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Suggestion for Foundry: pay $50 to get the ability to add voicing to your missions
soth007
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild Users Posts: 0 Arc User
As the title says, I think there should be an option to pay $50 to get the ability to add voiceovers to the foundry.
Now hold your flames a minute, and hear me out. Yes, I agree we don't want to block foundry content, we want everyone to be free to make content as it only helps make the game bigger and better.
BUT right now the option is either pay for voiceover ability or have no voicing done by foundry users at all. If people pay $50 very few are going to try to break the terms and conditions. The reason they're going to have to prevent voice overs from my understanding is it would be too many man hours policing the content for copyright breaks and swears and such. This way if someone does that you simply ban their account and they can't just run off and make a free one, they have lost $50.
Now hold your flames a minute, and hear me out. Yes, I agree we don't want to block foundry content, we want everyone to be free to make content as it only helps make the game bigger and better.
BUT right now the option is either pay for voiceover ability or have no voicing done by foundry users at all. If people pay $50 very few are going to try to break the terms and conditions. The reason they're going to have to prevent voice overs from my understanding is it would be too many man hours policing the content for copyright breaks and swears and such. This way if someone does that you simply ban their account and they can't just run off and make a free one, they have lost $50.
Post edited by soth007 on
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If you wanted to add a sound asset to the Foundry you would have to record it and then it would have to be packaged into the asset library of the game. From that time forward it is a permanent part of the game download. If you delete your content, it is still part of the download. If you leave the game and never come back, 20 years later its still part of the game assets.
So then we get into other issues, who owns the asset. Technically its Cryptic since its being included in thier product. There are many that will have issue to having thier assets taken. Lets say you are ok with Cryptic owning the asset. At some point down the road its reviewed and the asset is removed from a library. Now your content is broken. Well Cryptic owns the asset so what are you going to do. There are tons of legal and management issues no sane game company is going to embrace.
The reality is that this is not Neverwinter Nights where you built your own packages and hosted your own servers. Very different environment. Further management of graphical and sound assets not only effects the game performance but the download size. If Cryptic offers an asset lib; then that lib is usable by hundreds if not thousands of content creators and potentially millions of foundry missions. And it never changes size of the client.
If you have your own personal asset lib added to that it is usually by one content creator and only for one foundry mission. Times this now by even 100 content creators. You will triple the size of the asset lib for the game and it will take 6 hours to download all the additional content that may or may not be played by a given player at a given time. Yes you can part patch which Cryptic has as part of its engine but that is usually an update mechanisum not a download mech.
So, you can see why it just may not be practical to expect private assets to be integrated into the foundry. I am only speaking as a player of MMO's but I have been a developer and project manager of development projects and a player of MMO's since the days of Neverwinter on Compuserve, and before that of the formats that came before.
Cryptic would have to have a dedicated staff member to review all user-submitted dialogue for quality assurance and compliance purposes. I'd rather them hire another coder or artist to work on content and gameplay mechanics.
General rule of thumb for foundry authors... Avoid Walls of Text in your dialogue trees.
but I play one on the forums...
:P
Just a thought.
For the record: I'd be willing to pay for that extra server space.
It's actually even deeper than THAT - if players did their own VC for the game, Cryptic (and by extension PW) could get sued by the Screen Actor's Guild, due to having voice acting done by non-Guild members.
If Cryptic did the VC, that'd be ungodly expensive, and a waste of talent since most of the stuff on the Foundry's going to majorly suck.
but I play one on the forums...
:P
Instead what should happen if a certain set of modules are deemed steller then Cryptic should go in and do voice overs and tweak what needs to be tweaked to make it an official module. Sorta like a Hall of Fame in the NWN community. Course the problem lies in how to accurately judge a game as people will cite that in STO you have eliteist groups who will downrate competing content creators who positively rating their own.
Your paying for a service, thats the service transaction and is protected under federal trade law.
If Cryptic is making money off the use of amateur voice actors, they most definitely would be sued.
Do you not understand how unions work?
Or it could be like DoDS/TF2/CS/etc ... it downloads it to our machines as part of the load process. You don't need it? It never gets downloaded.
They'd have to add an "asset manager" or something which would allow you to cleanup content you no longer want (sort it by foundry map/mission). It's not as complex or dire as you are making it out to be.
Please no. Absolutely not.. NO NO NO. I would pay $50 NOT to have this. Voice acting is horrible enough in MMOs without someone trying to do it with their microphone in an English accent or some <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> and they'll find a way to make it so you can't skip it.. shoot me now. I will avoid ALL forge content if that becomes the case.
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There has already been talk of implementing voiceover for Foundry quests, but thank god it will not be based on any sort of payment plan.
From the Q&A at f2p.com :
Q. Can we buy Foundry assets with Astral Diamonds?
A. No! I don’t want a single barrier between the content you want to make and you being able to make it.
You just have to play the intro island on Age of Conan to realise how huge the wow factor can be. To see how your average guy/gal in the street can do this just try out some of the player made mods for Dragon Age which are both great and often hilarious.
A work around could be to use good speech synthesis, admittedly a technical feat in its own right, with scripted emphases similar to BBcode to add emotional over- and under-tones inline. Such scripts could be filtered for profanity and out of context wording.
Possibly a good proterm solution would be to allow prominent authors of good forge content the opportunity to add voice overs as trusted sources. Technically, simply have an mp3 repository of the relevant voiceovers that are optionally downloaded by players as and when they appear ingame. Thus relatively small download sizes.
I would agree with the $50 charge in any case since it would finance the file hosting and server costs that would be involved.