Could an MEA DLC be developed from some worthy fan fiction?

I'm going to point this question in the right direction by breaking it into its own thread.   

Problem with making MEA story mods is with voiced protagonists, it would be tough to splice together dialogue that didn't sound either really generic or weird.

Not that it COULDN'T be done. Just that it complicates things.

I find you are asking two different questions for DLC is something I consider from the developers themselves and they would write a story themselves. If you are looking for something to be done by players I would consider it a mod.

Now to answer your question, no I have not seen any good fan fiction, but I have not looked either for the vast majority I have ever looked at I consider cringyworthy at best. Besides with how restrictive they have Frostbite I doubt what people did for Mass Effect 3 could be reproduced.  (Edit) If people were to go beyond using a mod idea for something like that I am pretty sure the lawyers would come out and send a C&D letter.

No but they could maybe take inspiration from some. Perhaps like Brutal DooM seemed to help shape DooM 2016. The lack of dlc would actually be alright if there was a guaranteed sequel. Maybe they'd endorse a well crafted mod, but I doubt it.

Thank you Jade for your comments. I suppose that if BW arranged payments to use ideas from fan fiction it could be a real mess, full of litigation issues.

It's not clear to me how much BW listens to their creative fans, other than reporting bugs. Again, thank you. KC

Is it possible to reverse engineer a voice actor's voice from known lines into custom written lines? Lets say you make a mod for Mass Effect 3 involving Liara with some new dialogue, is it possible to synthetically generate voice for her that sounds like Alli Hillis? Or even record your own voice and manipulate it to sound like a specific voice actor... I imagine you can try to train a Generative Adversarial Network for that, but I'm not sure if that thing will actually work...

Actually there is something like that:
Lyrebird
It's fascinating. And scary. It's not perfect ATM, but it may work well enough for mods.

To me that is going into a grey area, for the "its a free mod" argument doesn't protect you from theft and it might not just be from EA, but the voice actors themselves for you are imitating their voices which they use to maintain their livelihood so that could be a C&D letter that causes you to lose all kinds of work.

Yes, you can, but the amount of work required is gigantic. If you only going to use the lines from the game, it is obviously limits your writing. The amateur VAs are great guys, but they obviously want the work to be released because that credit and DL link is what they can put on their resumes if you are not paying them. If you are paying them, obviously you are moving away from a free mod concept, and become an employer.

The amount of editing on each line, even if the VA does a great job is quite a bit, because you want to make sure the volume and quality is the same, the size of the files are reasonable, and then that you can convert them to the format the game uses, as it can be something non-standard.

And once you are in possession in your hundreds of recorded, edited and cleaned up lines, there comes the lip sync. So, you need to get the length of each file, and create a lip animation file of exactly the same duration, then assign both to the correct line in your dialogue file.

And that’s in an editing friendly game (my experience is from NWN2) and before you try to animate the face.

Well, that’s what I tried to do when I was working on a very short module, when I tried to see if I can match the level of design in 2004-6. Without the voiced protagonist, with limited cutscenes. Scripting was what mostly killed me, but voicework was really, really exhausting as well.

If you have never recorded VA, in my experience it is far harder than it would appear, even with editing software that helps with voice adjustment. It’s the same when peeps try to first write for mods too, because while they expect to see lots of choices in the game, they have a hard time capturing more than two every time they get a response, for example. So, I have most often seen the long 2 way dialogues w/o PC interactions/personality or way too short exchangers when the folks start out.

Anyway, modmaking is fascinating, but the team management for an armature enteprise and the amount of work and expertise it requires is not trivial. And, you do it under the constant expectation of receiving a “cease and desist” letter if you actually are trying to add content to a game, even if you sent a “Dear BioWare, I am your biggest fan and I do it for love and not for profit.” It is also worth noting that you know how the random strangers are mean to Bio? I assure you They are no kinder to the modder. Heh, in fact they will have it against you that you do it for free.

It doesn't seem to be illegal. With FO4 there are quite a number of mods altering the protagonists voice. That in itself is tempering with the original and it seems that the only limitations are what the company allows and if it can be done with the tools available.

You could also argue that using cutting room floor material could be illegal. But there's a whole bunch of mods restoring content that didn't make it into the finished game. Again, Fallout and to a lesser degree ME3, where the recruitment scene of the Cerberus engineers was added. If I remember correctly, there have been a few additional instances also.

You won't see fan made DLC.

However, as the tools develop then you'll see more advance mods appear that will expand the game in different ways. Whether its expanding the weapons, powers, enemies, armour, vehicles, planets, story, someone will make something as there are people keen to do so.

Fanfics are fun to write. I myself like to write fanfics from time to time, in my spare time.