Everyone's favourite Fallout now has voice acting for over 40 NPCs, thanks to modders

pcgamer.com:

The thing about old games—even the truly great ones—is that the studios that made them often didn't have the budget, the space, or the inclination to voice their many, many, lines of dialogue. I've said it before, but I reckon the thing that repels a lot of people from trying classic bangers like Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, or Morrowind is the sheer amount of reading they ask you to do (the fact that the combat in the latter two is simultaneously tedious and frustrating doesn't help, either).

But the modern era, despite being an unrelenting nightmare, has given us the tools to rectify this situation. A pair of mods spotted by DSOGaming(opens in new tab) are slowly but surely adding full-on voice acting to Fallout 2(opens in new tab), probably the most beloved of the classic, isometric Fallout games (although to be honest, I've always been more of a Fallout 1 man).

The mods in question are Goat_Boy's Talking Heads Addon(opens in new tab) for the Fallout Restoration Project and Black_Electric's Talking Heads That Actually Talk (THAT) Mod(opens in new tab). The first mod has been around for a while, and expands Fallout 2's roster of animated talking heads—a privilege reserved for major characters in the base game—to over 110 new NPCs. The latter came out in January, and gives those newly-animated heads actual, human voices.

The voice-acting mod doesn't use AI to accomplish its magic, at least not yet. Black_Electric has drawn on a pool of talent from the Fallout community to set NPC tongues wagging, and the results are honestly impressive for an amateur effort «operating on a budget of no money». A couple of dodgy mics aside, the voices I've heard have all done an admirable job of lending life to the game's