We’re at an interesting place in the evolution of video games. It’s now possible to have hours and hours of high-definition spoken words played back in your game. This is a far cry from just 20 years ago when hearing a couple of words compressed nearly to oblivion was considered pretty amazing. Like in Blades of Steel.
So, since space was at such a premium, if you wanted lots of dialogue, you were limited to text, lots and lots of text. Which never bothered me too much, it was a limitation of the media.
But games have now evolved where multi-minute scenes are played out (with varying levels of talent, but that’s fodder for another discussion), and text-heavy exchanges are becoming more and more infrequent.
And, to be honest, I hadn’t really given that a whole lot of thought either, until I was watching some video game review show or another and one of the reviewers actually gave the game a lower mark because he had to read too much. He was of the opinion that technology had progressed to a point where everything can be voiced, so everything should be voiced.
But does it really add that much to the experience? Yeah, it’s great to hear what the developers think the characters should sound like so I don’t have to improvise voices in my head, but I can actually read far faster than most people talk. So if I come across a game that has the audio subtitled, I end up skipping over the dialog and reading the text instead. Which ends up sounding pretty herky-jerky and unbelievable.
So, for me, the jury’s still out. I don’t mind doing a lot of reading, but, I have to admin, having big blocks of text punctuated by the occasional voice-acted section (for the important plot points) is kind of nice.