Voice in games

It seems like it would be a strange thing to cover but voice in video games has evolved so much and has changed the way we play games. There is so much to cover on the topic I am only going to skim the surface talking about early representations of voice in games, and how it is used today (both the bad and the good). Voice is one of the things that can bring games to a more personal level, because once a game starts talking to you it makes the player sit up and pay attention.

Origins of Voice in Games

Early games (the 70s all the way to the mid 90s) didn't have room for much voice acting. It was a technical limitation more than the designers choice. Early consoles just couldn't handle realistic voices that well. However, this is not to say that many early games did not try. There were two pioneers of voice acting in games: fighting games and sports games. Both of these genres had the upper hand in voice because they only needed a limited amount. It was still impossible to consider voice acting for an entire action or adventure game, but it was possible to give each fighter a little phrase and the announcer to say "FIGHT". In sports games all they needed was a few phrases to encompass the sport (for example, a football game only needed the words; touchdown, incomplete, safety, fumble and some other known football phrases). Because the dialogue was so short and there wasn't that much variety it was much easier to pull off simple voice-overs to give the games an extra layer of realism.

Sometimes early games would also use voice on the title screen, having the game announce itself. An early example of this is the Ghostbusters game for the Commodore 64, NES, and Sega Master System. You can hear how distorted the voice sounds, which was the main reason voice could not be an intergrated part of gaming in those days. This particular clip comes from the commodore 64 version.

Joe Montanna II: Sports Talk Football was one of the earliest sports games with commentary. You can hear how the Genesis could pull off clearer sound than the Ghostbusters clip, but the voice quality still is not good enough to encompass an entire game.

A clip from Mortal Kombat. However, many fighting games at the time used this same technique. Using an annoucer for the fight and giving the characters short catchphrases during special moves gives the game a little more realism.

Street Fighter II also had some classic early voice acting when the fighters yelled out their special moves. These phrases are still used in Street Fighter games today because they became so entranced in the franchise.

CD gaming

What brought voice in games mainstream without a doubt was the CD format. CDs could hold much more information than any cartridge or disk could and also could produce high quality sound. With CD based media, developers no longer had to worry about low quality voices and could now persue making games that had full voice tracks. This is when action, adventure and RPGs started to get full voice casts making them cinematic experiences. Sports games also benefited even more from this, now being able to have full colour commentary during the games.

Metal Gear Solid was one of the most cinematic games of its time. It was all done on 2 CDs on a 2x speed CD drive. However, this was enough to fully voice the entire game, with hours of speech.

Resident Evil was an earlier Playstation game that featured full voice acting. The voice acting is known for being comically cheesy but it added to the B-Movie feel of the game. These are some of the funnier quotes in the series. You can see how the bad translation and voice acting stand out even more with voice.

Nintendo the black sheep

The Nintendo 64 was not a CD based console so it lacked a lot of voice in its games. It was a powerful console so it could pull it off but the cartridge had a fairly limited capacity and one of the easiest things to cut in order to save space was voice. However, even today (with the Wii having a DVD drive) they do not regularly make games with voice acting. Sometimes this is done with a good reason. For example, Mario games have very limited voice acting but the characters voices are so cartoony that it would be annoying to hear them speak at great lengths. However there are many games that could use voice acting that do not have any at all. The Zelda games have a very colourful cast of characters and each one could have a great voice. For some reason the characters remain mute and you have to read the text on the screen. The games still stand as being fun and classics, but I believe some voice acting could really make the games epic.

Here is the voice of Mario. It is fun enough for a platformer game where you only heard Mario at select times. As you can see he also does the voice Wario (and other characters not shown in this clip).

Paper Mario is a Mario RPG, therefore it has a lot of story and text. Many people complain about the amount of dialogue to read, but I would rather read it than to hear the character in Mario's world speak. Many of which have very high pitched voices, or in Mario and Luigi's case Italian stereotyped voices that cannot be taken seriously.

When Voices go Bad

There are many times when voice acting goes completely wrong. With the ability to put voice in the games also comes the responsiblity to ensure that actors will take the role seriously, and game designers will write great dialogue. Voice acting in games is a double edged sword.If you have a great cast the game becomes much more immersive and memorable. If the voice acting is awful it can ruin the experience making the game seem much shallower than it might be.

A classic example or voice acting gone wrong. In the SNES Starfox the characters had little sound effects for their voice. But, when the N64 version came out they decided to upgrade to a full voice cast. The characters went from charming and fun to cheesy and borderline annoying. Thankfully the game was good enough to withstand this. However, later Starfox games suffered more as the voice acting became more and more prevalent.

Castlevania Symphony of the Night is one of the greatest games of all time, but it isn't perfect. The one thing that holds it down is the voice acting which makes the games plot seem much less meaningful and shallow (it is already a fairly simple plot). Luckily the game does not have that many areas that focus on story.

The Good Voice Acting

Not all games are plagued with horrible voice acting, some even really pull out all the stops when it comes to the voices in the game. When game designers take great care and pride in their dialogue and voices it really elevates the game. Great voice acting can enhance the storyline, make the game more realistic, give the player greater reason to have an emotional attachment, and all around make the game more polished. I am going to end off this post on a good note showing you what voice acting can lead to and how it can enhance the video game art form.

Psychonauts is a great game, and not only because of its gameplay. Tim Schafer (the lead designer) has a real knack for comedy and it really comes through in his writing. Even with great dialogue you still need great actors to delever it or it will fall flat.Thankfully, Psychonauts develops on a truely humourous experience thanks to the voice acting.

The Halo series is basically a sci-fi epic action game. Unlike some developers of first person shooters, the developers at Bungie actually cared about their story and wanted to make it something to remember. Now the plot in Halo isn't the greatest thing ever written but it does have more depth to it than a typical action game. The voice actors in the Halo series really know how to pull off a fun sci-fi feel.

Kingdom Hearts is a strange game. It is Disney meets Final Fantasy with the lead character Sora going from world to world meeting all kinds of characters. The people at Square-Enix made sure to capture the voices from the original Disney material. Even though they didn't have the original voice cast they tracked down people who played the parts other times (cartoons, or direct to DVD movies).

Uncharted Drakes Fortune is the closest thing I have ever played to an action movie. It borrows a lot of its themes from the Indiana Jones films and it shows. Part of what made Indiana Jones so great was the top notch acting, and Uncharted captured this with having some really fun characters, all of which had great voices.

Voice in video games is a relatively new aspect of the art form. It is something that can either help elevate a game to a real level of polish or make the game seem amateur. Since video games are only now obtaining mainstream recognition (and even then it is very fleeting) as a real medium it has become easier to find real dedicated actors to fill the voices. Video games voices is something that has gotten better over time and hopefully will only continue to do so.

Loading

Not all game design choices are done 100% on purpose. Sometimes game designers have to make the best of a bad situation. When video games started to come on CDs (and now DVDs and Blu-Ray) it brought a lot more to work with. The major downside to these formats though was the loading time. Unlike game cartidges, CDs had a much longer and more noticable loading time. Loading can happen when any significant change in the game occurs. The game needs time to load the new information before it can display it. This causes a pause in the gameplay that is unavoidable. Some game designers took the loading time as a challange and made the best of it.

Blank Loading screen

It is still used today and is probably the worst kind of loading. Rather than giving anything for the player to look at the screen is mostly blank with a simple loading text. Sometimes the logo of the game will be on the screen but looking at it can get very boring. Since the screen is basically static without much to do the loading time can actually seem longer than it really is. Try staring at a wall for 20 seconds. It obviously feels a lot longer than that, but if you are watching a movie for 20 seconds (especially an interesting movie) the time flys by. Sadly this type of loading is not extinct and a lot of developers still use this method. In their defence they may have not wanted to spend any time with the loading sequence and devert all their energy to the game itself.

Little Big Planet. A great game that everybody loves. But the black loading at the start of the game, feels much longer than it is.

Load it all at the start

Some bigger games know they are going to have a lot of loading. The game world may be so huge that the game designers don't want to stop the player every time he/she moves to a new area. A way to combat this is to load a large chunk of the game when the disc first starts up. This can lead to a long load at the beginning of the game but afterwards the loading moves much faster. This not only gets a lot out of the way, but it also helps keep the player in the game. One of the problems with loading is that the player is literally booted out of the game and forced to sit and stare. By having the loading at the beginning of the game the player is already out of the experience. He/she is not expecting to be playing as soon as the disc is booted up.

Grand Theft Auto is a large game with a highly detailed city. You move freely throughout the city so it is in the designers best interest to load up the majority of the game before it even starts.

Backstory

Some loading screens give the player something to read while waiting. It is usually a few sentences (sometimes they change as the loading continues) which fills the player in on the games backstory. This is fairly common place since it takes almost no work from the game designers and is a lot better than a blank loading screen. Things that might not naturally come up during gameplay can be read here.

Hidden Loading

Probably the best kind of loading and one that should be used more often. Rather than taking the player out of the game at all, loading can be hidden within the game. For example say the player needs to get from one level to another. Rather than stopping the game, the levels can be joined by a small tunnel that the player must run across. The tunnel is simple but still fits into the game design. While the player is running across the tunnel the level on the other side is loading. This exact situation is used in the Castlevania games, and during vehicle sequences in Half Life 2.

Castlevania Symphony of the Night was a large game with many diverse sections of the castle to explore freely. Rather than freeze the game between areas, each section of the castle was joined by a tunnel. The time it took to run through the tunnel was the time it took to load the area.

Resident Evil has the best hidden loading out of all the games. Not only did it not take the player out of the game but added to the atmosphere. Resident Evil was a very scary game for its time. The player never knew what was behind a door. The loading screen was replaced by a door slowly opening, or walking down/up stairs adding to the suspense the player felt.

Mass Effect took some criticism by having its loading hidden in elevators. Personally I liked this touch. Not only was the loading more visually appealing (looking at 3d models of your characters) but the elevator played news radio and you could hear how your mission was affecting the world around you. Or like in these clips your characters talked with one another.

Special Mention

There is one final type of loading that is very rarely used. Ridge Racer had the player playing a level of the classic Galaxian while waiting for the game to load. One of the reasons more games do not have a second game during the loading sequence is that it would take too much work. Namco, the developer and publisher of the game, already owned the rights to Galaxian so it took no work to put it in the loading screen. Furthermore Galaxian is a fairly small game and it can be run over top of a loading screen with ease. If a game is too complex, the loading game would need its own loading screen. Not many developers have a back catalogue of simple fast games like Namco and developers do not want to spend time creating their own sub game for the loading screen when work could be better spent elsewhere. However, the Galaxian loading screen is still remembered by many.

Loading is a challange in which the developers must make lemonaid out of their lemons. Anyone can just throw a "now loading..." text on the screen but it takes a little extra thinking and care to turn waiting for the game to load into something more bearable and sometimes a welcome addition to the game.

Cutscenes

One of the most common trends in games has nothing to do with gameplay at all. Cutscenes are basically little movies that force the player to sit and watch. They can be used for many different things and can have positive or negative effects on the overall game experience. I will look at the good and bad of cutscenes.

Where it all started

Cutscenes started off as simple filler between levels. The old Pac Man game had a simple cutscene of pac man and the ghosts running around. Some early games had a short cutscene that introduced the story. These early cutscenes were seconds long. They were not too flashy or that important. If the option was there many players skipped them and went on with the game.

One of the more famous cutscenes was at the beginning of the first Double Dragon game. It was short but set up the story well enough. In the few seconds it plays you understand that a girl is kidnapped and you have to save her.

The early Ninja Gaiden games for NES showed the first hints of cutscenes to come. They were not long but much more fleshed out than most. Camera angles changed and plenty of dialogue was said. Here is part one of a compilation of the cutscenes in the first game.

Eventually game designers decided to add a bit more dialogue to the scenes and try and flesh out the story a bit more. Early RPGs usually had long extended scenes that had the player just reading what other's were saying in the game. It was a natural progression to move these moments into scenes with better direction. Gameplay would stop as the characters moved around the screens themselves and set up key story line points.

Final Fantasy VI is know for its longer cutscenes. While still done in 2D sprites you can see how the game was striving to be cinematic. In the most famous cutscene from the game you watch an opera.

Finally the Playstation landed developers and found themselves with powerful new hardware that ran CDs. CD gaming offered much more space to play with than cart based games. Designers found many ways to try and fill up their game discs. One of these ways was having long cutscenes done in stunning graphics. They were usually rendered in higher resolutions and saved as movie files on the disc. These were show pieces for the hardware and the format. After this the modern era of the cutscene was born and popularized.

Again it was a Final Fantasy that took the cutscenes further. Final Fantasy VII featured longer scenes that were directed as almost mini action flicks. It successfully brought the RPG genre mainstream in North America and it did so mostly because of the cutscenes. Ever since RPGs have been know for their cinematic scenes, as a way to push the story forward. This particular scene depicts the death of Aeris.

Cutscene as a Reward

One of the more common ways many games, even not particuarly story driven ones, use cutscenes is by offering them as a reward. Cutscenes are a way to play out some action and story without involving the player. This may seem counter productive to the artform, but when done properly it is satisfying. Players can get fatigued while playing and sometimes are forced to do the same type of gameplay over and over again for a long time to reach their goal. Once their goal is finished it can be nice to drop the controller down for a bit and watch the outcome unfold.

After beating a level in Halo 2, the non-stop action takes a break from the player and you watch what happens at the end of the level. Its a clean way to give the player a break while at the same time keeping up the mood.

The main reward of a game is the ending, and cutscenes owe a lot of their history to endings. Since the game is technically over, the player is expecting to be done playing the game. Its a cool way to wrap up the story to have the player watch his accomplishments throughout the game being paid off.

The Tekken Fighting series is know for its well done endings. You get a different and unique ending for each character you beat the game with.

The Interactive Cutscene

The whole original point of a cutscene was to take control away from the player and show him/her what the designer wants without interferrence. However, a new form of cutscene is appearing that not only brings the story forward and has intense action squences but never takes control away from the player. The interactive cutscene is normally only in First Person Shooters. The eyes of the hero are the eyes of the camera. While a major story point unfolds in front of the player he can still move the protagonist around to see everything from different angles. The pioneer of this style of cutscene are the designers at Valve software and their Half Life series. Half Life's basic story is about an alien invasion. Throughout the Half Life games, large scale action squences unfold, sometimes while the player is in the middle of doing something else. In games without interactive cutscenes if a building were to blow up, chances are the gameplay would stop and there would be a new camera angle showing the building collapsing. In Half Life Episode One when the Citadel is exploding and taking out the whole city around it the player is free to look around as he is on the train escaping. He can watch the action unfold, or look down at the ground. It may seem counter-productive to create entire set pieces and only hope the player pays attention to them, but by adding this layer of interactivity it lets the player feel more attached to the character and their surroundings. Taking players out of the gameplay to watch something can take a player out of the game, with an interactive cutscene they are never without the controller in their hand.

Half Life Episode 1 ends with the Citadel blowing up. Gordon Freeman can look and move as he wants to. Because you are seeing the scene through the eyes of the protagonist you are more likely to feel a connection to the scene. It also helps make the game world seem more real since you are never taken out of gameplay.

Bioshock rarely takes the player out of control. You are always watching the game through Jack's eyes. This sets up many dynamic scenarios.

The other type of interactive cutscenes, called quick time events, are a bit less interactive but still encourages players to keep the controller in their hand. During a cutscene that takes the player out of gameplay sometimes a button may flash up on the screen. If the player does not press the button fast enough their hero will die during the cutscene. This ensures that the player has more of an attachment with their character, since they have to play closer attention to the screen, while still being able to create the full cinematic experience of a cutscene.

God of War uses quick time events as an ending to a battle. It allows Kratos to pull off more brutal moves that would not be possible in gameplay alone. This particular battle is from God of War 2 and its intense Pegasus battle.

Way too Long!

Now that cutscenes are common place in a game some designers forget that they are making a game at times. As I said before a cutscene should be a break from the game. Sometimes cutscenes turn from a nice break to a very long interruption in the gameplay. At a point designers need to figure out if they want to make a game or a movie. The Metal Gear Solid Series is a prime example of this. I admit that I love the series but I do see a flaw in how long the cutscenes are. Thankfully the gameplay that is there is so good that it is worth sitting through the long cinematics. A game should not neccesarily play like this however. The cutscene should be a reward for playing; playing should not be a reward for watching a cutscene. At one point I sat through 2 back to back cutscenes that nearly totaled an hour. When cutscenes over stay their welcome the game stops becoming a game, and is now a short movie. Cutscenes can compliment the medium but they can also overtake it.

Why can't I play this?

For me the worst kind of cutscene is one where I sit there wishing I was playing the scene and not watching it. At the best of times cutscenes should show moments that the player could not realistically control. But if you are approaching a character and are ready to fight only to see the battle played out in a movie, it doesn't just take you out of the game it also makes the player angry. There is almost no point to replace a battle in a gameplay with a battle being played out in a movie. A cutscene can play out the end of the fight to give it a dynamic finish, or start off the fight to set it up the exact way the designer wants, but it should never completely replace the battle. If the cutscene can realistically be translated into gameplay it probably should. Hideo Kojima (director of the Metal Gear Solid Series) even admitted to his mistakes when he said, "In MGS4, yes, I put everything in the cut sequences, which I kind of regret to some extent, because maybe there is a new approach which I should think about. I'm always thinking about it -- making it interactive but at the same time telling the story part and the drama even more emotionally"

In Resident Evil 5 you come across a motor cycle gang. rather then having an epic battle with them you are forced to sit and watch the entire fight unfold. It would have worked much better as a boss battle then a cutscene.

Cutscenes can be a great tool for the game designer but they can also put a lot of players off. When used properly they can be a well needed break or reward for the player. When too long or used instead of gameplay they can take the player out of the interactive element of the game. Still it is something every game has to one extent or another, and everyone has their preferences on how they should be used.