Modders are using AI to put voice acting in Morrowind | Hacker News Reader

Modders are using AI to put voice acting in Morrowind

pcgamer.com

115 pointsmakaimc87 comments

Starting with Oblivion the elder scroll games have voiced dialogue, presumably because that's what players started expecting.

But this had the effect of dramatically reducing the number of options when talking to NPCs and also creating some immersion breaking artifacts like an NPC sadly recounting a personal tragedy and then immediately cheerfully discussing the weather or whatever.

It's also strange when the same four voice actors play so many characters. It's just tedious and immersion breaking.

AI has the potential to improve this situation in several ways.

Honestly I think that the reuse of voice actors is even more annoying in Oblivion than the absurd non-conversations NPCs keep having with each other.

How is this a detriment for both of you?

It's a lovely redeeming quality of both games, by far. Having the same voice actor for everyone is absolutely freaking hilarious, too, to boot.

I mean, how can you not love this lol: https://youtu.be/N6hVmn9FM7o

Don't get me wrong, it's very entertaining, but that doesn't change the fact that it takes my suspension of disbelief and bashes it around the head and neck with a sock full of Septims.

> AI has the potential to improve this situation in several ways.

In something of the caliber of TES they could just get a few hundred voice actors. It's something like 100m budget vs 1b in revenues.

With Oblivion in particular I think they threw a ton of money to get Patrick Stewart to voice a few lines. That could have done towards hiring many voice actors, but it may have been a reasonable marketing move overall - it's hard to tell given the shape of the market and that genre at the time.

One of my favorite RPGs (Pathfinder: Kingmaker) had the devs talk about it. They had limited voice acting, and that already heavily limited their options for DLCs and post launch content. If we actually get AI voice acting, I'd stop having issues with it.

Yep. I saw that change from Fallout 2 to Fallout 3. It was dramatic and bad. Voice acting in RPGs made for much more limited game dialog (and gameplay!) across many RPG series. They stopped being role playing games and started being movies you played through. AI voices are a welcome potential fix... though I doubt the big corporate game studios are going to go back to the old ways.

I think Oblivion is the game where all the voice lines were recorded in alphabetical order, so the delivery is terrible because the actors didn't get any context.

VA is a real pain, especially for an indie game dev.

It completely changes your workflow because you need to have your script ready and finalized to record all the lines all at once. Say good bye to iterative development. Want to tweak something or add additional lines? Yeah, that is going to cost you.

I think "AI" based voice generation (well data driven voice generation, I will die on the hill that it should not be called AI as it is not intelligent) will absolutely have a place for prototyping games and having filler voice acting.

The problem is though, that good VA can absolutely make or break a game. Will players really tolerate "AI" voices? I hope not! There is a reason certain famous voice actors are paid good money: it is an art.

People will watch certain shows or play certain video games simply because they have a voice actor that they like in. You can't get that emotional attachment form generated voices.

Voice carries so much more information than just the text. It gives hints to the emotional state of the speaker, their background and education, their intentions. "AI" can never replace top-tier voice acting from humans simply because that would require a general intelligence.

> You can't get that emotional attachment form generated voices.

Vocaloid managed to turn people’s emotional attachment to generated voices into a billion-dollar industry

(I’m actually crying right now, just remembering the emotional impact of The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku — a song written from the perspective of a piece of voice synthesis software which is in the process of being uninstalled, and performed at a speed no human singer could match, as she tries to squeeze in one last goodbye T_T)

"AI" can never replace top-tier voice acting from humans simply because that would require a general intelligence.

This exact same quote has been used as a desperate means of gatekeeping for what it means to be intelligent across every domain. Deep blue with chess, AlphaGo, diffusion generative art, the list goes on and on. It's amazing that people continue to make this mistake to me.

Everyone thinks that their domain is safe, and everyone is inevitably wrong.

There have already been many high profile realistic sounding TTS engines in the last 10 years. Some of the newest advancements allow you to combine a TTS voice with a recording of your own voice. So a game developer can record a line of dialogue angrily and with emotion, and then this is transferred onto the appropriate TTS generated voice (elf princess, dwarven blacksmith, etc).

Voice acting is a field absolutely ripe for disruption.

https://mashable.com/article/james-earl-jones-gives-rights-t...

People will watch certain shows or play certain video games simply because they have a voice actor that they like in.

There are certainly people who do this, but you're projecting. This is objectively a minority of the target market. I could canvas 100 children who have watched Amphibia or owlhouse and it's doubtful a single one of them could name a single voice actor in those shows.

This applies even more so to voice acting in video games, I'm an avid game player everything from GTA, to tomb raider, to portal, to baldurs gate. Gun to my head and I couldn't name a single person who voiced a single line.

I noticed that even the expansion packs for Morrowind had a lot more voice acting - dialogue was still textual of course, but NPCs' "monologues" were a lot more substantial.

I know it's just nostalgia talking, but I feel like the text dialogue was one of the things that made MW as special as it was. At a certain point I think text becomes easier for a user to digest - you don't necessarily want some NPC talking at you for ages about the history of Vvardenfell. And MW was very rich in history like that.

> At a certain point I think text becomes easier for a user to digest - you don't necessarily want some NPC talking at you for ages about the history of Vvardenfell.

No to mention, this can sometimes become immersion-breaking. Especially with such data dumps, voice actors would forget (or not be informed) about the context in which their lines are being heard by the player, and then you end up with a random villager or space soldier suddenly giving you a TED talk.

If they start using AI to enhance all the old games, we won't need new games because the old ones were better.

Morrowind will still not be popular with younger players. I imagine the lack of fast travel, map markers and the class/skill system is just too much for most.

Part of the game is learning how to figure out what the fuck you're supposed to do.

I love immersive sim games. Miss back in the day when we didn't have maps for dungeons and you were supposed to be drawing a map on paper. I never did, as a little kid I just learned how to memorize dungeon layouts really well and now I memorize any place I go on foot.

just brand it "the dark souls of x" and young players won't be bothered by complexity

Morrowind: The Dark Souls of The Elder Scrolls.

It has a nice ring to it!

I don't know if it has a nice ring to it, the title is a bit unwieldy to say.

It's the Dark Souls of game titles.

I mean the open world design philosophy in Elden Ring is not too dissimilar to Morrowind's and it was a massive hit. What really needs updating is the combat system, it wasn't great when the game came out and it aged horribly.

I haven't played Morrowind, but Elden Ring has both map markers and fast travel.

Morrowind is similar, with map markers for major landmarks and diegetic fast travel, but still requiring the player to explore and orient to find quest objectives.

The visuals are pretty rough and the map is small. The map size actually is a blessing though since your character moves at a snails pace.

The gameplay, especially from a melee perspective, is rough at best, and directly unfun at its worst.

A case of limitations working in concert. The rather oppressive distance fog helped conceal just how small the world was, and it felt a lot more expansive thanks to the slower pace of the game.

No sprinting, no mounts, no fast-travel-from-anywhere (beyond mark/recall and the teleport to temple spells) and the in-game fast travel systems were varied, thought out and well placed. Having to plan a route of mage guild teleports, boat rides, stilt striders, and/or the teleportation complexes helped immerse the player in the world.

> character moves at a snails pace.

Boots of blinding speed to the rescue! No idea why authors think it was good idea to make default speed so low and lock game-fixing item behind some random-looking quest in the middle of nowhere

That was the beauty of the game. You could randomly find amazing things.

Yep, my first TES was Oblivion and I loved it so much that I tried going back to Morrowind. I don't mind having to read and I don't mind walking, but holy hell the combat makes the game almost inaccessible.

I think younger players can get over those things. The dealbreaker with Morrowind is the incredibly clunky and frustrating combat system. It presents as a real time first-person action game, but almost every action you take in a combat scenario is governed my hidden die rolls. When a player swings their sword and they see it visibly clip through an enemy, but the die roll calls it a miss, the player feels like they've been cheated by the system.

The combat in this game was considered rough when it was new, and it has only aged like milk since then.

If they had simply shown "hit" or "miss" when the weapon was used, it would have been less frustrating, I think. Even if it still intersects the character model, you would at least know the miss was intentional and not a bug.

I gotta admit, as someone whose first Morrowind experience was on a smartphone running OpenMW, combat that requires aiming correctly and having hit chance was infuriating. One or the other would be fine, like with a Zelda-esque lock-on feature combined with hit chance.

Morrowind has several different systems of fast travel, the best being the silt strider

No way! My favourite method of fast travel will always be scrolls of Icarian flight. Sooo freaking hilarious!

I remember first coming across the scroll at the beginning of the game. "Surely this isn't intentional? I have some sort of mod installed don't I?"

Mark-recall, teleport to temple, teleport to imperial cult, mage guild, silt striders, boats, propilion marks, overcharged jump spell ;)

The best games have already been made.

The best games were the ones released during your childhood. The next best are modern indie games inspired by the ones you played in your childhood.

I grew up on FPS' and strategy games, I mostly play metroidvanias now (been spoiled by hollow knight and Ori) ;)

That couldn't be further from the truth. There are more people than ever creating games, and, discoverability aside, some of the greatest games are yet to come.

Imagine you made that statement on May 27, 2019, the day before Outer Wilds came out.

At which point did the last, best game get made? Because great experiences are always coming out, for example, HiFi Rush just recently.

If all you look at is AAA experiences, then maybe I can understand this viewpoint, but this is absolutely not true in general.

If we use the Atari 2600 as a (very!) rough benchmark for publicly available video games, the medium as we know it has been around for about 46 years. [1]

Given that movie theaters sprang up in the early 20th century, [2] you could make the argument that video games haven't even reached their equivalent of the French New Wave yet. Given how far someone can go with a little bit of self-taught asset creation, I think the best video games will be made after you and I have passed away.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_theater

The internet has certainly accelerated the development speed of culture. What year did indie films start being distributed by amateurs? We’re at least that point in gaming. We’re at the point now where independent startups are making higher quality products than the peak AAA games from ~20 years ago.

That's like saying the best movie has been made, the best book has been written, the best software has been created

So hard disagree there.

Oh god, it will be like movies. Remake after remake of old good games.

Yup. I still remember running Morrowind for the first time. My jaw dropped.

Arena and Daggerfall (the two predecessor games) were procedurally generated, and just felt "more of the same" after a while. My understanding is that the world in Morrowind was lovingly crafted by hand. This might have resulted in a small in-game world—but each inch of that world felt special.

Interestingly, the Witcher 3 is probably the one other game that gave me the same "this world is handcrafted" feel (dunno how that was built though).

I think this is why the Hogwarts Legacy game is doing so well. The story is fine I guess, and the combat is polished but not particularly deep. But the recreation of the castle and Hogsmeade are so painstakingly detailed and well thought out. It's easy to get lost for hours just exploring, something most other open world games of the last decade really struggle with.

The illusion starts to fade when you wander further away from the school, but the game smartly keeps most of its critical path around Hogwarts and Hogsmeade.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is another example of an open-world with ridiculous attention to detail. It's certainly rare to have such a detailed open-world and a really good story.

> lovingly crafted by hand

Ever play Riven? I remember reading that "every pixel was crafted by hand" (which probably wasn't quite true, but, probably not enough to matter. That game was a work of art)

The Witcher 2 was the first game I remember really blowing me away in that regard. Sure, it's not quite fully open world (more of a series of small open worlds), but the design is immaculate. To make up for space constraints they definitely leaned into the whole "Disneyland sightlines" thing, where you'll turn a corner and suddenly be a in a new area, with all sorts of fascinating nooks and crannies to check out.

I'm very much in the minority in that I actually prefer The Witcher 2. It's not open-world, but it's immersive. The world design is superb, and the characters are well-written in a way I haven't seen an open-world game achieve (not even The Witcher 3). I remember feeling guilty for pilfering some coins from someone's house, and then realising I'd never felt that guilt in a game before.

I'm, ah.. I'm gonna go over here with my eager anticipation and prior excitement over literally this. Although I know you're not actually referring to these kinds of remakes, if only because these are much more "labor of love" than "cash in on a known thing".

(Dungeon Keeper -> Dungeons 2; more than a straight remake)

(Master of Magic; dec last year; nearly an exact remake - switch to hex grid, few other tweaks, maybe more down the road :hopes:)

(Pharaoh, A New Era - tomorrow, possibly an exact remake?)

Hell if I could get a Metroid Prime Remastered-type remake of every game from my childhood I'd never need another new property again. Better than playing a new game that takes up 120GB on my drive of which 80GB is microtransaction textures so some bro can have anime girls on his M-16.

I cannot damn wait until the Banjo-Kazooie decompilation project is complete and someone starts working on a Render96-esque version of it.

It's already been that way for the past 5-10 years. Tons and tons of remasters and remakes, sometimes for games that aren't even that old

Hasn’t this already been happening for the past 5 years?

Hard disagree. Amazing games like Control and Horizon zero dawn still exist.

Control is such a great representation of what a modern game can be. For example, with newer games I have a hard time picking out enemies and items on screen. Control solves this by making the enemies a bright red.

I'm very intrigued to see what comes from the "lowering the bar" aspect of all these AI tools. Its seems to me like the ultimate no-code-for-everything tool.

On one hand, you've got flawless voice scam calls, but on the other? I can imagine a new style of fan-edit movies, but without any limitations of having to splice together film and audio from prequels/sequels/etc.

We're in for a wild ride.

I've seen a demo of resyncing lips movement to dubbed speech, which looked to work well. Combined with voice synthesis (which is now pretty good, though still well short of well-acted lines), you could already toss together something for pretty major edits to dialog.

I do think the YTP spliced audio still has intrinsic appeal. Part of the humor comes from memorable lines being reused in unexpected ways.

I did a similar project for League of Legends: it uses AI (davinci-003) to act like a dynamic in-game announcer that talks to you you based on your performance in-game. [0]

As someone who made this as a sideproject, I can totally see how if you have a team of people behind a project for a game like Morrowind you could go deeper and create whole narratives and quest systems around these "ideas" - without the need for 10s of voice actors and game-modders

Quite fun for those who like, have been playing the same game for 10+ years!

[0] https://youtu.be/tdONZF9iktY

What a grand and intoxicating innocence.

Now this is an application of AI that I can get behind!

I wonder if they’ll be training the AI on the same voice actors from Oblivion or if they’ll just use some generic AI voices. Or maybe some other celebrities?

AFAIK Oblivion had only few voice actors

There is so much more out there than just celebrities and existing actors. It would be a crying shame if our world had to stay limited to only what we have now, and only what professionals are willing to do, and only what there’s a paying market for, and only what is safe and politically correct.

With Tortoise TTS you can add input voice samples from different people to produce new voices that vaguely sound like a combination of the two. It's a bit of a crapshoot, sometimes resulting in wild things like a female voice morphing into a male mid-sentence or sudden gasps and bizarre demonic croaking. Playing with it has been pretty fun.

I've even used Japanese inputs and the outputs kind of sound like the originals speaking native English. Still a bit uncanny and less stable than inputs that match the model's language.

Forget deepfaking, it's quite literally a bottomless pit of unique voices that don't exist.

nice, glad to see someone is already on it! I had opined that video games won't need voice actors any more and way more fleshed out dialogue. A random NPC running around in Fallout in the distance? You can have a full conversation about some relevant contexts in the world, with spoken responses.

several other ramifications of this is that file sizes can actually be smaller again. Most/significant part of the file size in games is audio at various formats and high qualities. But since pre-recorded can go away, it can be replaced with prompts tied to some NPCs that augment their response. The training sets can just be the file, and the training sets (edit: the MODEL) can actually come with the OS or be a shared resource on the system, instead of packaged with the game. Smaller additional training sets (edit: the model, not the training set) can come with the game.

I have a different idea regarding compensation paths for human beings, but its not likely that it will be followed, or lucrative even if implemented.

You don’t need the training set available to run the model.

you're right, I should say just the model, or trained model. what terminology would you use? For example, with stable diffusion I download a.... model? and can also train a model?

It’s just the model.

You might tangentially download the code to train a new model from scratch or update the model you received.

The important bit is that the training data is HUGE and the model is not.

> video games won't need voice actors any more and way more fleshed out dialogue

I respectfully disagree. One only has to look at Mass Effect's voice acting for male and female Shepard. It's (almost) exactly the same dialog lines, both performed by humans, but Jennifer Hale just kills it. The voice alone made a lot of players think of Femshep as the canon (despite the male model being present in the box art and most PR media).

I do agree in that we might need less voice actors - but mostly for non-key NPCs. Humans will still play a role.

On that same note, it would not surprise me if non-key NPC's dialog was not written by a human any more, but by a machine. A human "writer" could be replaced by a "chatgpt prompt engineer". But again that will only apply to secondary NPCs.

Honestly, I think we need more voice actors, not less. One of my biggest complaints with the dialogue in Oblivion wasn't the inanity of the "conversations" but the fact that there weren't enough different voices to go around so everyone of same race and sex would sound the same.

I believe that the only reason you would write this is because you haven't seen the services that let you train a voice generating AI from a few minutes of your own voice or from a few minutes of another person's audio.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CoVPCo2sMIj/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M...

You can already feed this generated responses to say back.

In the near future, humans will play a role, for 5 minutes. We agree on that point. In the also near future, we'll have enough samples for a diverse audience.

My point was that a human will always be able to convey more context via tone and inflection than a machine. Machines will need to use manual context tags like <angry>. At which point you might as well just hire a person to talk to a mike. Machines also noticeably struggle with more nuanced emotions like sarcasm, or disdain, even with tags. That’s all well and good for something like merchants. It’s not good for main characters.

I don't really agree. Femshep is way overhyped and maleshep is just fine, if not even more iconic. Femshep sounds like trying too hard to come across as gruff and experienced military veteran and it just doesn't work for me. Comes across as fake.

Started playing Mass Effect with Knights of the Old Republic fresh in my mind back in the day. It was so jarring hearing the same voices with different characters.

Prerecording VA with AI is one thing (and is super cool and practical right now), generating it on the fly is a whole different can of worms.

Its gonna be a some time before the "baseline" console/PC is fast enough to run a game, language model and voice model all at the same time.

And it may take even longer for software support to be put in place and for devs to actually use it. Unity doesn't even natively support Opus right now, which would dramatically reduce VA filesizes

okay there are many baby steps before this future

for example:

- simply pre-rendering scripted responses using voice models. same audio files, large games. no voice actors.

- the same thing without QA even checking if the voices sound good

- larger scripts but internet connected doing the voices in the cloud

- language and voice models, internet connected rendered at the data center

- a smaller set of prerendered voices offline, a larger set when internet connected

- all coming client side

What I picture would be a Diablo style open world MMORPG with NPCs voiced by AI, quests generated by an AI that has information about the world as it has progressed over time, and the quests tailored to each person's character and play individually.

No more generic fetch quests. No more dungeon grinding. Adventures only, please!

All the dagoth ur memes are funny as hell and I hope they never go away.

maybe with AI voice synthesis NPCs will finally be able to say a player's name

The thing I’m looking forward to is having one voice for all language options.

Sounds like Lee Pace

Very much agree. Even the pacing of :30-:45 was very Lee Pace to me

help.

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