the hump, the curve smooths off and you get good fairly rapidly.
One of the big differences between nerds and normals is that nerds enjoy punching through that wall. The difficulty is seen as a challenge, not an impediment. Most people want a faster feedback loop on the dopamine reward. FPS type games deliver that extremely well.
Important addition: the majority of people isnt equipped for this kind of game. Patience and ability to grasp this kind of thing is what makes the computer nerds the computer nerds.
Programming and sysadmin stuff isnt really popular either for that express reason.
There was one on Xbox original where you talk using the headset. It’s military with tanks, etc. Its like "unit 3 attack objective A… All units hold… Unit 3 patrol… It was awesome but the campaign was short and as far as I remember there was no skirmish/play with PC.
Star Wars: Empire at War is a classic with more nontraditional gameplay and light 4x elements (no diplomacy). The modding scene is rich too, with Thrawn’s Revenge for the EU and multiple Clone Wars mods.
I wish I could play a game where I could talk in real time instead of click, prepare attacks with my generals before the battle and settle a strategy, and where the fastest tabber-clicker is not the one who always wins.
Why? Because I’m getting old, that’s why, and anyone who ever played a competitive RTS knows exactly what it means.
Try the Total War games, especially the older (non-Warhammer) ones. Units take time to carry out actions, there is no point and not really a way to do insane actions per minute counts, as if a unit is engaged in melee, it can’t really disengage without losses. There is also a great scale to the whole thing. I loved Shogun 2 for example.
I also like Eugen games like Wargame, Steel Division or Warno if a modern shooty type thing is more your game. Maybe try Regiments, that one is also good and maybe a bit less complex than Eugen titles.
Neither of these has base building, both are more of a “this is how many soldiers get for this battle, use them wisely” type game.
You have just perfectly explained why I loved Shogun so much! It was much more forgiving to learn, and to then excel at. Very much a fun RTS. Atleast the original was very well made, I should try the second one.
RTS did go mainstream and it indeed turned into games very different from old school SC et al.
Plants vs zombies and LoL are the descendants of the genre and are or at least were, HUGE. Tower defense and moba are the two evolutionary paths that RTS took.
Tower defense is super mainstream, but moba, while huge isn’t really mainstream in my opinion. But one things for sure, they don’t have much in common with SC except the lineage.
If you miss that old style of game, that’s fine, but there are probably tons of ways to morph the RTS genre that solves its old problems, finds it more success, and still scratches that itch. I’m quite fond of Cannon Brawl, and Tooth and Tail had its issues but was on the right track.
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