Disco Elysium had about the same amount of voice acted dialogue as BG3.
Granted, it gets away with that because it’s a point and click adventure game, but you don’t necessarily have to have a sky high budget to have tons of dialogue and a highly branching storyline. If you don’t have voice acting it’s even cheaper. Fallen London has roughly 4x the amount of dialogue as those games, though it’s basically a live service text adventure.
It absolutely does not. I haven’t played nearly as much Disco Elysium as BG3, but it has way fewer characters and way less content. DE is a 20/40 hour game, BG is a 80/200 hour game. And BG3 again includes full voice acting for eight PCs as well as a ton of side characters and branching paths.
Disco Elysium gets a ton of mileage of its inventive event system and branching situations, but it’s an order of magnitude less content than BG, easy. Baldur’s Gate cast was effectively on call for six years straight. They were studio employees for the duration. And that’s not even getting into the fact that every dialogue bit in BG3 is not just voiced but animated. Procedurally, most of the time, but there’s still a ton of tweaking and debugging and manual scripting being done that needs to match the audio in a way the portraits and text in DE does not.
I get how the end result may seem comparable, Pareto principle and all that, but one of those things is not like the others.
The question is whether the extra effort is part of the reason why BG3 is an all-time best seller and DE is a smallish indie hit. I don’t need all my games to be just as big as BG3, but I also own thousands of games, including both BG3 and Disco Elysium. Would the normies that heard of BG3 through the grapevine, maybe watched some Critcal Role once, have been just as willing to part with sixty bucks with a tenth of the voice acting, a fifth of the visual polish and a third of the content?
And I’m not saying I definitely know that answer, but it’s the answer your average publisher exec with greenlight decisionmaking powers has to make when they budget and finance whatever game they’re publishing next.
Baldur’s Gate 3 supposedly has 1,365,000 words of dialogue while Disco Elysium supposedly has “a little more than a million”.
I’m not talking about how the game feels, this is just raw stats.
EDIT: the Final Cut version of Disco Elysium is supposed to be completely voice acted, but for lines where the narration is mixed into the middle of a character’s line, it’s not. For example: “Yes,” Kim adjusts his glasses “I think that would be prudent”. The “Kim adjusts his glasses” part isn’t voice acted, so that might cut down on the amount of voice acting a bit more.
I’d have to go check the Final Cut version. I certainly remember a lot of unvoiced prose in there, but it’s hard to know what is included as “script” of that, or what percentage of each game’s reported script is voiced.
For what it’s worth, the number I see out there for Baldur’s Gate 3 is two million words, not one point three. That’s still twice as long, and the points about cast size, length and animation definitely stand, as does the overall point.
Disco Elysium had about the same amount of voice acted dialogue as BG3.
Granted, it gets away with that because it’s a point and click adventure game, but you don’t necessarily have to have a sky high budget to have tons of dialogue and a highly branching storyline. If you don’t have voice acting it’s even cheaper. Fallen London has roughly 4x the amount of dialogue as those games, though it’s basically a live service text adventure.
It absolutely does not. I haven’t played nearly as much Disco Elysium as BG3, but it has way fewer characters and way less content. DE is a 20/40 hour game, BG is a 80/200 hour game. And BG3 again includes full voice acting for eight PCs as well as a ton of side characters and branching paths.
Disco Elysium gets a ton of mileage of its inventive event system and branching situations, but it’s an order of magnitude less content than BG, easy. Baldur’s Gate cast was effectively on call for six years straight. They were studio employees for the duration. And that’s not even getting into the fact that every dialogue bit in BG3 is not just voiced but animated. Procedurally, most of the time, but there’s still a ton of tweaking and debugging and manual scripting being done that needs to match the audio in a way the portraits and text in DE does not.
I get how the end result may seem comparable, Pareto principle and all that, but one of those things is not like the others.
The question is whether the extra effort is part of the reason why BG3 is an all-time best seller and DE is a smallish indie hit. I don’t need all my games to be just as big as BG3, but I also own thousands of games, including both BG3 and Disco Elysium. Would the normies that heard of BG3 through the grapevine, maybe watched some Critcal Role once, have been just as willing to part with sixty bucks with a tenth of the voice acting, a fifth of the visual polish and a third of the content?
And I’m not saying I definitely know that answer, but it’s the answer your average publisher exec with greenlight decisionmaking powers has to make when they budget and finance whatever game they’re publishing next.
Baldur’s Gate 3 supposedly has 1,365,000 words of dialogue while Disco Elysium supposedly has “a little more than a million”.
I’m not talking about how the game feels, this is just raw stats.
EDIT: the Final Cut version of Disco Elysium is supposed to be completely voice acted, but for lines where the narration is mixed into the middle of a character’s line, it’s not. For example: “Yes,” Kim adjusts his glasses “I think that would be prudent”. The “Kim adjusts his glasses” part isn’t voice acted, so that might cut down on the amount of voice acting a bit more.
I’d have to go check the Final Cut version. I certainly remember a lot of unvoiced prose in there, but it’s hard to know what is included as “script” of that, or what percentage of each game’s reported script is voiced.
For what it’s worth, the number I see out there for Baldur’s Gate 3 is two million words, not one point three. That’s still twice as long, and the points about cast size, length and animation definitely stand, as does the overall point.