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Modders are using AI to put voice acting in Morrowind
- rhacker 4y agoIf they start using AI to enhance all the old games, we won't need new games because the old ones were better.
- laserdancepony 4y agoMorrowind will still not be popular with younger players. I imagine the lack of fast travel, map markers and the class/skill system is just too much for most.
- entropicdrifter 4y agoPart of the game is learning how to figure out what the fuck you're supposed to do. I love immersive sim games. Miss back in the day when we didn't have maps for dungeons and you were supposed to be drawing a map on paper. I never did, as a little kid I just learned how to memorize dungeon layouts really well and now I memorize any place I go on foot.
- tekmate 4y agojust brand it "the dark souls of x" and young players won't be bothered by complexity
- herculity275 4y agoI mean the open world design philosophy in Elden Ring is not too dissimilar to Morrowind's and it was a massive hit. What really needs updating is the combat system, it wasn't great when the game came out and it aged horribly.
- bigbillheck 4y agoI haven't played Morrowind, but Elden Ring has both map markers and fast travel.
- dharmab 4y agoMorrowind is similar, with map markers for major landmarks and diegetic fast travel, but still requiring the player to explore and orient to find quest objectives.
- tsgagnon 4y agoThe visuals are pretty rough and the map is small. The map size actually is a blessing though since your character moves at a snails pace. The gameplay, especially from a melee perspective, is rough at best, and directly unfun at its worst.
- out_of_protocol 4y ago> character moves at a snails pace. Boots of blinding speed to the rescue! No idea why authors think it was good idea to make default speed so low and lock game-fixing item behind some random-looking quest in the middle of nowhere
- linuxftw 4y agoThat was the beauty of the game. You could randomly find amazing things.
- Arrath 4y agoA case of limitations working in concert. The rather oppressive distance fog helped conceal just how small the world was, and it felt a lot more expansive thanks to the slower pace of the game. No sprinting, no mounts, no fast-travel-from-anywhere (beyond mark/recall and the teleport to temple spells) and the in-game fast travel systems were varied, thought out and well placed. Having to plan a route of mage guild teleports, boat rides, stilt striders, and/or the teleportation complexes helped immerse the player in the world.
- pathartl 4y agoYep, my first TES was Oblivion and I loved it so much that I tried going back to Morrowind. I don't mind having to read and I don't mind walking, but holy hell the combat makes the game almost inaccessible.
- babypuncher 4y agoI think younger players can get over those things. The dealbreaker with Morrowind is the incredibly clunky and frustrating combat system. It presents as a real time first-person action game, but almost every action you take in a combat scenario is governed my hidden die rolls. When a player swings their sword and they see it visibly clip through an enemy, but the die roll calls it a miss, the player feels like they've been cheated by the system. The combat in this game was considered rough when it was new, and it has only aged like milk since then.
- godshatter 4y agoIf they had simply shown "hit" or "miss" when the weapon was used, it would have been less frustrating, I think. Even if it still intersects the character model, you would at least know the miss was intentional and not a bug.
- causi 4y agoI gotta admit, as someone whose first Morrowind experience was on a smartphone running OpenMW, combat that requires aiming correctly and having hit chance was infuriating. One or the other would be fine, like with a Zelda-esque lock-on feature combined with hit chance.
- none_to_remain 4y agoMorrowind has several different systems of fast travel, the best being the silt strider
- chongli 4y agoNo way! My favourite method of fast travel will always be scrolls of Icarian flight. Sooo freaking hilarious!
- pathartl 4y agoI remember first coming across the scroll at the beginning of the game. "Surely this isn't intentional? I have some sort of mod installed don't I?"
- out_of_protocol 4y agoMark-recall, teleport to temple, teleport to imperial cult, mage guild, silt striders, boats, propilion marks, overcharged jump spell ;)
- sbmyft 4y agoThe best games have already been made.
- dmonitor 4y agoThe best games were the ones released during your childhood. The next best are modern indie games inspired by the ones you played in your childhood.
- ChoGGi 4y agoI grew up on FPS' and strategy games, I mostly play metroidvanias now (been spoiled by hollow knight and Ori) ;)
- malnourish 4y agoThat couldn't be further from the truth. There are more people than ever creating games, and, discoverability aside, some of the greatest games are yet to come. Imagine you made that statement on May 27, 2019, the day before Outer Wilds came out.
- Freedom2 4y agoAt which point did the last, best game get made? Because great experiences are always coming out, for example, HiFi Rush just recently. If all you look at is AAA experiences, then maybe I can understand this viewpoint, but this is absolutely not true in general.
- danbolt 4y agoIf we use the Atari 2600 as a (very!) rough benchmark for publicly available video games, the medium as we know it has been around for about 46 years. [1] Given that movie theaters sprang up in the early 20th century, [2] you could make the argument that video games haven't even reached their equivalent of the French New Wave yet. Given how far someone can go with a little bit of self-taught asset creation, I think the best video games will be made after you and I have passed away. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_theater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_theater
- sschueller 4y agoOh god, it will be like movies. Remake after remake of old good games.
- npsomaratna 4y agoYup. I still remember running Morrowind for the first time. My jaw dropped. Arena and Daggerfall (the two predecessor games) were procedurally generated, and just felt "more of the same" after a while. My understanding is that the world in Morrowind was lovingly crafted by hand. This might have resulted in a small in-game world—but each inch of that world felt special. Interestingly, the Witcher 3 is probably the one other game that gave me the same "this world is handcrafted" feel (dunno how that was built though).
- babypuncher 4y agoI think this is why the Hogwarts Legacy game is doing so well. The story is fine I guess, and the combat is polished but not particularly deep. But the recreation of the castle and Hogsmeade are so painstakingly detailed and well thought out. It's easy to get lost for hours just exploring, something most other open world games of the last decade really struggle with. The illusion starts to fade when you wander further away from the school, but the game smartly keeps most of its critical path around Hogwarts and Hogsmeade.
- nvrspyx 4y agoRed Dead Redemption 2 is another example of an open-world with ridiculous attention to detail. It's certainly rare to have such a detailed open-world and a really good story.
- RangerScience 4y ago> lovingly crafted by hand Ever play Riven? I remember reading that "every pixel was crafted by hand" (which probably wasn't quite true, but, probably not enough to matter. That game was a work of art)
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
- jacooper 4y agoHard disagree. Amazing games like Control and Horizon zero dawn still exist.
- pathartl 4y agoControl is such a great representation of what a modern game can be. For example, with newer games I have a hard time picking out enemies and items on screen. Control solves this by making the enemies a bright red.
- jscheel 4y agoSounds like Lee Pace
- sigmar 4y agoVery much agree. Even the pacing of :30-:45 was very Lee Pace to me
- digdugdirk 4y agoI'm very intrigued to see what comes from the "lowering the bar" aspect of all these AI tools. Its seems to me like the ultimate no-code-for-everything tool. On one hand, you've got flawless voice scam calls, but on the other? I can imagine a new style of fan-edit movies, but without any limitations of having to splice together film and audio from prequels/sequels/etc. We're in for a wild ride.
- thfuran 4y agoI've seen a demo of resyncing lips movement to dubbed speech, which looked to work well. Combined with voice synthesis (which is now pretty good, though still well short of well-acted lines), you could already toss together something for pretty major edits to dialog.
- dmonitor 4y agoI do think the YTP spliced audio still has intrinsic appeal. Part of the humor comes from memorable lines being reused in unexpected ways.
- paraph1n 4y agoNow this is an application of AI that I can get behind!
- monkpit 4y agoI wonder if they’ll be training the AI on the same voice actors from Oblivion or if they’ll just use some generic AI voices. Or maybe some other celebrities?
- Cloudef 4y agoAFAIK Oblivion had only few voice actors
- natch 4y agoThere is so much more out there than just celebrities and existing actors. It would be a crying shame if our world had to stay limited to only what we have now, and only what professionals are willing to do, and only what there’s a paying market for, and only what is safe and politically correct.
- snerbles 4y agoWith Tortoise TTS you can add input voice samples from different people to produce new voices that vaguely sound like a combination of the two. It's a bit of a crapshoot, sometimes resulting in wild things like a female voice morphing into a male mid-sentence or sudden gasps and bizarre demonic croaking. Playing with it has been pretty fun. I've even used Japanese inputs and the outputs kind of sound like the originals speaking native English. Still a bit uncanny and less stable than inputs that match the model's language. Forget deepfaking, it's quite literally a bottomless pit of unique voices that don't exist.
- yieldcrv 4y agonice, glad to see someone is already on it! I had opined that video games won't need voice actors any more and way more fleshed out dialogue. A random NPC running around in Fallout in the distance? You can have a full conversation about some relevant contexts in the world, with spoken responses. several other ramifications of this is that file sizes can actually be smaller again. Most/significant part of the file size in games is audio at various formats and high qualities. But since pre-recorded can go away, it can be replaced with prompts tied to some NPCs that augment their response. The training sets can just be the file, and the training sets (edit: the MODEL) can actually come with the OS or be a shared resource on the system, instead of packaged with the game. Smaller additional training sets (edit: the model, not the training set) can come with the game. I have a different idea regarding compensation paths for human beings, but its not likely that it will be followed, or lucrative even if implemented.
- oneoff786 4y agoYou don’t need the training set available to run the model.
- yieldcrv 4y agoyou're right, I should say just the model, or trained model. what terminology would you use? For example, with stable diffusion I download a.... model? and can also train a model?
- oneoff786 4y agoIt’s just the model. You might tangentially download the code to train a new model from scratch or update the model you received. The important bit is that the training data is HUGE and the model is not.
- otikik 4y ago> video games won't need voice actors any more and way more fleshed out dialogue I respectfully disagree. One only has to look at Mass Effect's voice acting for male and female Shepard. It's (almost) exactly the same dialog lines, both performed by humans, but Jennifer Hale just kills it. The voice alone made a lot of players think of Femshep as the canon (despite the male model being present in the box art and most PR media). I do agree in that we might need less voice actors - but mostly for non-key NPCs. Humans will still play a role. On that same note, it would not surprise me if non-key NPC's dialog was not written by a human any more, but by a machine. A human "writer" could be replaced by a "chatgpt prompt engineer". But again that will only apply to secondary NPCs.
- dmm 4y agoStarting with Oblivion the elder scroll games have voiced dialogue, presumably because that's what players started expecting. But this had the effect of dramatically reducing the number of options when talking to NPCs and also creating some immersion breaking artifacts like an NPC sadly recounting a personal tragedy and then immediately cheerfully discussing the weather or whatever. It's also strange when the same four voice actors play so many characters. It's just tedious and immersion breaking. AI has the potential to improve this situation in several ways.
- coldacid 4y agoHonestly I think that the reuse of voice actors is even more annoying in Oblivion than the absurd non-conversations NPCs keep having with each other.
- tbalsam 4y agoHow is this a detriment for both of you? It's a lovely redeeming quality of both games, by far. Having the same voice actor for everyone is absolutely freaking hilarious, too, to boot. I mean, how can you not love this lol: https://youtu.be/N6hVmn9FM7o https://youtu.be/N6hVmn9FM7o
- coldacid 4y agoDon't get me wrong, it's very entertaining, but that doesn't change the fact that it takes my suspension of disbelief and bashes it around the head and neck with a sock full of Septims.
- lm28469 4y ago> AI has the potential to improve this situation in several ways. In something of the caliber of TES they could just get a few hundred voice actors. It's something like 100m budget vs 1b in revenues.
- anonymousab 4y agoWith Oblivion in particular I think they threw a ton of money to get Patrick Stewart to voice a few lines. That could have done towards hiring many voice actors, but it may have been a reasonable marketing move overall - it's hard to tell given the shape of the market and that genre at the time.
- AndrewOMartin 4y agoWhat a grand and intoxicating innocence.
- oneoff786 4y agoThe thing I’m looking forward to is having one voice for all language options.
- belinder 4y agomaybe with AI voice synthesis NPCs will finally be able to say a player's name
- 241195 4y agohelp.
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- orliesaurus 4y agoI did a similar project for League of Legends: it uses AI (davinci-003) to act like a dynamic in-game announcer that talks to you you based on your performance in-game. [0] As someone who made this as a sideproject, I can totally see how if you have a team of people behind a project for a game like Morrowind you could go deeper and create whole narratives and quest systems around these "ideas" - without the need for 10s of voice actors and game-modders Quite fun for those who like, have been playing the same game for 10+ years! [0] https://youtu.be/tdONZF9iktY https://youtu.be/tdONZF9iktY
- tb_technical 4y agoAll the dagoth ur memes are funny as hell and I hope they never go away.