I started playing Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods Enhanced Edition today and to put it rather bluntly, the voice acting is simply atrocious. Awful. Terrible. Think of a word that has a generally negative meaning in the context of criticism and apply it to the voice acting of that game. It deserves it. Really. Voices don't match the characters, elderly looking characters have young fresh sounding voices while clearly younger characters have tired old voices. Even if the voices did match the characters it wouldn't matter, the voice actors were clearly just phoning it in at the best and wholly and entirely not even trying at the worst.

Now the voice acting in most video games is not that bad, thankfully, but there is the other end of the spectrum, great to nearly flawless voice acting.

To me, a game that achieves a near flawless standard in voice acting is Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines. With several well known voice actors (including two voice actors from Futurama) the overall quality is quite high, the lines are delivered believably and the voices fit the characters. To put it simply, it's nearly flawless.

So, for this thread, just say what game(s) you think have poor voice acting and what game(s) you think have great voice acting, and give a bit of reasoning if you want. Maybe talk a bit about the games here on GOG itself, for the early games with voice acting as well.

Heritage Age of Kings is seriously making me want to jam a sharp #2 pencil into both my ears.

Keep in mind that everything you people complain about is nothing compared to the french localisation of it.

There is no good voice acting in a game. When I play a game, I want to play, not spend half the time listening to some actor rabbit on about things I don't care about. Even if I need to know the information, I can read it twice as fast as they can speak it.

Interesting statement, what game do you think has the best French localization?

I tried playing Skyrim with Japanese voice acting last year, the Japanese voice acting was much better than the English voice acting, in my opinion, makes me wish I could play it with Japanese voice acting with English subtitles.

The dialogue and voice acting in SPAZ are pretty poor. Luckily the gameplay is makes up for it. Best voice acting? Wing Commander The Price of Freedom was top notch and most all of the GTA games from 3 onwards.

"Mafia" impressed me a bit, it was surprisingly decent.

"Baldur's Gate" could be considered as the worst if it was alone, unfortunately it's pretty much the standard.

I think a balance between voices and text is necessary.
If there is too much text, it gets tiring just reading it instead of playing.
Also voices do increase immersion.
I also agree with movieman523 that reading is often faster.

The best option would be to let the player decide which of the 2 they want by allowing to turn on\off voices and allowing to pass\speed up text.

I REALLY liked the voice acting in SMT: Persona 4

How do you feel about games that have the first sentence of a bit of dialogue spoken, with the rest of it being just text? Like Morrowind, or Planescape: Torment (I think that's the system it uses).

I always feel like there is a bit of a disconnect when they do that.
I think my brain expect the character to continue speaking since the text match, but it doesn't.


Speaking of speech in video games, what does anyone think of games where character makes weird noises instead of speaking(there's always a speech bubble at the bottom).
Okami and Zelda come to my mind as games that do this.

No, that's not weird noises...they are speaking in Japanese.

I really enjoyed Dust: An Elysian Tale 's voice acting. It was goofy and fun. It actually surprised me. Pretty much equivalent to a cartoon show.

lol