I hope not. Jennifer Hale is amazing. She’s the reason I’ve never played as male Shepard in mass effect. She also voiced Bastila in knights of the old republic. Incredible skill/talent.
Right? Femshep is amazing, but people are sleeping on maleshep. ‘we’ll bang, okay?’
How do you play through that tripe twice? It has next to no challenge and the story is beyond stupid.
I really enjoyed the characters. When I think about Mass Effect 3, for example, I think of how I felt when making peace between the Quarians and the Geth, because of how I had gotten to know the characters of Tali and Legion. Or Wrex enthusiastically greeting Shepard as an old friend, something that’s only possible if you talk him down in the first game.
I was as disappointed as everyone else at the actual ending to Mass Effect 3, and I do think the plot goes a bit weird even before that (the ending boss fight of mass effect 2 is a bit weird, but again, I think more of the personal stakes that had been set up by good character writing (plus Jack Wall’s “Suicide Mission” makes what could’ve been overly cheesy instead feel grand and epic)), but I found the smaller, interpersonal stories that Mass Effect tells to be quite compelling.
I’m not really a gamer, but I listen to a lot of audiobooks.
AI isn’t anywhere close to being able to replace “good” narrators. Maybe a bit like self driving cars - the first 90% was achieved rapidly, the next 5% took some doing but ok, now though the final 5% seems kinda unachievable on any timescale.
That said, automation (and yes, AI) tends to approach industries incrementally. A headline voice actor isn’t going to be replaced tomorrow, but maybe some low level roles are. Fewer voice actors just means less demand for the really good ones. Def not good for the industry but… time marches on I guess.
The biggest thing companies want to do with AI is infinite cheap content. They want generate a movie or other entertainment for a 10th or even 20th of the cost while burning a state’s worth of energy. They’re going to try and generate a successful movie from models that are trained on previously successful movies. And, they’ll get it.
At least at first. Eventually, even we’ll burn out from endless selection of predictable movies and other entertainment. And, I’m not talking just once a year. More like once a month. At some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, they’ll learn that the attention economy is not infinite. There is a limit of people, time, and money. They’re putting most of their eggs in the this basket and I hope it smashes to pieces.
AI isn’t here to improve anything. It’s here to open a path to infinite growth. Infinite entertainment, infinite weaponizing, infinite whatever. More predictable, infinite growth. Problem with that is that we’re slowing as a race and sooner or later it will start shrinking. The more they try to take, the quicker this is going to happen.
Sure. Let’s protect the proper culture. Like Fast and Furious 10, or the 60th marvel superhero movie rehash :P
we’ll burn out from endless selection of predictable movies and other entertainment
We aren’t already doing that? Even without AI, most of today’s writers suck ass, and corporate meddling has stomped out risk taking. Writers have no chance to build experience with good shows with longevity. With no risk, there is no creativity.
All of the good series were ones from cable TV. Breaking Bad, Sopranos, old Star Trek, Mr. Robot, Babylon 5, House, Rick and Morty, Game of Thrones (even if it ended badly), Better Call Saul, The Expanse (which died immediately after it switched to Amazon), Gravity Falls. About the only streaming series I really enjoyed was Loki, and that only lasted two seasons. Anything else might have a good first season, but they chop out any sense of character development by making these season 6-8 episodes long. No episodic content. No character development. Just go go go towards the seasonal end goal. And then get cancelled, because they didn’t get a chance to shake out the mediocre ideas and improve their direction. Can you imagine Star Trek:TNG being represented by only their first season, and then cancelled as a result of that?
All of the recent good movies were from directors that had a chance to take risks back in the 2000s, and are now given full creative control to do what they are good at. Dune was a great movie, but it simply adapted the source material, and was given enough budget and resources and creative control to Denis to produce what it needed to be. How many good directors will be left when the old guard retires?
All of the good games are from indie series now. Concord is being getting review-wrecked and shat on, while people focus more of their attention on an fucking asset-flip game about a squirrel with a gun. All of the good bigger studios are gone, fully absorbed into the Microsoft/ZeniMax/WB/EA empire. Only the first or second-time indie game developers are the ones producing good games.
Hell, at this point, maybe AI would do a better job than the shit that’s out there. I doubt it, though. It’s too half-baked right now.
I am waiting for an AI model and corresponding tools to generate my own anime and manga. No more stupid open endings, no more infinite story they stop producing because who knows, no more “I was in the same room as a girl, OH NO! Someone might have seen me, I’m so embarrassed!”.
I almost wish I could take existing anime, put it in a machine and make it better. That should actually become a thing, use AI to make your favorite TV shower more to your liking. Someone needs to create this. Bad ending? Fix that. Bad dialog? Fix that. Change gender on all characters? Fix that as well. Foul langage? Easy.
99% sure she voiced McGinnus in Deadlock.
Really? I know her range is kind of insane but I don’t hear Hale in McGinnis at all.
Edit: Some people say it sounds like Erica Luttrel, which jives with me. McGinnis sounds almost exactly like Bangalore from Apex.
Maybe you’re right, I did play a LOT of Apex so maybe my brain misfired on this one, but I was playing Deadlock the other day and one of McGinnus’ lines instantly made me think “Damn, that was Commander Shepard!” I’ll have to listen closer next time I play and see if it’s really Bangalore I’m hearing.
The only protection we could possibly have HAS to be implemented by the government, look how Germany handles their workforce. They have a worker’s council, you can’t just lay off people or fire tons of people nope. Workers are protected. Here in the USA, people are just servants, building pyramids, and then tossed to the street.
My idea: if a company employs over 50 employees, it should be ILLEGAL to outsource any job overseas, or replace them with AI. Example, voice actors. Should not be legal. Small studios / indie, should be perfectly legal since these are individuals that struggle to get started.
Unions can organize without the government having any protections. It’s very difficult to organize that way. It’s difficult to organize even with the most union-friendly government imaginable. But either way, it can be done.
Unions in the US have been shot by police at before. Hard to have less government protection than that.
Your idea is one of the specific reasons many companies try to label everyone as an “independent contractor”. Especially people like voice actors are not “employees”, and thus do not count as such for your idea.
Disppointed there are no insert
Greedy Corpo:
“Aah yes, 👐 A.I. 👐 we have dismissed those claims”
Jokes aside, at least in regards to Mass Effect both voice actors bring something to the game for me
Although, I admit female shepard is consistently better throughout the triology, male shepard has his charm as Mark Meer improved on his performance throughout the trilogy. The human element can do much to elevate a weaker performance and in its own way leave a stronger impact, at least for me.
While I like Mark Meer for his voice work in other Bioware games (Jade Empire for sure, also I don’t dislike maleshep at all) and his work on stuff like the irrelevant show, Jennifer Hale is just fantastic to the point where renegade femshep is to me the cannon version of Shepard
That is fair, I prefer renegade femshep as well. Jennifer Hale, for me, does her renegade lines with more menace and she carries authority better.
Male Shepard, I feel, does the vulnerable moments well, especially in 3… maybe it is a bias in the display of male lead vulnerability. I feel like Mark Meer does the more meme-worthy comedic moments better.
Generally I lean towards light hearted paragon MaleShep and badass renegade FemShep on voice preferance
Jade Empire, takes me back. Great game and had a nice morality system that effected how your character developed with skills and how the playable character interacted with the world and how it had a strong effect on type the ending that would play out.
Also thank you for the link, will have a look
The Elcor are really where the series shines for depth of acting.
Emotional; this was my favorite game series for a long time. Excited; hopefully the upcoming one will live up to the series’ name.
To be fair the greatness of experiencing Elcor Hamlet was intended to be seen through his actions not emotions.
[Regretfully and with much sorrow] One cannot truly experience it in its 14 hour splendour
[Restrained Optimism and sadness] It will be a different game considering the people behind it and the aftermath of the trilogy. [Wistful Contentment] Having the next Mass Effect have some grounded world building and, if need be, mix elements to a compromise of old and new
