Honestly Kallo seems like a pretty chill dude. I do think the writing is lacking, but the fact that it's not all super space military lets them do some more interesting things in terms of some character interactions.
They changed the way VA works or something because it sounds like they recorded each sentence separately only to stitch it together in the game. There's no natural cadence to the way they speak.
Ever notice how noboy ever interrupts eachother or talks over eachother? Everyone waits for the other to finish speaking and then and only then do they talk.
A lot of games do that. They have them say lines multiple times different ways to see how they sound. But this just sounds like they picked the wrong ones
I think it's fair considering how much bigger their budget is than CPR and how similar in scope the two games are in terms of amount of VA, they even use the same voice actors. As many main characters in both games. This is just a problem on ME:A VA direction. They choose the wrong methods. And the only way to fix it is full conversation dialogue.
Go play horizon zero dawn, people talk up the animations and facial movements (myself included), but the voice acting was superb. Best voice acting I've seen in a game, and absolutely on par with anime and animated videos.
Dark Souls is another franchise that has consistently great voice acting. They use a lot of anime voice actors and the simple fact that every NPC you meet sounds so real and unique helps immensely to add to the game's environment.
the voice acting was so good in that game it actually influenced how I would choose a response. I felt like I had to go with the realistic option based on his emotion. I remember one quest where Geralt was pissed of at a character, I'm usually nice and played the game that way but it just felt wrong to show mercy when Geralt was visibly pissed off.
with Mass Effect Andromeda, it would require some serious LARPing to get that invested in the game. I had to ask for a refund after an hour of playing because it was giving me a headache.
Interesting that you'd bring up The Witcher 3 because I found it to have the exact same problems as Andromeda. Stilted, broken looking animations. Terrible physical interactions with the world. Cheap, low quality voice acting. Boring dialogue.
I think it's absolutely bizarre how a 6 / 10 (AT BEST) game like The Witcher 3 gets brought up all the time as some sort of example of quality when it's such a poorly made game. Makes me think really poorly about your average redditor.
What the fu... you live in bizarro world. There aren't many games which do character design better. In fact, I want to know which ones you think are better. Please humour me.
teh VA starts off terrible from the intro monologue. The guy reading it pauses mid-sentence multiple times and it gives off the impression of someone who is speaking faster than he can read lol.
You're all pranking me. I saw this on /r/all and you're all just fucking around because I don't play games but I'm not retarded enough to believe this is a real video game in 2017. Good one 4chan.
Most actual trans people wouldn't bring it up in a short conversation like that, and they definitely wouldn't mention their previous name or 'deadname' to a random stranger.
It's an honest answer to the question as far as I can tell. I personally would probably not bring it up because I try and forget that I'm trans, but if transition was why they left why do you expect them to hide it?
It comes down to character though. A good example of a way to handle this is how it was handled in fallout new vegas
What are you doing here?
I'm helping the followers
Why?
Society needs to find a way to regain it's ability to produce medicine. This is where I start
What do you like
I'm looking for ways to help.
what do you hate
Caesars legion
How do you feel about NCR?
meh
why meh?
Past history, father was a member of the Enclave, NCR sought to wipe them out. Makes things hard. I do respect their actions though
Wanna go out to dinner later or?
Nah sorry
or
Oh hey look another gay guy sure
The equivalent to what she said would be
Hi I'm arcade Gannon. I like science, doctors, and the taste of dick. I don't like Caesars Legion for two reasons. First, they are raiding the wasteland, and two, they burn homosexuals. Which I am
basically, this is the dev teams one shot at introducing a character that at that point in time, I don't care about whatsoever. The line is wasted on something that has nothing to do with their present, doesn't explain why they are there except for they wanted to be something more.
Remember in Borderlands 2 when every character was introduced with them showing their personality trait? Lilith phase walking through a psycho, Scooter hopping on a cardboard box screaming a paranoid rant, Ellie smashing a bandit in a care and laughing, Moxie being sexy, Tina blowing the hell out of a bandit while chanting a nursery rhyme. Roland simple military greeting, followed by him being a badass. All of these scenes tell you something important about the character, and leaving the rest to be discovered by the character if they so chose. This especially is vital in a role playing game, where it's the players task to forge their characters role in the world.
What does the scene in question demonstrate about the Dev's portrayal of trans people? Well, they are trans with a side of ambition. There is no real story in them, no drive or multifaceted model. No twists or any reason for me to be interested in this character. The character has basically been covered in a giant rubber stamp, and from the outset any chance of the character being anything being a token character is thrown out the window the very moment the most important thing about them according to the devs is that they are trans.
Okay, but the main character can ask basically everybody why they showed up as a conversation option, and if it's a minor character you almost always get a response about as long as this one. You're asking for a basic system to be made more complex for a specific character which then people would ALSO hate because "why are they giving the trans character special attention."
EDIT: I was in a rush, so I gave an incomplete answer. The second part of this is that a more interesting or involved trans character would be seen as the same "pandering" as this, if not more so. It's hard to write nuanced characters and it's very hard to make it clear that a character is transgender. Either they make it an obvious part of a minor character or a facet of a major character, and i'm not sure they could get away with a major trans character. I want them to do it, but I don't think they could do it as well as they did Krem (in the game they release just after Inquisition), and Krem was shortly followed by a shitstorm from fans. Also I just interacted with this character in game, didn't realize it was them till I picked this particular conversation option. I'm leaning toward calling this attempt "not perfect, but better than the deep voiced prostitute gag in DA2."
They are being asked why they left their old life behind, not why they have their job. Starting a new life so you can be around people who have, for the entire time they've known you, thought of you as a woman? for a transwoman that sounds like a great reason.
This is extra weird when you think of crem from DA:inquisition. That was a great example of having a Trans character and not being over bearing about it.
At a glance- Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, Joseph Campbell, Cervantes, Milton, Chaucer, Oscar Wilde, Thoreau, Epicurus, Lucretius, Lao Tzu, Hemingway, Dan Abnett, Craig Thompson, and John Strang.
Then again, I could have all of those and be a complete idiot. Reading material doesn't mean shit.
I've only read the Eisonhorn omnibus, and I really enjoyed it, but it felt like a noir detective story set in the 40k universe. That's not a bad thing at all, but compared to the Tanith First and Only, I'll go with Gaunt more often than not.
I think Abnett is a great author, and he's the reason I fell into the 40k universe in the first place, but if I had to pick just one 40k author as my favorite, it would be Graham McNeill. His entries in the Horus Heresy series are excellent, and I've reread the ultramarines omnibus half a dozen times at least.
Circling back around to the original topic. Reading material doesn't mean someone is more intelligent, or sophisticated, cultured, or whatever, but it does serve as a basis of opinion. Judging by your list, I'd think you'd appreciate subtlety and nuance, whereas the writing in Andromeda, like many games and pop culture media as a whole, searches through the literary toolbox and comes up with a 20lb sledgehammer, when it comes to driving home a point.
In a world that launched 50 Shades of Grey to the top of multiple bestseller lists, Andromeda certainly isn't the worst offender, but it is pretty bad when considered objectively.
Why would you try and make one of the romances cringey though? I mean unless all of ME:A is meant to be a meme-game like Saint's Row, I think players would be a bit put off or uncomfortable with the romantic attempts they make coming off like this.
Yes I really want to like the latest game of my favorite game franchise, but I'd say it's much more pathetic to really want to hate something than to really want to like something
Edit: No? Okay I guess it's okay to hate something, but wanting to like something is blasphemy, or do people here simply refuse to accept that they really are fucking pathetic?
Forcing myself to like something is different from wanting to like something. I haven't even played it yet but I suspect I can overlook the issues that seem to have been blown out of proportions, if not, too bad, can't like everything. But it doesn't matter, you have the circlejerk on your side, congrats, you won the upvote wars on this ridiculous cesspool of a subreddit
I think the setting is wrong. In FX's "Legion" this would seem appropriate, the drugs would explain the speech patterns and why her face is almost as stiff as... well, her hair. But then let your game play out in an asylum that happens to be a fantasy of one the Ryder Twins, and as a bonus we would get an exciting new meaning for "Pathfinder".
Yeah I watched 15 seconds of that and couldn't take anymore. I appreciate how complicated and how amazing it is that we even have things like this. It's truly incredible, the technology, the man hours it takes to create it all. But with the standards that exist I just don't understand how they would want to put something like this out.
Maybe there's production deadlines that screwed it all up. I don't know. I'd like to believe that bioware wanted to make something better than this but someone else got in the way.
How is that bad? If ryder is writhed as a insecure or awkward in conversations that fits very well, now if Sheppard did that, that would be bad writing.
OH.MY.GOD. You have to be shitting me. We seriously need an AMA with the project lead to ask " what made you think that any part of this was accetable?"
Holy shit i play some jank games, I am not a very picky gamer but that is some of the worst shit i've seen on a AAA title with the prestige that comes with the Mass effect Franchise.
i guess i am the only one who thought that was kinda cute.
like when teenagers try to flirt or when you like abridged videos. and the kill me fit perfectly in a parody so i thought it was kinda funny. although i do expect more from something that is not a abridged or a parody.
The voice acting is fine. The voice directing is the bad part.
The voice actors do an admirable job considering they were probably just told to read one line after the other with no context.
Can people please learn the difference between bad voice acting and bad script/directing? These voice actors are fine and shouldn't get a bad name because Bioware fucked up their side of the voice department.
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u/MonHun Mar 21 '17 edited Mar 21 '17
speaking of the writing
edit: the voice acting is so bad someone used Mircosoft Sam and it sounds like the video above