RPGs are ruined by traditional voice acting but naive consumers demand it anyway. The problem is that voice acting places practical constraints on the scope of dialogue in RPGs, rendering the RPGs shallow by necessity.
I see three possible ways forward:
1) Generative AIs are used on the fly by games to create NPCs the player can truly roleplay with
2) VA strike re-calibrates consumer expectations so we can go back to RPGs with text dialogue only, possibly with LLMs instead of scripted conversations. Either way, an improvement over:
3) Continue with the status quo.
Listed in order of preference. From an RPG gamer perspective, the worst outcome is that both human writers and human VAs keep their jobs.
I see three possible ways forward:
1) Generative AIs are used on the fly by games to create NPCs the player can truly roleplay with
2) VA strike re-calibrates consumer expectations so we can go back to RPGs with text dialogue only, possibly with LLMs instead of scripted conversations. Either way, an improvement over:
3) Continue with the status quo.
Listed in order of preference. From an RPG gamer perspective, the worst outcome is that both human writers and human VAs keep their jobs.