Dragon Age Central

Asked and answered-- again. It's just in the trailers.

Quote: Posted 06/03/09 13:41 (GMT) by barbarianbarbie
OMG, OMG, OMG, that was Kate Mulgrew's voice as Flemeth! She's an awesome actress. I just loved her as Captain Janeway. Wow!

Good catch.

Quote: Posted 06/03/09 10:19 (GMT) by Dark Specie
They may have been made "immortal" for this demo, you know.

Probably. The way the demo was being played, I would normally expect the dragon to have chewed them up. They were just trying to show off some of the flashier elements as the presenter was talking.

Like previous BioWare titles, your character will have a voice set you pick at character creation.

These voicesets include things like attack sounds, battlecries, pain-grunts, general statements of displeasure, approval or disapproval, statements about conditions ("Not feeling so well, Trap Detected, etc.) and so on.

And not to mention that our clear choice would be to emphasize the player character's silence in any given cutscene, right? Pan the camera to them, have them hum and haw silently from foot to foot, crickets chirping in the background...

Two things to keep in mind:

1) You are not completely silent. You do have a soundset that you choose, which works not unlike the soundsets in NWN. You shout during combat and react in other ways.

2) I think you do speak in conversation. You have lines for the player character responses, more lines than any other character in the game in fact, and just because DA doesn't have the same cinematic focus as Mass Effect doesn't mean that the player isn't providing a voice to those characters the same as with any of the games Georg listed. This is a style choice, and one meant to reflect the broader choice of character customization we've chosen to focus on in DA.

Quote: Posted 05/20/09 21:54 (GMT) by IV Jackofblades VI

I understand that the actual dialogue is not voiced, but I just don't see how you can have a main character who never says ANYTHING. So in cutscenes he or she just stands there awkwardly silent. Just listening intently. Even for dramatic cutscenes, no yelling, screaming, or anything? A silent character? How?

I guess you haven't played any other RPG before Mass Effect.

Fallout ?
Oblivion ?
Knights of the Old Republic?
Neverwinter Nights?
Baldur's Gate?
....

As for how, it's simple. The process involves not recording full voice over for the player, mainly because of diskspace concerns (no, we can't ship on 4 DVD-9's)

There is too much variety in allowing people to choose their own names to make presenting fully voed names possible. There is also the problem of names written like St. John are essentially pronounced Sinjinn.

As mentioned, there are some elements (such as family names for example) that may be voed from time to time, but it just isn't possible to allow full VO for all of the possible choices of first names.

Quote: Posted 05/14/09 01:27 (GMT) by Dave of Canada

I'll admit, I haven't followed Dragon Age much - but it interested me, and now I'd like to get informed

1. How long is the game going to take?

I think the estimate is sitting at 80 hours. You'd have to get Evil Chris to verify that, though.

Quote: 2. I've heard there's such things called "Origins" - what are they?

These things. Fully playable starting chapters of the game that vary according to your race (and sometimes class.) and affect how the world views you (and vice versa.)

Quote: 3. Single Player only, or is there Multiplayer?

Single Player only.

Quote: 4. I've heard this game is going to be hard, how "hard" is hard?

This depends a lot on which difficulty setting you play on. If you enjoy weeping in frustration, try nightmare. If you just want to see the story, try casual. If you like something in between, there's normal and hard.

Quote: 5. Who is the bearded badass that jumped on that purple ogre-thing in the "Violence" trailer?

Duncan! (He's the same guy narrating the "Join Us" video.)

Quote: 6. When's the game coming out, or the estimated time?

Second half of this year.

Quote: 7. Will the main characters voice-acted, like Mass Effect?

The player character is not voice-acted.

Quote: 8. What's the general lore / world set up for the game?

Man, this would take me a week to answer. I'm going to point you here instead.

It is too late to suggest actors. The recording has been completed.

Still, having a "I hope X is voicing someone in the game" is just fine.

The soundtrack for the game is done by a composer experienced with video games. (No, we haven't announced any names yet).

It's definitely a more traditional, *cough* epic, type of soundtrack. More along the lines of what you've heard from the game already before this trailer.

No. That music was just for that trailer.

Quote: Posted 05/07/09 23:36 (GMT) by tigrina
I really hope that the soundsets are better then those in NWN though...

They are. I could go into the reasons behind the problems with NWN's VO process, but that's a completely seperate topic. Suffice it to say that the people working on the soundsets' VO understood what we were looking for and how it fit into the game. With NWN I recall there only ever being one or maybe two soundset choices that weren't cringe-inducing when I created a character -- conversely I don't have that problem with any of the DA soundsets (although I certainly do like some more than others).

If you have subtitles turned on, you'll see something like, "Happy bark!" or, "Growls," when Dog speaks. The robo-voice for him was eerily awesome.

Quote: Posted 05/07/09 18:14 (GMT) by Adinos
Short answer: No

Err... sorry, but that's completely incorrect.

Your player character does not speak in dialogue, but you do indeed select a soundset at character creation -- there will be a selection available for you that are specific to your race and gender. This means you will hear your character shouting and so forth in combat, not to mention using a few other triggered lines in a style that anyone who played NWN should be familiar with. All party members have a similar style of soundset.

Quote: Posted 05/04/09 15:52 (GMT) by Nighteye2
A dozen characters per actor? With a dozen dozen actors, it'd be a nice coincidence...

I believe the allocation of characters to voice actors depends a lot on how important the character is and how far apart they are in the game world. There's no issue, in my mind, in having an actor provide a voice for numerous minor characters so long as they are not talking to each other or very close. For other characters, it's okay only so long as the actor can provide a very different voice (and you'd be surprised at just how different some can get). One of the jobs that our Audio department does is identify what the roles needed are and where in the game they're used and divvy up these roles to as many different actors as required (while simultaneously holding auditions and making sure that the sound is different enough) -- it's a pretty gargantuan job.

I think we'll have the ususal foreign language versions we had in previous BioWare games. Ja!

As for 'cutting corners' by having the same voice actor doing multiple voices: That 144 is the number of voice actors. The number of characters in the game is dramatically higher. All our games always had multiple characters per actor - anything else is unviable for a variety of reasons.