The Importance of Good Voice Acting in Video Games
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Anyone that played The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for more than a few days quickly began to recognize Bethesda's budget deficit in their voice acting department. Characters you had never seen before somehow felt eerily similar to the shop merchant you visited in the last town. Unless it's a plot point, you shouldn't be thinking about that kind of thing while you're in the middle of a game. It breaks up the flow of the story, and reveals the game for what it is when you start questioning just how many voice actors Bethesda did hire for what otherwise could have been not just a good game but a great one.
People play games to be entertained. Everyone's motives are different; some people want to kick ass while others want to get to a higher level, and some merely want to take off a break from work or school and get away from it all. Ultimately though, the immersive, entertaining quality of video games is what draws us in and takes us to a world that we can get lost in and enjoy. When the gamer starts focusing too much on the mechanics of the game itself, the spell is broken, and we're left wondering why our machine gun and an egg are taking up the same amount of space within a shoddy inventory system. Developers are starting to recognize that, and in an era of high definition gaming and a multi-million dollar industry, companies like BioWare are pulling out all the stops.
