jess

Anyway, things I like about Final Fantasy 16:

1. Torgal (a tiny dog)
2. Torgal is such a good boy
3. Every time Torgal is not on screen I'm asking "Where's Torgal"
4. Anytime they render fire it looks really good?

Uh… I guess that's it. Maybe they'll add some additional good elements later. They certainly don't seem to have understood what was interesting about Game of Thrones

THIS MAKES ME SO ANGRY

I think the original Borderlands is one of the very few games ever to have an actual character being interrupted and the audio/subtitles reflected this appropriately

the one case i can think of that makes enough sense is like, when you're doing single-dialogue boxes and a confirm-before-next-message system, since you would have to swap from always waiting for the player to advance to just advancing for them.

that in and of itself isn't that rare, but given that video games can be played with audio off and not everyone is a great reader, i do wonder how much of an impact this has over things

yeah huge pet peeve of mine. i used to largely associate it with english dubs of japanese games but i'm not sure it's limited to that.

Meanwhile Sonic Adventure 2 perfected characters interrupting each other in 2001. Not intentionally but...

Voice actors basically never get to speak over the finished product to get the timing that close, and game cinematics don't usually have the equivalent of an "editor" that snugs the timing once all the pieces are together (distinct from a "director" who plots things out beforehand).

And of course multiple languages make it even harder.

There's also the problem of commercial games' demand for ever greater levels of photorealism straining against the medium's aesthetic baggage - the strict codification of genre, especially as that's entwined with mechanics; the many non-verisimilitudinous modes of representation.

This problem is unsolvable as long as the player has control of when dialog advances. I haven't played FF16 but it is in the lineage of games that traditionally cede control of dialog timing to the player. It makes sense to me that developers and players of JRPGs and visual novels would accept that this is just how life is.

best version of this i've seen is in the Amarantus demo (which is a visual novel not bound by Voice Acting) where it will automatically advance the dialogue in such cases (and has a toggle for auto advancing or not with these specific sorts of cases)

I feel like one of the reasons for this is because of the need to have all the voice acting translated into multiple languages - it'd require retiming each language individually and that takes a not insignificant amount of work across such a big game

Getting the timing right in an interruption is really difficult, because in reality 'interruptions' in speech are really overlaps – one actor is briefly talking over the other. So the pause between lines is actually supposed to be negative, and even a very brief gap is noticeable.

So to have actually-good interruptions in a video game, you actually need support for crosstalk, which is often rare. It's one of those edge case things that often goes unsupported.

Getting the specific timing right is also very fiddly, and the workflow at a lot of studios is:

• Writer writes line
• Line gets tested in-game with temp audio ('stubs'), is deemed okay
• Line gets recorded by the real VA
• Ooops the exacting timing between lines is now fucked up because the VA didn't read the line exactly like the stub
• This never gets another revision pass to fix dialogue timings

Theoretically writers really should avoid writing for affordances the dialog system doesn't have, but people do anyway.

Love it when a game skips to the next text textbox halfway though a character's dialogue to cut them off without player interaction (but it's a game kind enough to offer a log so you can read what they were saying till they got interrupted)