How Voice Acting Took Away Choice: A Retrospective on Immersive Video Games

Better technology always comes with unexpected consequences. We’re a culture of people who invented antibiotics so we could stop washing our hands. We made better phones, started carrying them with us, and are now riddled with phone-related anxiety. But, as an old person, my favorite technological complaint is one that doesn’t matter to barely anyone else at all:

Voice acting ruined the entire culture of immersive video games.

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In the very early days of gaming, there were text adventures. You interacted with them by typing a VERB and a NOUN. “Take sword.” You had to be simple. The adventure didn’t know very much.

But as games became more complex, they knew quite a lot. Options expanded. Suddenly, you could “slather the ogre with honey.” You could “dip the microchip in the hot mud.” Really, you could do pretty much anything you imagined.

It wasn’t always useful. In fact, it was very rarely useful. But there was a breadth to it. The most clever of developers, working with the most insane of beta testers, were able to cover nearly anything a player could think of.

Eventually, branching stories and custom options became commonplace. You had games like Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, in which choosing the right (or wrong) stats would radically change your own personal dialogue. You had games like Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, in which the race you chose to play had a dramatic impact on how you saw the world.

But there’s a reason why these types of games no longer exist.

It’s voice acting.

Voice acting is what initially caused studios to limit the amounts of dialogue they could put in games, and the variety of that dialogue. And it persists today, in the form of games that may have the illusion of choice, but invariably bottleneck.

This is something that we’ve started to recover from now, with the resurgence of indie games, and with increasing acceptance of smaller, low budget studios. But the legacy of these decisions live on.

How Ever-Expanding Budgets Irrevocably Led to the Elimination of Choice

Now, it’s not all because of voice acting.

In the early days, it was a combination of animation and voice acting — everything that made the game “cinematic” in nature. Branching stories and unique dialogue options became obsolete because the studios couldn’t afford to create that much content.

And cinematic was cool. It was fun and new. You weren’t just playing a game. You were playing a movie.

But players suddenly wanted to see everything in a game digitally acted. This was extraordinarily expensive, and when you’re investing that much into the content, you want the average player to see 90 percent of it.

To do that, you need to eliminate choice.

So, even though there might be different dialogue options occasionally, they all lead to the same place. You can no longer opt to “ASK ABOUT TROUSERS” because no one wants to record a line about asking about trousers. And shoes. And socks. And so on. The line must be drawn and the budget must be kept in the black.

At this point, you might note: Why would you ask about the trousers? What could that possibly have to do with freedom in a video game? Not an unfair point, but this goes back to the interactivity between game and player, and how much of the story is written by each.

Audio: The One Thing We Can’t Quite Generate On-the-Fly

For the most part, we now have the technology to make the visual components of a cutscene on-the-fly. We have ways to sync lips to audio cues, and we have the ability to create an entire library of “idle” and “talking” animations, with transitions between them.

Over time, this technology will continue to get even better.

But as of now, pre-recorded audio continues to hold us back from creating more raw content. We have not developed a way to easily generate character lines from text. Even deep fakes encounter audio with surprisingly greater levels of challenge than the visual components. Our eyes can be tricked, but our ears cannot.

This has gotten “better” in recent years, with more depth being added to games, more choices, and more spoken dialogue. Unfortunately, it’s largely happened because voice actors either aren’t being paid, or are barely being paid — the choice is coming at a cost.

Moving Into a World of Choice

There’s a certain level of trickery game designers can use today. Game designers can opt not to include dialogue at all, or limit themselves to pre-recorded shouts. Most small budget and indie games don’t have dialogue for exactly this reason, or if they have pre-recorded audio, it’s only for certain characters and scenes.

But will we ever get AAA games again that are like the original AAA RPGs, in which nearly every plot had multiple conclusions, and characters could choose to be anything that they wanted?

We’ll see.

There’s always been an easy solution. The solution is throwing extensive amounts of time and money at the problem. We have games like Cyberpunk 2077 which hearken back to the days of choice and option — and well, it’s been delayed like three times. And we also have the nature of players themselves to contend with; having become used to games that naturally bottleneck, many are unhappy with the potential for sub-optimal decision-making.

And not everyone wants to ask someone about their trousers.