“Aah yes, 👐 A.I. 👐 we have dismissed those claims”
Jokes aside, at least in regards to Mass Effect both voice actors bring something to the game for me
Although, I admit female shepard is consistently better throughout the triology, male shepard has his charm as Mark Meer improved on his performance throughout the trilogy. The human element can do much to elevate a weaker performance and in its own way leave a stronger impact, at least for me.
While I like Mark Meer for his voice work in other Bioware games (Jade Empire for sure, also I don’t dislike maleshep at all) and his work on stuff like the irrelevant show, Jennifer Hale is just fantastic to the point where renegade femshep is to me the cannon version of Shepard
That is fair, I prefer renegade femshep as well. Jennifer Hale, for me, does her renegade lines with more menace and she carries authority better.
Male Shepard, I feel, does the vulnerable moments well, especially in 3… maybe it is a bias in the display of male lead vulnerability. I feel like Mark Meer does the more meme-worthy comedic moments better.
Generally I lean towards light hearted paragon MaleShep and badass renegade FemShep on voice preferance
Jade Empire, takes me back. Great game and had a nice morality system that effected how your character developed with skills and how the playable character interacted with the world and how it had a strong effect on type the ending that would play out.
To be fair the greatness of experiencing Elcor Hamlet was intended to be seen through his actions not emotions.
[Regretfully and with much sorrow] One cannot truly experience it in its 14 hour splendour
[Restrained Optimism and sadness] It will be a different game considering the people behind it and the aftermath of the trilogy. [Wistful Contentment] Having the next Mass Effect have some grounded world building and, if need be, mix elements to a compromise of old and new
I have sympathy for voice actors, the situation is obviously complex for them. But, and I’ve said this numerous times to numerous people, AI voice work is probably going to end up being cheaper and much more voluminous. That’s exactly what developers need for procedurally generated games where they want to see “all” of the characters voiced.
I’m not saying anyone should try to use AI to voice main characters in standard video games. However, this isn’t about standard video games.
The fact is, mass voice work in procedurally generated games is something that can only ever be accomplished with AI.
The whole Rogue-like genre is constantly evolving. And yeah, a lot of the development is bad. If you’re in that scene, you probably know what I’m talking about - lots of dead end projects, lots of pointless feature sets, lots of pointless busywork being disguised as game mechanics, slot machine nonsense, etc, ad nauseam. Nonetheless, AI generated voice work is obviously going to be used there at some point.
I have a hard time believing that a lot of people are going to lose their jobs to AI voice work. The voice work generated through AI is not comparable to what people can do. Again, that isn’t the issue. The economy is in the dumps, and AI is the only way to afford voice work for games that are designed around procedurally generated voice work.
You can be upset at losing your job. But, throwing a wrench at a wrench because you think the wrench is screwing you, is just stupid. Corporations might screw you. But, the technology itself is just technology.
I hope not. Jennifer Hale is amazing. She’s the reason I’ve never played as male Shepard in mass effect. She also voiced Bastila in knights of the old republic. Incredible skill/talent.
Mark Meer is great, and definitely worth playing thru to experience. Not quite at the same level as Jennifer Hale’s performance, but it was still absolutely brilliant.
Still, I hear this every time I hear Shepard talk to Dr. Chakwas.
I really enjoyed the characters. When I think about Mass Effect 3, for example, I think of how I felt when making peace between the Quarians and the Geth, because of how I had gotten to know the characters of Tali and Legion. Or Wrex enthusiastically greeting Shepard as an old friend, something that’s only possible if you talk him down in the first game.
I was as disappointed as everyone else at the actual ending to Mass Effect 3, and I do think the plot goes a bit weird even before that (the ending boss fight of mass effect 2 is a bit weird, but again, I think more of the personal stakes that had been set up by good character writing (plus Jack Wall’s “Suicide Mission” makes what could’ve been overly cheesy instead feel grand and epic)), but I found the smaller, interpersonal stories that Mass Effect tells to be quite compelling.
Because you don't play it for a harsh challenge, the story is pretty decent, but I played it for worldbuilding, art style, ensemble cast, feeling of adventure and journey across a galaxy. That sort of broad feeling stuff.
I’m not really a gamer, but I listen to a lot of audiobooks.
AI isn’t anywhere close to being able to replace “good” narrators. Maybe a bit like self driving cars - the first 90% was achieved rapidly, the next 5% took some doing but ok, now though the final 5% seems kinda unachievable on any timescale.
That said, automation (and yes, AI) tends to approach industries incrementally. A headline voice actor isn’t going to be replaced tomorrow, but maybe some low level roles are. Fewer voice actors just means less demand for the really good ones. Def not good for the industry but… time marches on I guess.
I think reasonable people know it won’t work like that and ultimately you can’t make this stuff without humans.
The real answer is remembering that ALL of this stuff, even the farms full of AI running Nvidia cards are RUN BY HUMANS.
The “means of production” (I’m sure that won’t piss brigaders off) is still controllable by the masses.
Like wake the fuck up. Either you sleep walk into a few decades long mess of boring LLM stuff and destroyed commercial art. Or you form unions at every level.
Right from the power company that cuts power to poor areas to power server farms or the developers at EA writing the pipelines for LLM training.
Every single group needs to say no or stop or whatever.
It’s totally possible. Anyone that tells you differently is stealing from you and destroying your future.
Anyone one of you reading this that could get affected by this (can’t think of anyone who isn’t honestly) needs to stop and take 20 mins to find something to do about it, or you’re just complicit by inaction. (And in my mind a shitty person)
Maybe you’re right, I did play a LOT of Apex so maybe my brain misfired on this one, but I was playing Deadlock the other day and one of McGinnus’ lines instantly made me think “Damn, that was Commander Shepard!” I’ll have to listen closer next time I play and see if it’s really Bangalore I’m hearing.
The biggest thing companies want to do with AI is infinite cheap content. They want generate a movie or other entertainment for a 10th or even 20th of the cost while burning a state’s worth of energy. They’re going to try and generate a successful movie from models that are trained on previously successful movies. And, they’ll get it.
At least at first. Eventually, even we’ll burn out from endless selection of predictable movies and other entertainment. And, I’m not talking just once a year. More like once a month. At some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, they’ll learn that the attention economy is not infinite. There is a limit of people, time, and money. They’re putting most of their eggs in the this basket and I hope it smashes to pieces.
AI isn’t here to improve anything. It’s here to open a path to infinite growth. Infinite entertainment, infinite weaponizing, infinite whatever. More predictable, infinite growth. Problem with that is that we’re slowing as a race and sooner or later it will start shrinking. The more they try to take, the quicker this is going to happen.
I am waiting for an AI model and corresponding tools to generate my own anime and manga. No more stupid open endings, no more infinite story they stop producing because who knows, no more “I was in the same room as a girl, OH NO! Someone might have seen me, I’m so embarrassed!”.
I almost wish I could take existing anime, put it in a machine and make it better. That should actually become a thing, use AI to make your favorite TV shower more to your liking. Someone needs to create this. Bad ending? Fix that. Bad dialog? Fix that. Change gender on all characters? Fix that as well. Foul langage? Easy.
we’ll burn out from endless selection of predictable movies and other entertainment
We aren’t already doing that? Even without AI, most of today’s writers suck ass, and corporate meddling has stomped out risk taking. Writers have no chance to build experience with good shows with longevity. With no risk, there is no creativity.
All of the good series were ones from cable TV. Breaking Bad, Sopranos, old Star Trek, Mr. Robot, Babylon 5, House, Rick and Morty, Game of Thrones (even if it ended badly), Better Call Saul, The Expanse (which died immediately after it switched to Amazon), Gravity Falls. About the only streaming series I really enjoyed was Loki, and that only lasted two seasons. Anything else might have a good first season, but they chop out any sense of character development by making these season 6-8 episodes long. No episodic content. No character development. Just go go go towards the seasonal end goal. And then get cancelled, because they didn’t get a chance to shake out the mediocre ideas and improve their direction. Can you imagine Star Trek:TNG being represented by only their first season, and then cancelled as a result of that?
All of the recent good movies were from directors that had a chance to take risks back in the 2000s, and are now given full creative control to do what they are good at. Dune was a great movie, but it simply adapted the source material, and was given enough budget and resources and creative control to Denis to produce what it needed to be. How many good directors will be left when the old guard retires?
All of the good games are from indie series now. Concord is being getting review-wrecked and shat on, while people focus more of their attention on an fucking asset-flip game about a squirrel with a gun. All of the good bigger studios are gone, fully absorbed into the Microsoft/ZeniMax/WB/EA empire. Only the first or second-time indie game developers are the ones producing good games.
Hell, at this point, maybe AI would do a better job than the shit that’s out there. I doubt it, though. It’s too half-baked right now.
Voice work as a career is dead. The genie is not going back in the bottle. Games can now have substantially more dialog, so the end product will be better and cheaper for the studios.
I don’t think it’s dead. As it is it is going to evolve, not die.
Primary roles will be acted, that won’t go away. It’s too noticeable when it’s not a real actor when you’re with your pal for 120 hours. Johnny Silverhand or Garrus Vikarian would be jarring not having a real human.
NPCs, however, I worry about. Those random interactions I see contracts changing, where actors will have to give rights to train on their voice, where some key moments may be spoken the the rest is regenerated.
AI isn’t magic, and there are some real pitfalls around it. It can get pretty close, but someone who is paying attention will always notice.
Cheaper? yes. better? No. LLMs produce the most derivative inane BS that it would just act as filler. In classic RPGs and adventure games a lot of the filler dialogue was one line per NPC to represent a microcosm within a location. There’s nothing to be gained from theoretically infinite NPCs with theoretically infinite lines of pointless dialogue.
Is it the voice that makes the character, though? Can I take any middle aged Stanley type from the office and get the ai to place the voice as the next Taylor swift? Is it then actually the original character/ actor? Why not just synthesize the looks according to whatever teenage adolescent fantasy the marketing department wants and fully program the character, i.e. a fully artificial actor, instead of basing it off some persons looks? The former cannot possibly have legal repercussions, but if the latter, by all means, protect the actors rights and likeness from abuse.
I think the studios still need the actors to perform the characters, because the ais can’t emote. But once they can, it’s over for the actors
10 years? Bruh 10 months. I saw some stuff recently that was image gen, and there is not a fucking chance I would be able to say it was or wasn’t generated. Like I do some aspects of this shit for a living and I’m fucked.
Code generation, image and video generation, voxel generation, voice generation.
We’re fucked. This is like, seeing the iceberg in that minute before it hits on the titantic.
Okay, sure, when given the fps camera, closest things to the camera are getting noticed. Duh?
But all things considered, who cares about a single goblin toe? Im much more scarred about the thongs happening in nearby shed. Bleach please.
But at that scale there’s always gonna be compromises. Duh. Does somebody actually expect full fidelity between 3rd person and closeups all the time? Might be showing my age but I sure don’t. What kind of madnes is that?
Games don’t need the show everything, leave a bit to imagination. Sure visuals ate cool, but don’t let that be all there is to it.
My guess at the real reason for all this grave dancing is that it feels like a victory over FOMO. If the new $40 game sucks and no one is playing it, I can safely go back to whatever I was playing before without worrying that anyone’s having fun without me.
i don’t know what most people’s reasons for deriving enjoyment from concord’s failure are, but there’s no way FOMO cracks the top 3 lmao
seeing the trailer, i definitely thought it was a bandwagon hero shooter that might have had some creativity if a bunch of suits didn’t say “make it GotG”, but realistically, it launched with little fanfare, in competition with valve’s first new game (beta) in ages. not that it was fated to fail but it didn’t have a lot going for it
Maybe the most significant issue is that, for some reason, the Seekers of the Storm update has tied Risk of Rain 2’s physics systems to its frame rate. When asked about it on Discord, Gearbox developer GBX-Preston said FPS-related issues, “and all the ramifications on balance/physics/attack speed/movement/etc. were not intentional. This is in our top handful of issues we’re investigating.” As a stopgap, he said players experiencing issues should lock the game at 60 fps.
It’s in Unity, isn’t it? So rather than multiplying the speeds by Time.deltaTime when you’re doing frame updates, you just don’t do that. Easy peasy. They’ve got that real “Japanese game devs from twenty years ago” vibe going.
Thats great to hear. Not surprised about Starfield tbh, but I am surprised they fixed it for F76, considering it relies largely on the same tech as F4, which does have that limitation.
Or even a decade ago. Dark Souls 2 had some enemies’ attack animations tied to frame rate, like the Alonne Knights. So they attacked incredibly fast on PC compared to console.
Minecraft has this wonderful mechanism where everything is dependent on game-tick/server-tick, which is independent of player FPS. Why do modern developers keep using FPS for game physics?
From what I’ve read they tried to combine the console and PC version into a unified single version. Gearbox must’ve seen the Borderlands movie and sought to lower the bar below the ocean floor.
From what I’ve read they tried to combine the console and PC version into a unified single version.
JFC. Starting off with something that is cross-compatible is one thing, but trying to merge the two codebases together… that’s a 2-3+ year effort, minimum.
Destiny 2 still struggles with this. Some enemy attacks 1 shot because at high frame rates they hit the player multiple times as the projectile passes through the player character’s model
You can freely download old versions of steam games. You used to be able to do it through the steam console, but now you have to use an external application.
Edit: you can still do it through the Steam Console.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne