Feylic said:
theprof00 said:
Don't be a grammar/spelling nazi. (they are known for using it to cover up for something)
Not my fault you have a made up name
Anyways 100k for voicework is a pretty good amount. He made about 1000$ per day working twice a week for a few hours a day.
anyhoo, they probably ended up spending about 500k total in voice work.
Now Haze, a game with a smaller budget, probably already over the cap from problems with development. It's no wonder that other things are going to take a hit in the quality department. Advertising, polishing, and others.. you also have to remember that it's not just the voice actors they have to pay, they need to rent a studio, have people implement it into the game, optimize the quality and sync every line. Sure the actor is only a bit more comparatively, but maybe they were already spending money they didn't have.
I'm not saying they were, and I'm not saying they aren't making excuses. But it's obvious that when you spend most of your money on one thing, you have to spend less on other things. |
So I correct you once, on how to properly spell my forum name, and you call me a grammar nazi...
Anyways, I ask you again, have you even played Haze. If you actually did, you would understand what I mean when I say some voice acting was terrible. I doubt they even paid for some of it. For however millions of dollars this games budget was, I highly doubt they couldn't afford to spend a couple grand on getting somebody with one voice acting lesson to preform a few lines :/. This game underwhelmed me by quite a lot, and It isn't due to bad or unfinished programming. How come so many other companies can get through the code, and still have a budget to hire reasonable voice actors? As I said, this is just an excuse for a poorly made game.
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Let's squash this grammar argument, okay?
To address your point, I have not played Haze. But that doesn't make me unfamiliar with bad voice acting. I completely agree with you when you say "I doubt they even paid for it". I myself said "they probably didn't even pay the guy that did the horrible boxart". Your latest post seems to completely agree with my viewpoint, especially when you say, "It isn't due to bad or unfinished programming". I too think that the coding was finally completed. However, what we seem to be disagreeing on, is exactly how detrimental the programming process was. I think that they were doing well and then ran into some problems with physics among other things. Who knows what it was, it could have been something even more difficult, like for example, they could have had to completely rewrite the code, costing who knows how many millions.
And look, even though people keep saying that this was a multi-million dollar budgeted game, we seem to have always been taking it as if it's a positive, whereas the company marketing was probably using the unexpected and catastrophic budget as a way of making the game seem worth the buy. IE: "With that kind of budget they should be able to afford anything" rather than "This game was so difficult to program and the planning for it was so poor, that they had to literally throw money at the problems until they went away".
There is this concept in business, I forget exactly the term, but it means "to continue to support something simply because you have already spent so many resources supporting it". I believe that this might have been the case here.
FR wanted to make 5M$ game, then they spent about 5M$ much more quickly than they thought, and decided to throw more money at it because at that point they already had 80% of the game done and just wanted to get it onto shelves and get money back into their pockets. So, they did throw more money at it. Then, they realized "Shit, all these bugs we've been having, it isn't because of coding errors... it's because the engine itself is fundamentally flawed and not properly written to work with the cell's multiple CPUs".
So they fix the engine, are now 80% into the new total budget. But, now they are looking at a potential delay, and on top of that, the release is coming dangerously close to other big title releases. They scramble everything into the box, paying everybody overtime (getting less quality and quantity per dollar by doing so) quickly finish all the programming, and then spend the rest of the 1-2M on advertising, boxart, publishing, shipping, voice and sound optimization, fine tuning, website design, and whatever else. And then, they slowly realize that they should have just scrapped the project instead of extending the budget in the first place.
PS: I spelled your name incorrectly. I apologize for that, I wasn't looking at your post when I wrote the reply at the bottom of the page, and it didn't make sense to go and look at it again because you would obviously know that I was addressing you. It's cool. People call me Proof all the time, it's no sweat because it's just a typo. It doesn't deserve to be the heading of the point in my reply. Maybe it would fit better as just "PS: it's 'prof' not 'proof':P"
