Topic: The PlayStation Fan Thread

@Octane I wish I could share in your enthusiasm. But honestly, I still find the open world games they made 10+ years ago to be more fun and endearing than the ones they're making now. (Excluding those PC RPGs, I think I finally have to accept that the entire CRPG genre was 99% garbage until 2008)

@Haru17

How exactly does the voice actor affect the quality of the overall game?

The "plausible path" to it being worse than Witcher 3 will be the same path the other 99% of games take on their way to being worse than Witcher 3.

Uhh, are you kidding me? Geralt talks over a bunch of his own game, and the first Horizon footage had people mentioning Aloy / Ashly Burch's blow-by-blow commentary. A protagonist's voice acting can have a huge effect on the story, which in turn composes a lot of an RPG overall.

The "plausible path" to it being worse than Witcher 3 will be the same path the other 99% of games take on their way to being worse than Witcher 3.

lol no. Develop some characters not in a book first, then we'll talk. Every 'emotional' scene in W3 came out of a severe left field arc. The final, climactic scene was laughable it was so bad — and I got the good ending on my first try (for some reason, it was never very clear about that).

If it's any consolation, I personally didn't care about Geralt as anything other than a vehicle for the story/setpieces/bombastic gameplay, as well as the afformentioned instant-fountain that is his voice.

I'd say the same for Captain Shepard in Mass Effect. I definitely disagree that a voice actor can't make a difference. It's just like with any movie, proper delivery can mean the difference between a line coming off as emotional, inspiring, cheesy, boring, or utterly nonsensicle. Having someone who can consistantly pump out gold over the course of a large game (if not 3 large games!) really isn't something that should be taken for granted.

Because the writing doesn't matter?
The quality of the character development doesn't matter?
The way the quests evolve doesn't matter?
Because the quality of the in-game world over all doesn't matter?

Your post makes no sense. There are PLENTY of ways this game could be worse than TW3.

"Bombastic: high-sounding but with little meaning; inflated."

Seems legit. (I honestly hate doing definitions, but sometimes you gotta represent Speech & Debate club.)

Sadly, that one was due to autocorrect, when I tried to get around writing the word "Bad-posterior", in a much more brazen fashion. I'm impressed that it almost came out as a logical sentence, at least.

I think you miss my meaning. It's not literally just that they got a competent voice actor to head the game, it's all the things we can infer from that. Geralt as a protagonist is not an isolated decision, it branches out and connects with the rest of the story and setting. Because the Pols decided to go with a gruff, mid-2000s-style protagonist, they had to go with the whole "morally gray" tone. Because they picked a pre-established character like Geralt to adapt, they couldn't make much character development happen because he had already been through his personal journey in The Witcher 1 & 2 and, I presume, some untranslated Polish fantasy novels.

And because they picked this gruff, 'morally gray,' older man-tagonist, and quasi-Batman; we know more about the writing than we could ever learn in a hundred playthroughs of The Witcher 3.

@CanisWolfred It took me a second to catch your meaning, haha. I don't really like vehicles in fantasy games. Give me Epona instead

Bad-Albatross®^TM_{No Stealing!}

But yeah, I didn't find him to be an interesting character, but I didn't hate him, and he wasn't uninteresting, landing him in the rare category of Acceptable. I could accept that I had to lug his grey-haired-posterior everywhere in order to kill sheep and do other cool things like that, and I could accept that no matter what dialogue option I pick, he will ultimately be the one speaking. I could also accept that Geralt is the one who sleeps with all the wenches, because at least I get the trading cards afterwords!

I will forever remember The Witcher 3 as the game that reverse-kink-shamed me for attempting to save a woman from what turned out to be medieval rape role-play, then went out of its way to avoid having a sex scene with the succubus on the streets of that very same city.

Bizarre.

I'm sorry, but I don't see how that really addresses what I said. I've yet to play TW3 (grizzled white dudes running around killing people isn't really my thing), but how does any of what you just said apply to the writing of the various characters you presumably meet in the game? How does it affect the various stories in quests you take? And it doesn't address the way the game's open world is constructed at all.

We won't really have a sense of how H:ZD compares to anything until it's out in the wild.

EDIT: Incidentally, I don't know how many novels there are overall, but a good number of them have been translated into English. Seven or so, by the looks of it.

Idk how many people are playing Final Fantasy XV, but if you're not... you should be.

You really, really should be.

Saving it for when my bro comes home from College around Xmas time.

Grain of salt approach: Final Fantasy XV has an awful story, pretty bad pacing, and some jank to its combat. I think it's my favorite game this year that's not a Monster Hunter expansion, though. It's super weird — FFXV has a ton of environment and enemy variety that's not really put to good use. But sooo much effort went into that game. They should try to make a more standard JRPG next time.

@JaxonH I'll get it when it's $20 or so. NOTHING about it looks appealing to me, personally, but I do have some level of curiosity about it.

this has been true for a long, long time

if there's any game it would actually happen with it would be XVI

@kkslider5552000 No, but this time they tried to make an open world on top of everything else.

sure, but that statement has been true about main series Final Fantasy regardless since December 17th, 2009

Well they don't really affect the story though do they. They're just given lines to read out for the most part. The story would be identical if it was completely silent. I'd argue that voice acting has actually done less for RPGs than it has for other genres. Most of the dialogue in RPGs is when you're just standing around anyway so just reading things was always fine. Which is why to this day, most people's favourite RPGs were ones that had no voice acting. I'd put voice acting on par with good graphics in terms of RPGs. It's a nice novelty, but for the most part they were fine without it.
The place where voice acting has really added considerable value to games is the party based (AI party) action and adventure types. Last of Us, Uncharted, Half-life 2, Portal 2, FFXV. Before voice acting came along, you just couldn't have someone talking to you at the same time as any kind of action on screen, because you can't pay attention to text at the same time as realtime events on screen. The Last of Us before voice acting would be a much inferior game. Final Fantasy before voice acting was not inferior at all.