It's an old interview but it was during the time where Sword and Shield was about to be release and it explain why no voice acting:>“There’s sort of two main reasons, so firstly this is a RPG with a whole lot of text that we’re then localising and releasing in nine different languages at the same time. So from a purely practical point of view actually getting that organised and carrying out all the voice recording, the corrections and so on in nine different languages for release on exactly the same day is something that would be incredibly difficult. So, that’s one reason why we haven’t chosen to do it this time around.>But the other reason is one of character image, in the sense of when you play a game, if you’ve got a voice on that character that instantly provides to the player an image, a feel for that character that they don’t generate themselves, it’s pushed on them from the development side. Whereas if we have really flavourful text, for those characters, but no voice the players can kind of create their own image of who that character is as they’re playing. And that’s something we really like to encourage as we’re creating games.”TL;DR It would take too long to translate 9 different language with voice acting and release on the same day (1) and afraid of ruining the image of the character(2). All from Shigeru Ohmorihttps://nintendoeverything.com/game-freak-on-why-pokemon-sword-shield-doesnt-have-voice-acting/
>>723871047tl;dr: they're fucking lazy, stingy and incompetent. There are more text heavy games than gamefreak that have partial and full voice acting. Gamefreak has neither. Not even little grunts or one liners. Just complete dead silence. It's a joke. They don't give a fuck. Fuck these hacks.
>>723871047>It would take too long to translate 9 different language with voice acting and release on the same day (1) and afraid of ruining the image of the character(2)Solution: Monster Hunter language
what is this guy talking about?It's common for AA games to support tons of text languages but only 2 or 3 voice languages
>>723871047I don't even like nu-pokemon, but no voice acting is based. Voice acting has caused dialogue options and narrative in general to be dumbed down.
This is for the most well known and valuable franchise in the world btw. It would be too difficult. They can't afford to hire the talent who could do something that literally every other studios can do nowadays, even indies.
>>723871142Any and all budget you could give towards voice acting NPCs I'd rsther Gamefreak spend on better sound design. Go full autistic with sound design. You have 1,000 plus creatures, get fucking lost in the sauce Id crave that over pointlessly voiced children to appease pdf files. You have the anime. Deal with it.
>>723871272It didn't dumb anything down for Baldur's Gate 3 so it's clearly doable.
>>723871047After that leak shows that pokemon games have the budget of a typical CW show like Arrow, Supernatural and Flash we know the reason for why the games are so shoddy is because they make billions of dollars with minimal effort, so why bother changing? They are a corporation their entire goal is to make the line go up for as cheap as possible minimal risk, maximum profits! That attitude is literally a legal requirement
>>723871361They won't do that for the same reason they won't do voices. They are cheap motherfuckers, and they know they don't really have to do that, retards will still buy 10s of millions of copies anyway so why bother? It's cheaper to go after the competition to ensure nobody will ever do the things they don't want to do. I hate Nintendo and gayfreak so fucking much it's unreal.
>>723871450Yeah, they won't do shit to make it good in any way which is why I don't own a switch 2. The base Nintendo games have strayed so far from their original path they're no longer created for me in mind, the formfactor isn't as fun as the DS was, Nintendo just lost a lot of their magic. Gamefreak isn't Nintendo but Pokemon being good could incentivize me to buy the console. However they'd never do that like you said so here I am at an impass.
1 - its too much works2 - but also thatIt looks like 1 is more important.
>>723871047Okay, so what is the excuse for the pokemon themselves still having the same awful soundclips from the gameboy days?
>>723871687>Okay, so what is the excuse for the pokemon themselves still having the same awful soundclips from the gameboy days?Because that's what they sound like dumbass, and they can't just say their name because the Pokemon names are different across languages.
>>723871047>so firstly this is a RPG with a whole lot of textPokemon games don't have a lot of text.
>>723871047>TL;DR: we're lazy, cheap pieces of shit and our retarded fanbase will buy anything we shit out, so why tryFixed that for you.
>I NEED THE LINES READ FOR ME BY SHITTY CRINGE VOICE ACTORS!!“Muh voice acting” has to be the most retarded complaint about modern pokemon to ever exist.
>>723871909it's okay ohmori, they'll buy it anyway
>>723872016I’m sorry you never learned how to read.
>>723871909It's basically the premise of why the cartoon exists.
>>723871687I thought they updated those in X and Y? >>723871909I don't think it NEEDS voice acting but it's jarring and weird to see the characters in a modern game, especially as they get more expressive, just kind of gesture awkwardly in silence during cutscenes. Even N64 Zelda had the characters make a sound or grunt when you speak to them. They could at least have a nonsense language like Silksong.
>>723871047In most games without voice acting there's that "pipipipi" sound when character talk. In Z-A it legit feels like sound bugged out when sometimes text is emerging on screen but you hear nothing.
>>723871047why doesn't they do the banjo / animal crossing gibberish?
>>723872062why do pokebabs get mad at me when i agree with them?yeah man, it doesn't need voice acting, it doesn't need good graphics, it doesn't need good writing, it doesn't need good gameplayi know, you love buying low effort low budget dogshit
>>723872536Or just grab JP VA's and have them do a few grunts or excited shouts and so on, and use those across all different language releases.
>>723871047I literally can't imagine what this zesty nigger is supposed to sound like, so voice acting would help here.
>>723871142Where did the passion go? Or is it still there and they don't have the budget a home console game requires? I honestly want them to do a HD2D game for the gen 5 remakes just to see if they still have it in them
>>723871235You know they dropped that in Wilds, right.
>>723873305And the franchise has been shit since then.
>>723871047Having no voice acting is fine, but not doing Zelda grunts is retarded. You need at least some grunts so people can form a voice in their head.
>>723873232Yes you can
I remember some anime dub voice actor made a showreel of herself doing nemona's lines from scarlet/violet and it was so god damn badI thought Nemona was great while playing the game but I would have hated her if that person had voiced her
>>723871047I think there should be Japanese voice acting at least, millions consume anime/manga every day
>>723871047>Whereas if we have really flavourful text, for those characters, but no voice the players can kind of create their own image of who that character is as they’re playing. And that’s something we really like to encourage as we’re creating games.based
>>723871047>It would take to long.Yet every other company can do it.
>>723871047i get not having a voiced protag (it sucked when bethesda tried it in fallout 4 and they quickly dropped it) but the NPCs could at least have some lines
>>723871047Just make it like every other dialogue heavy game and only have an English and Japanese language track. I’m sure Brazilian and Chinese kids would rather hear an unfamiliar language than lips flapping in silence.
>>723871047>game series that made over 100 billion dollars cant afford voice acting because uhh...>meanwhile literally every other game has voice acting in 10 different languages
>>723871909you realize you can just turn off the voice acting if you don't want itwell maybe you can't do that in shitty nintendo games because they are made for retards and you can't give them options
>gamefreak: imagine the applethis confuses and angers /v/.
>>723875217Persona, Xenoblade, and Fire Emblem have dozens of hours of voiced audio, in multiple languages, and only see 1/10 sales of Pokemon.
>YOU HAVE TO HIRE VOICE ACTORS AND PAY THEM WHAT THEY'RE F*CKING WORTH CHUD!>"no"
$110,000,000,000 a Year IP btw.
>>723871047Voice acting would ruin the pokemon characters. It would give away when they are serious or when they are about to hit you with truly wacky dialogue. Pokemon dialog would translate well to voice acting at all
>>723871687Do you play the games at all? All pokemon have several cries now
Voice acting is soulless shit. I can't believe you retards are actually raging over a franchise not becoming triple A slop, like what the fuck is wrong with you morons?
>>723875989Most of us are upset the game carries a AAA price tag but still has handheld production values. Even PS1 and Saturn games had voice acting 30 years ago. Pokemon games are $60-$100 yet lack what has been considered an industry standard for decades. Nobody would be complaining about VA if the games were $20.
>>723871235This has been shown to have a negative effect for popular enough franchises because it comes across as cheap in the same way no voice acting does to normies. Pretty sure the only thing that gets away with it is Animal Crossing. This is why MH dropped it too.
>>723871909I genuinely wouldn't care if the games still used the far back dissociated camera angles with scripted scenes using minimal animations.But the new scripted scenes are so in your face, with complex character animations and mouths moving as if they are speaking.GF themselves out MORW work into making this seem weird. And it constantly takes me out of scenes that are clearly supposed to be immensive. I'd take gibberish over silence if I'm going to have to watch Taunie flap her lips anyways.
>>723875292What? This is literally GF saying they can't imagine the apple.
>>723876254you don't buy games anyways.
>>723877065>we want the player to imagine how our characters soundno you moron.
>>723876254I don't think any game should do anything that is considered "standard" it can be a consideration but it is much more important that it suits the game they want to make.
>>723871047Why the fuck would you want voice acting? That shit in the new Zelda games is cringe. Go back to text boxes with the characters doing occasional sound bites please.
>>723871269>It's common for AA games to support tons of text languages but only 2 or 3 voice languagesThey usually only support English and nipponese.AAA games do but they also take forever even for multinational companies, GF is just a 200 people studio.
>>723871909instead we just get cringe silent cutscenes
>>723871142The silence is based and i'm in favour of oaying voice actors what they're worth (0). I bet you can't even imagine an apple faggot.
The only reason it doesn't have voice acting is gamefreak doesn't want to spend more than an indie budget on these games. That's literally it, any other excuse is cope.
>>723871047Other games manage it. Maybe don't release the games every year like CoD and Madden.
>>723871047No voice acting is the one good desition they take.
>>723877520>GF is just a 200 people studio.With billions of dollars in the bank that they'd rather spend on hookers and coke than the games they make.
The problem with the silence is that the text noise isn't quality enough for it.Ace Attorney solved this decades ago by making spoken text sound different for males and females, and change in pitch and volume based on if a character is shouting etc, as well as the text sounding off the syllables of whatever words are appearing on screen.There are creative ways to do a game without voice acting and gamefreak doesn't do those, meaning it is solely them not wanting to spend the time, effort, or money on the issue.
no you see, voice acting is actually a bad thing now because pokeshit doesn't want to spend more money on their yearly shovelware
>>723877859Having money doesn't mean that you should waste it on unnecessary things. And voice acting in gaming was always unnecessary.
>>723873236>Or is it still there and they don't have the budget a home console game requires?Pokémon is the biggest franchise in the entire world. It's bigger than Star Wars, bigger than Marvel, and this is their flagship product.
>>723875117Chinese prefer JP dub anyway, the rest of the world is generally fine with either EN or original JP. Add Spanish to that, since it's apparently a huge market for everything, and you covered like 90% "global needs" for voice acting with just those 3 languages. And if you want to cut corners, just do what most RPG do already - voice acting for main story, silence with just a bunch of grunts, gasps and greetings for side content.
>>723873305Wilds uses MH language for background NPC chatter but not for the story or main NPCs since it’d sound ridiculous with the way the story is presented
>>723877520>AAA games do but they also take forever even for multinational companies, GF is just a 200 people studio.It doesn't matter how big the studio is, nobody records in-house, they send a script and a deck of rough animation timings to a recording studio and then they have shit recorded for them. The "timing" issue is sort of legit but only if for some reason they feel the need to tweak the script all the way until the last month before release and that is usually indicative of a poor production planning anyway.
>>723878334Ok but see >>723878145There are ways to do voiceless video games. Other ways include stuff like monster hunter language, which hollow knight does effectively.Gamefreak doesn't do any of that, resulting in characters looking like they're talking while soundless text just sits there on the screen. It makes the fact that there's no voice acting stand out way way more, because no voice acting for text is blatantly not some design choice like it is in Hollow Knight and Ace Attorney.
>>723871047>>723871142He's right though. Voice acting has no place in video games. Any penny spent on VA is a penny too much.
>>723878606Not having at least something while the text is scrolling makes the game seem cheap, so I'm not spending my money on it. You might as well remove the music because that's unnecessary too.
>>723873236>they don't have the budget a home console game requires?This is on gamefreak. They choose their own budgets. Nintendo handles distribution and advertising but gamefreak produces the games themselves.They deliberately handicap themselves for the sake of greater profit, which is ironic because if they actually spent the budget Nintendo spends on Mario / Zelda (around 70-100M, which is still light for AAA games these days but something pokemon would make back in announcement pre orders alone), the games would probably sell near GTA numbers.
>>723872536the animal crossing voices are actually intelligable albeit primitive TTS voices when you play in Japanese
>>723872097Pokemon in particular never did this for every letter.
>>723871047based!
>>723871047Why would you even need to justify this? Of all the problems pokemon has, not being voice acted isn't one of them. Very very few games should have voice acting.
>>723879495I think the problem is that the industry has moved forward, and it's simply way more common now that there is usually SOMETHING that plays when characters speak, it doesn't have to be fully voicelined it can be just some reaction noises, or just nonsense language of the gameworld or even just some random noises with higher or lower pitches depending on the character. To just say no to all of that is indicative that they prefer outdated methods for their games. Which I suppose is Gamefreak in a nutshell, though.
>>723878537kys shill
I was semi excited for Z-A then I saw actual gameplay and the mega leaks, the game fucking sucks, it looks so shit. I'm not even going to play this.
>>723878763Sure, dialogue can have musical transitions and cute little anime sound effects for accenting certain lines, because those don't introduce the same issues as voice acting. Dialogue boxes should ideally let you snap to the full text instantly so you can actually read the fucking thing at your own pace. With voice acting, you have to actively fight against it in order to read. Also, interrupting voice-acted lines, which you should be allowed to do, leads to BEAR SEEK SEEK LEST which sounds horrific and wrong.
>>723879653yeah, no, every NPC in zelda sounding like i'm repeatedly grabbing them by the genitals was incredibly grating
>>723879653>the industry has moved forwardNo the fuck it has not. Whatever direction it's going in is not forward. And that applies to pokemon too. But they are at least right about voice acting.
>>723879653>the industry has moved forwardinto the grave maybe.
>>723877401Zelda was a case of terrible casting for zelda. Everyone else is passable. Sort of like Ada in re4 remake, sometimes you get a total failure. But a competent director axes that shit and gets a replacement.>>723877852>>723878334>>723878606The game of the year is about to win off the backs of 60% voice acting, 20% music, 10% gameplay, 5% writing, and 5% footfaggotry. E33 without the voice acting performances is a completely forgettable game.
>>723879787I actually played it and thought it was cool. I'm impressed by how they managed to make it real time while retaining almost all core mechanics, shifting a lot of turn based elements to time-based and making positioning important. This is, unironically, one of the best moves from turn based to real time I think a franchise has ever done, since it retains most of the original system while transitioning it to an entirely new gameplay style.The only major flaw is that the city is very samey and flat. Definitely the biggest thing they need to improve, which is a shame because from a gameplay perspective it's well designed (very dense and that density is directly relevant to gameplay since you can use elements of it in battle).
>>723880064so what? some lame award show funded by sony and run by dipshits like the dorito pope and a gaggle of game journos should not be driving industry standards.
>>723871047This is the most retarded OP I have read in a while.Pokemon games have no voice acting (or graphics, or good coding) because the games are just shovelware that needs to be cheaply produced in order to sell merchandise.So shut the fuck up.
>>723880107>This is, unironically, one of the best moves from turn based to real time I think a franchise has ever doneyou have terminal shit taste
>>723880064All of the botk voice actors are awful. Zelda just has more lines than most so it's more noticeable.And saying a game tickled journo willies purely because of its voice acting is a rather compelling argument against its inclusion.
>>723879974>>723880049Whatever people might have as their opinion about the direction the vidya industry has moved (which I too think that for the bigger titles it just is not as amazing as it was when I was younger), it still stands that if you ignore any sort of voiceacting or even sounds that accompany textboxes in your game, it might fly if your game is a small project. People are way more willing to accept that, maybe they will point it out that it could have used something for the text segments, but when you are a company that has made games for many fucking years now and it's one of the biggest franchises on the planet, you do stand out in a pretty bad way in comparison.
>>723871272You're talking about Pokemon here. Fucking Pokemon. It's not fucking Mass Effect or Baldur's Gate. It doesn't have complex narrative nor dialogue choices that actually impacts the story.
>>7238710476 years old interview isn't exactly relevant today
>>723880310Alright, I'll care about your decision to call it abhorrent shit when you've actually played it.
>>723880265This is peak poser babble. Some Pokemon games are undeniably good, well-paced and well-structured games. The best Pokemon games are good in the same way that the best Dragon Quest games are good. Just undeniably solid games full of charming little details. And no, you don't fit in yet.
>>723875989Then don't charge AAA price with $30 DLCs on top you fucking retarded asslicker.
>>723880495>sounds that accompany textboxes in your gamePokemon has always had those and still does. Why would you feel the need to lie about pokemon of all things? There's plenty enough wrong with these games that's actually real.
>>723871047>TL;DR It would take too long to translate 9 different language with voice acting and release on the same dayJust incase you thought this wasn't bullshit enough, half of the reason The Pokemon Company International literally fucking exists is to do this exact thing for the anime and spinoff games.
>>723880495this idea that it makes a lot of money therefore they need to spend 9 figures on an ugly ue5 vasoline smear look to please a vocal minority of grown ass men playing armchair investor is stupid. tell me how well this development strategy has worked out for EA getting bought out by the saudis or microsoft running every studio they buy into the ground or the last ratchet and clank game flopping with multiple millions in sales. this has only worked for rockstar.
>>723881384>>723881384>this idea that it makes a lot of money therefore they need to spend 9 figures on an ugly ue5 vasoline smear look to please a vocal minority of grown ass men playing armchair investor is stupid. tell me how well this development strategy has worked out for EA getting bought out by the saudis or microsoft running every studio they buy into the ground or the last ratchet and clank game flopping with multiple millions in sales. this has only worked for rockstar.Yeah Squaresoft literally started this strategy with Final Fantasy 7 and it literally fucked them over at every turn. To the point they're afraid to reveal how well the new Final Fantasy games are even doing.
>>723871047Small indie studio, please understand. Its not like Pokemon is a big franchise, like Ys
>>723881384maybe because that's not the idea
