The "always enough interesting characters" problem needs to be solved by something along the lines of "if an important NPC dies, the role is passed to an heir". But ... also the world needs to be less murder-y, and (related) actually have a closed economy.
The article mentioned the problem of fitting audio on a single DVD (which would only be exacerbated by fallbacks, and no please don't consume my entire SSD) ... there certainly was a regression in video game creative dialogue when everything started to be voiced. And voice synthesis is an example of one of the rare problems that AI might actually be able to solve fairly reliably, though it's not clear if the jarring exceptions would be more of a problem outside the current utility problems. Though given that the individual input words should be known, probably just converting text to phonemes would suffice.
Yes, completely agree. We're fine with text for dialogue in indie games and it's a lot easier to store and generate. I would happily have all the characters in Skyrim talk in text if the conversations were more dynamic.
The only problem is that audio can give you location info. if someone is off to your left shouting that you'll pay in blood, it's a little harder to place them if it's just angry text above their heads
The article mentioned the problem of fitting audio on a single DVD (which would only be exacerbated by fallbacks, and no please don't consume my entire SSD) ... there certainly was a regression in video game creative dialogue when everything started to be voiced. And voice synthesis is an example of one of the rare problems that AI might actually be able to solve fairly reliably, though it's not clear if the jarring exceptions would be more of a problem outside the current utility problems. Though given that the individual input words should be known, probably just converting text to phonemes would suffice.