If you're a massive trivia fan and loved the original Fable on Xbox, then all our news stories out together won't please you nearly as much as this one. CVG has received a few facts and figures about the sonic side to Peter Molyneux's Fable II.
The audio, or rather vocal landscape, of the game has been recorded at the London-based firm Side. It's latest newsletter reveals that Side cast over 45 actors (aged from 8 to 80) to play almost 200 speaking characters.
"Four of Side's voice directors ensured that all performances harmonised perfectly with Fable II's idiosyncratic world and captured the complexities of its inhabitants. The voice recording ran concurrently in two studios for over three months, amounting to nearly 370,000 words recorded - that's 38 hours of dialogue."
There's even a quote from Peter Molyneux himself: "The sheer amount of dialogue in Fable 2 meant this was a massive project. Side rose to this challenge in a professional and efficient way. They have done a great job for us".
In case you missed it the latest Lionhead developer diary went live earlier this week and it's well worth a look.
And people complain about the amount of dialogue in MGS?!
Seriously though, when I play this game I want to be properly insulted. If I go into a town and some cretin calls me a "chicken chaser " I should be able to knife him. With that amount of of waffling in the game there should be some great insults thrown at you if you decide to go the evil route. I know they couldn't call you 'chicken f**ker' but some original insults to make you feel like a bad b*stard.
I muted the dialog in the original Fable because it was so bad, fantasy settings should never have liverpudlians.
The dialogue in Fable is the best dialogue in any game I've ever played. It's just warm and cosy and British and fun. No game has ever put a smile on my face simply by walking around a town quite as much as Fable did, and Fable 2 is going to be the same by the sounds of things!
Samildanach - people complain about the amount in MGS because:
A) it's 99% unskippable B) it's terribly convulted
I'm certain that the vast majority of the recording work done for Fable 2, as with Fable 1, will be NPC chatter whilst you're in close proximity to them - not in 20+ minute cutscenes that tell you nothing.
Also, MGS4 probably has a word count closer to 1 million than 370,000. In fact it probably has 370,000 words in the first opening scene
Sorry to contradict you, but I watched all the cutscenes in MGS4 and that with the gameplay clocked in at 20 hours altogether. Also, 99% of the cutscenes are skippable.
What I meant to say was that although I I know that most of the dialogue will come from NPCs, different insults from different towns would make it a lot more involving. This is a third or fourth gen 360 game and should have a lot more to offer than Oblivion. There was a lot of talking in that but a lot of it was repeated. I can see the same happening with Fable 2. It'll get on everyone's t**s after a while.
Even in that, a game on the original Xbox, there was a lot more variation in the dialogue from random townspeople. Of course it repeated sometimes, but it happened a lot less than in Oblivion (they spent too much time building a large empty world and not enough time on what matters in an RPG)
BigBlueBox (now Lionhead) know what they're doing!
I want this game as much as the next man, but i'm sensing a touch of overkill, information wise. Some things you just don't need to know, right?
Yeah, I know what you mean - why do we need to know how long the dialogue recordings are when we won't really hear all of it?....kinda pointless information if anything.
Don't get me wrong, I still think this is definitely going to be one of the big games of 2008 - I just know Lionhead are going to deliver the goods with this one.....I've even put it in my schedule for October - hopefully I'll have had my fill of the game before GH: World Tour is released and takes over my life....
I think the more important aspect of this news is that they're using 45 different voice actors. Oblivion only used something like six or seven different actors, and it was really obvious; with 45 actors voicing around 200 parts, NPCs should actually sound distinctly different to other NPCs!
how many disks will this come on? 38 hours of audio sounds like quite alot, I dont care about multiple disks as lost odyssey was on 4 dvds but you only had to change once every blue moon (I changed disks 3 times during my 90 hours). Anyway gaming does not really need blue ray yet, the next generation will maybe, but swapping disks isn't a big deal, I think some ps3 fans are just too lazy to get up every few hours
Fable 2 will come on one disc. The thing about good developers is they know how to compress their data.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is the perfect example of developers not bothering with it simply because they have the room. MGS4 can fit on one DVD9 disc once you compress the data properly and don't need to duplicate it for slow read-speeds.
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court, 30 Monmouth Street, Bath, UK BA1 2BW England and Wales company registration number 2008885
