Zora DB on 24/8/2002 at 23:26
Is this true? Call me a stick-in-the-mud, but I can't stick games that make you play as a particular gender unless (like in Thief) it's a specific character who just happens to be a man (or woman... but when does that ever happen?!)
So what's the deal with Arx? I had a fem avatar in UU2, are we really taking a step backwards here?
Kinlaadare on 25/8/2002 at 10:15
I'm sorry to announce that, but it seems that there's no female character in Arx... in the german version, there's not.
Shadowcat on 25/8/2002 at 12:22
Quote:
Originally posted by Zora DB Is this true? Call me a stick-in-the-mud, but I can't stick games that make you play as a particular gender unless (like in Thief) it's a specific character who just happens to be a man (or woman... but when does that ever happen?!) I thought I recalled reading that you
do play a specific character in Arx? (I could be remembering wrongly, though... I've been trying to avoid spoilers, so it's a while since I read details about the game...)
As for the latter comment... well, it happens on occasion... The Longest Journey is a decent example. I think the default PC in the first "Unreal" was a woman, for that matter, so even the shooters do it from time to time...
It would certainly be nice if more games had that option.
Lanael on 25/8/2002 at 20:13
It's a technical problem:
In Arx ( as in Thief ) the voices has been recorded by actors ( and actresses !! ) :
If you could change the gender, all the voices for the PC had to be recorded twice ( it takes twice space on disk and cost much to produce )
And I'm not talking about the story problems : the PC could be designated by 'him' or 'her'...
In morrowind (for exemple ) , they just recorded a few voices, all other communications are done by text ( which is dynamicaly transformed ).
This kind of problem would be resolved when the text-to-speech technology can produce natural voices with intonations and the like...
Until that time, devellopers have to make a choice of gender for their PC.
xman on 26/8/2002 at 08:42
Anyway, I for one don't care about the gender of my character.
What matters is what I "command" him or her to do.
I really enjoyed playing Tomb Raider and that's not for Lara Croft's boobs but really for the game itself (searching for hidden places in various vast levels.
The same goes for Heavy Metal FAKK2.
And the longest journey what an excellent game (to give an example of a game where the choice of a female character was not made upon boob-size criteria).
Scarlett on 5/9/2002 at 18:48
i don't see how it could be *that*much of a problem. All you have to do is make a new voice set for the female character, then record new VO's for the lines that refer to the player as being male... and there can't be all that many. Even in the demo there were only 1 or 2 lines that i noticed that were like that.
If they're not going to do a female character, then there at least needs to be a larger variety of male characters. All the ones that were in the demo were pretty ugly.
Lanael on 5/9/2002 at 19:27
I didn't say that it's not technically feasible, but it cost much more money and take more times to do for developpers ! : )
*That* is the problem !
Maybe is the near future we can see one game or two with this feature...
Perhaps all this is linked to the fact that computer games are played mainly by men. Though it's less and less true ( a good thing IMO ) !
Le Magot d'Oz on 6/9/2002 at 22:55
Would a female care about a princess ? the story may change with a another character...
Scarlett on 1/10/2002 at 01:04
Well, for the same reason a male would i guess......unless...ah.. i get it, so males save the princesses so they can hump them huh? ;)
Don't tell me Arx is about saving a princess!
i hope its at least somewhat original.......
Oh and Lanael, if money is the problem i'm sure there's plenty of very talented female actors who would do that kind of thing for free. Many people would be very honoured to be the voice behind a character.. i know i would :)
Fafhrd on 1/10/2002 at 19:34
I think you'd be amazed at how many female voice actors WOULDN'T do a character free of charge, Scarlett.
