NetHead wrote on Mar 30, 2017, 22:20:
eRe4s3r wrote on Mar 30, 2017, 18:36:
..And nobody even yet bashed the voice acting enough imo. The female Ryder is TOTAL SHIT. 0 Emotion in the voice anywhere.
Male Ryder is at least decent. But the VA quality like everything else is just not there. Nothing compared to a Witcher 3 or even original Mass Effect
I don't mean to defend the voice acting, it's often poor and moments that need emotion, exertion etc are worse, also there are a few voices in there which have no business being there even if they didn't sound like they recorded it themselves on their phone while on the toilet.
Though (big but here), I think for a lot of that sub par to crappy voice acting I'm not sure it's the fault of the voice actors. Even taking examples of ones that seem bad are sometimes accomplished actors, have a lot of acting under their belt, previous VO experience and reappearances in shows, things which wouldn't be the case if they always performed as they do in Mass Effect Andromeda.
Basically I strongly suspect there was completely inadequate directing and possibly information given to the voice actors. Expecting someone to put the appropriate emotion etc into dialogue without knowing all the details is foolish, no matter how good they are they can't without detailed context and character information.
Even a single actor's performance changes through the game, sometimes it's fine others times it's poor. Unless all the VO's were deliberately tanking it, which I don't believe for a moment, the blame lies with those who should have been directing them, blame falling back at the studio responsible for it all aswell as signing off on it.
Guess I'm not so much defending the voice acting as the actors, I just don't see it being their fault looking at those things like how their performance changes and past experience.
This game bares the markings of a management disaster if not incompetence. $40+ million, 4/5? years, and EA still apparently willing to wait longer, there is no excuse for this to be the result.
When something succeeds it's almost always a team effort, when something fails management has made a mistake, and this thing has grubby fingerprints blemishing almost every part, a hallmark of the problem being higher up.
Well, I admit that animation and VA play together with management, directing and writers, and you make a really good point that not all of it is bad. I think my real problem (call it a character flaw) is that I can not unsee bad VA+facial animation, but I don't notice good VA as
good, I just take it for granted as not being bad. And of course not all VA was bad, it was just not what I expected for a game of this budget level. I had a pretty good impression of male Ryder for MOST of it, that one scene, with the cardinal, is where I actually looked up fem ryders response, and the difference is like night and day. It's as if female ryder had no information about the situation maybe?
Btw, I have to add that I also checked the German VA for 20% of my playtime, and if you think the english VA's have "bad moments" then be VERY THANKFUL that you did not play on German, in German the
entire game is a "bad moment", none of the voices fit, and especially Turians ;p
All things to me, the real problem isn't good or bad VA, the problem was that the game threw me out of the immersion hard nearly constantly. Tiny glitches, bah, I played Witcher 3, I've seen the horse do things that would warrant exorcism, but this was a quirk, it was unique. It actually improved my opinion of the game, because everything else was so polished. And when I saw the addon areas I was blown away, I felt like I could really be there.
Maybe it is simply higher expectations mixed with more experiences through being older and having played all these games. I don't even NEED VA as a requirement, but if you put in VA, then it has to be good nearly always or it reduces my opinion of a product.
And finally, and with that I call it day when it comes to Mass Effect:A, I also played several games with great writing (Nier:A) and/or voice acting (Witcher 3 + Addon) recently. And obviously this changes perception, oh well.
I was using Hyperbole when it came to fem Ryder VA, obviously because I had not seen VA being talked about anywhere. Everyone is stuck on animations and faces, but what makes or breaks things for me is the VA attached to those horrors ;p When face does not match what is *said* which in fem ryders case, is nearly every 2nd dialog due to globfaced grinning disorder that they call the default face, well then things are just worthy of Hyperbole, and I didn't like fem Ryders voice from the getgo, I don't like that actors voice, like flat out, so I may not have given it much chance beyond that... but that is subjectivity...
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TL;DR, I just expected way more. But you are right, 5 years smells of a management disaster, I didn't even consider that. And if that is really the source of the problems then I am sorry for hating on the VA's, the actors are good people, and some of them are great actors for sure. But I can only judge what I hear and see in this game, I don't stalk an actor through their career (sadly, In case of fem-ryder VA I did, and I did not like the voice at all, in no situation) that is super strange, and not really TL;DR anymore