I'm going to work on creating a 3d RPG in DarkBASIC. I'm writing the story for the game, and for the dialogue, I'm wondering if you believe it to be very beneficial to have the words pop up in a dialogue box on the screen and have actual voice actors perform the character's voices/lines. Otherwise there would have to simply be a dialogue box with a typewriter sound as the words are typed out. Do you think it really adds to a game of this type to use voice actors? Or would it just add unnecessary difficulty for the programmer (me)? One game that I was thinking about in relation to this question is Star Fox. In the older games, there was just a dialogue box and beeps as the letters are typed to the screen. However, in Star Fox 64, the voices were actually spoken, along with the words being typed up. It is necessary for 3d games to be realistic (in this case, have voices)?

I think it sort of depends on the game.

I'm certainly not against having no voice on in-game text, especially for a game as in-depth as an RPG. I would, personally, much prefer no voice to bad voice acting.

Also, many RPGs only have voice for the really important dialog. Main characters/npcs/etc. The side characters are text-only. I'm not sure that I agree with this method (I am more a proponent of the all-or-nothing approaches), but it's an option anyway.

If you have text that shows up with a sound, a few words of advice/requests:

1. Please, for the love of god, make sure that there is an option for instant text (instead of having to wait for the text to draw in, character-by-character). I read fast. I hate having to wait for text to scroll in (Phoenix Wright is bad about this). I'd rather the text in the text box just pop up, and let me hit a key when I'm done reading it.

2. Make sure the sound is soft and non-instrusive. There's nothing worse than a ridiculously out-of-place or annoying sound effect to go with the text.

Anyway, those are my opinions, but I'd like to think that they're good all-around general rules.

Hope that helps!

Actually, yes, that did help. :)

I was checking out other RPGs to see what they did and I came across FFVII's "box appears over speaking character's head" system which didn't have actual voice actors. I think I'll go with that.