It's flavor of the month and I honestly could not care less.
It reminds me of this recent trend of "this and that as an 80s movie" or whatever pictures that flooded the internet a while back. At first it was cool because nobody had ever seen anything like that before but it got boring and old really fast. Once you've seen them a couple of times, once the novelty factor wears off, what else is there? Right now, it's already so overused and all over place, it has practically gotten to the point where it almost invokes a negative reaction out of me whenever one pops up. Just how many times can one watch stuff like fake Joe Rogan interviewing cartoon characters or Dagoth Ur talking about something stupid before it becomes, well, annoying and lame? It's like every other joke. It does get old. It does get overplayed. And with the intrigue pretty much boils down to only the novelty of it, it gets there even faster, because of high replicability and rampant overusage. And this technology is only going to improve and become more and more readily available and easy to use as time goes on, so it's only decline from here.
Yes, it WOULD be cool to have every Morrowind NPC voiced, but then what? They may sound a little bit wooden now but eventually that's going to be fixed as well and they'll sound just as good and natural as top of the line voice acting. And what happens then? Let's go one step further. Let's say we're 20 years into the future and now every single game can have perfect AI voice for every NPC. Well, what then? It's just going to become something that people take for granted, an afterthought, something cheap and uninspiring, and even worse, outright offputting, when it is overexposed and turns into yet another thing used as a substitution for quality. The same evolution has already occurred with other technologies.
It's pretty much like graphics, except that it's not visual but audio. With each passing day, I can see the parallels between the two becoming more and more indistinguishable. Digital graphics were the craze back in the day and with so much attention put into them, they were ridiculously improved upon in the past I don't know how many years. We've gotten to the point where CGI, especially the high budget crap in movies, is more than capable of capturing photorealism and in many cases literally looks way grander and more detailed than real life. And what has that brought us? Absolutely nothing. Look at this fully computer generated city, or this digitally recreated this actor that looks 100% real. Or look at this video game, look at that normal map, look at that little rock rolling down the hill, etc. Who gives a shit?
At the end of the day, it's basically just dressing up Morrowind with a DX11 shader but for sounds. Better graphics are always good, but at a certain point, you got to play the damn game. No amount of graphics or AI voice lines can help you with that.
