The Problems With Video Game Voice Acting

The Guardian's Games blog explores the tendency of modern video games to suffer from poor voice acting, a flaw made all the more glaring by increasingly precise and impressive graphics. Quoting: "Due to the interactive nature of games, actors can't be given a standard film script from which they're able to gauge the throughline of their character and a feel for the dramatic development of the narrative. Instead, lines of dialogue need to be isolated into chunks so they can be accessed and triggered within the game in line with the actions of each individual player. Consequently, the performer will usually be presented with a spreadsheet jammed with hundreds of single lines of dialogue, with little sense of context or interaction. ... But according to David Sobolov, one of the most experienced videogame voice actors in the world (just check out his website), the significant time pressures mean that close, in-depth direction is not always possible. 'Often, there's a need to record a great number of lines, so to keep the session moving, once we've established the tone of the character we're performing, the director will silently direct us using the spreadsheet on the screen by simply moving the cursor down the page to indicate if he/she liked what we did. Or they'll make up a code, like typing an 'x' to ask us to give them another take.' It sounds, in effect, like a sort of acting battery farm, a grinding, dehumanizing production line of disembodied phrases, delivered for hours on end. Hardly conducive to Oscar-winning performances."

Comments

Like the games themselves

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Who would have thought it?

Rush jobs typically exhibit signs of low quality and lack of attention to detail.

Re:Like the games themselves

[sopssa]

It takes some talent, but if you have played Bad Company 2 you know how great the sound environment is. Voice acting doesn't sound as bad when rest of the sounds are done correctly and when having a dynamic sound world. It's amazing how good it sounds in BC2 - you hear close things like team mates talking, huge explosions and everything happening around and in distance, and voice and gun sounds sound different inside and outside buildings.

If you're only listening to talking, even mediocre voice acting will sound bad. Surrounded with all the other sounds in the world and it doesn't sound so bad anymore. However, it doesn't mean it all has to be explosions and high volume - while sneaking in a jungle you could hear the grass you're walking on, leafs, bugs, and your team mate whispering to you while at the same time hearing distant sounds. It takes the whole thing to make one part of it to feel good.

Re:Like the games themselves

[somersault]

Brutal Legend was one game that I was thinking recently had some great voice acting, and it seems this guy was one of the voice actors in it :)

Voice acting is a very important component for making an immersive game, but you also have to have a good script. Was playing through Bad Company 2 in the last week and the script was awful compared to the first. Same great voice actors, but there was a sudden injection of swearing into every cut scene, and slightly less humour. I don't even have a problem with swearing in general (see Brutal Legend for details :) ), but after the first game having little to no swearing IIRC, it was out of place for those characters to be swearing like troopers all of a sudden. Despite being troopers.

There are a few games where you can tell that the actors had to record masses of dialog completely out of context - Oblivion for example has a lot of interactive voice dialog and the inflection in some of it can be rather iffy.

Re:Like the games themselves

[ZeroExistenZ]

Rush jobs typically exhibit signs of low quality and lack of attention to detail.

And also attention and preserverence..

For a PBX project I had a friend speak about 40-50 phrases.
The pace went really good to start with, but slowed down to the end and quality went down signigicantly where I had to really motivate her to keep on going. Even though the first 10 sentences she wanted to "perfect" them with nuances and redo them, I urged her to just get as much done and have it reviewed after, which proved the best tactic as she progressively got more worn out and moved to an attitude of "I want to get this over with, this is very tiring", as she got progressively more drained.

Re:Like the games themselves

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

On behalf of "stupid monkey" actors everywhere, allow me to invite you to bite my... you know what? Forget it. You typed exactly one sentence and made about 48 errors. Anything I say is just going to be as pointless and unhelpful as your post.

Re:Like the games themselves

[Rogerborg]

Yup. There's nothing stopping developers from doing it well - look at the GTA3+ series games. Even after completing San Andreas multiple times, I still laughed milk out my nose when CJ unexpectedly blurted out "I hate gravity!" on what must have been the thousandth time I cycled him off a cliff. Sheer class.

Re:Like the games themselves

[theaveng]

I don't understand people who say "This voice acting is terrible". Sure if I play something like Mario Sunshine, which has atrocious voicing, then I'll notice but for the most part I don't. It's just vocalized reading of the words on the screen.

Of course I also don't understand people who say "Babylon 5 has lousy acting" or "Japanese anime sounds better in Japanese". To me B5 acting is no worse or better than Star Trek stiltedness. And my copy of Love Hina (old but a classic) is just as funny whether I watch in Japanese or English.

Maybe I'm just not as picky or sensitive to voice nuances.

Re:Like the games themselves

[paziek]

In Polish version of Bad Company EA hired good actors, that did excellent job. Its one of those rare things that EA actually have well done.
I guess it all depends on how important voice acting is for the game, and how much budged you spend on it. I guess there wasn't all that much voice acting in BFBC2 comparing it to some RPG game, but its obvious that this had some effect - I installed EN version and got English voices, but my friend keeps nagging me to switch to PL and check out its awesomeness! I only saw samples during production, but can agree on this.

Re:Like the games themselves

[imakemusic]

Sure it doesn't matter for a Mario game but when the game is supposed to be an immersive storytelling game then it stands out.

In Max Payne the voice acting was mostly good (if a bit cheesy). There was one voice clip that grated every time I heard it. When the baddies spot you they sometimes say "what the hell?". Except that it's said in a tone of voice which makes it sound more like a relaxed "yeah, what the hell, I'm game" than a tense, surprised "what the hell is that?"

Re:Like the games themselves

[Psmylie]

I almost always watch my Japanese animation in Japanese. There are a couple reasons for this, starting with the fact that sometimes awkward phrasing is needed in English to match the mouth flaps of the character. Also, I don't speak Japanese, so if the voice actor is horrible, I won't know it :P

It's more important to me that the voice fits the character, that it sounds right. And, often, the Japanese seem to do a better job of that then the Americans. Just my opinion and preference.

Re:Like the games themselves

[trurl7]

You've not said anything that one could disagree with. "To you" there is no difference. Ok. To me there is.

I won't comment on the B5 point, but as far as anime goes....do you know Japanese? Do you know anything about the culture, and how the voice acting style, word choice and pronunciation affect the viewer's perception of the character? Love Hina is funny in both versions, it's just that the English one is missing much of the context. Oh, and the implications of the English voice actors screws up the character dynamic. But, hey, if it works for you...

Re:Like the games themselves

[grumbel]

Same here. The trouble most of the time isn't the voice acting, but the technical side of stuff. Having the same lines repeated over and over again gets annoying and breaks the immersion, no matter how good the acting on that specific line is. Having a mute hero and talking NPCs also leads to very unnatural dialogs. Overuse of the same voice actor with the same voice in different games or using the same voice for different characters in the same game is also a thing that should be avoided.

Another very annoying thing is inconsistent dubbing. For example the voice acting itself in both The Longest Journey and TLJ:Dreamfall was very good, even the translation when taken on its own was good. Where they failed is in making the translation match. Key concepts of the game world are described by difference words in both games (Balance vs Gleichgewicht) and its extremely annoying, as you notice that error a lot and it wreaks the immersion each time.

But again, all this is technical stuff that could be avoided with better planing, not something that is the fault of the acting itself.

Re:Like the games themselves

[durrr]

You mean it's not a lektor dub? So that would mean there's more than one person in poland doing voiceovers?
From my experience with polish television i had the image of a communist remnant, a Minister Of Voice that was personally responsible for all localization of voice content.

Re:Like the games themselves

[jockeys]

totally agree. I was going to post something up and saw your post.

Brutal Legend has some of the best voice acting I've ever heard in a game (not surprising from the same dude who brought us Full Throttle back in the day) and a famous cast. (Jack Black, Ozzie Osbourne, Lemmy Klimster(sp), Lita Ford, Rob Halford, Tim Curry). They all did a good job and recorded enough dialog that even during the grind, there wasn't a lot of repetition, it really kept the game fresh on subsequent replays and during multiplayer.

Re:Like the games themselves

[dougisfunny]

That's completely besides the point.

If you have to deliver a line and you're given:

'You betcha.'

In a spread sheet, its hard not to do a 'crappy' job. In a cartoon, there is a script that flows progressively. The article is saying that the games don't. So the line could be responding to "So do you want to go to a bar after work?" or "This bowl of rancid meat sure looks appetizing huh?" and there is no context, and either could be menu choices the NPCs need to respond to. If they do it wrong, they get told 'x' to indicate they should do it again.

Honestly? Bringing up the argument of subs versus dubs? I suppose it is almost fitting though, given how the article is about things out of context.

Re:Like the games themselves

[dougisfunny]

I suppose I should clarify, that I meant to reply to the your parent post.

Re:Like the games themselves

[Pteraspidomorphi]

Brutal Legend was one game that I was thinking recently had some great voice acting

All of Tim Schaffer's games do... His talent as a game designer probably has a lot to do with the attention given to the script and voice acting.

Re:Like the games themselves

[digitig]

I don't think you understand the word "average".

Re:Like the games themselves

[BrokenCube]

I agree - but more that that, I find it's generally better to watch anything in the language it was originally filmed/rendered/drawn for. Not only does this avoid the issue of awkwardly translated phrases to match lip-sync and sentence length, as pointed out in the parent, but also quite often translations will have trouble matching visual and emotional cues; this is even more noticeable between languages which have different word order. Subtitles, of course, do not have this problem.

Re:Like the games themselves

[feepness]

Of course I also don't understand people who say "Babylon 5 has lousy acting"

With coaching even those with Asperger's can learn to read other human's emotions.

Re:Like the games themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

To me B5 acting is no worse or better than Star Trek stiltedness

If these are what typify acting for you, it's no wonder that neither looks better or worse. If you pick two chunks from the manure pile, it doesn't matter how you compare them...they're both crap.

Re:Like the games themselves

[stewbacca]

Funny, but true. I've often thought that geeky shows get a pass in acting quality because a large segment of the target audience cannot discern good from bad acting anyways. Dr. Who and Babylon 5 come immediately to mind. Which is weird, when a show like Battlestar Galactica comes on with mostly third rate actors, it is hailed as acting supremacy (relative to other sci-fi shows, of course).

Re:Like the games themselves

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Hah! So in other words, when there's enough background noise to drown out the bad voice acting you don't notice it so much...

Re:Like the games themselves

[sammy baby]

Ugh, Max Payne? The voice acting was terrible! Some of the most leaden, horrible... oh, wait. You meant the game! Yeah, the game voice acting was pretty good. ;)

If I recall correctly, there was also a scene in the game where you hear an explosion in the distance, followed by Payne muttering, "What the hell was that?" I smiled every time I heard it because I thought it was so well delivered.

Re:Like the games themselves

[del_diablo]

The real issue is not the dubbing, but that the cast sucks. The typical result of about anything re-dubbed: *Half of cast is porn actors *The pick the wrong people for epic shouting scenes *There will be less amount of puns and meanings *Might be translated wrong *And to few voices, I swear that a few shows i have watched was the same 5 people as in the last show............... and there is even too few voices compared to characters On the top of that: *Makre......... I.E: One Pice 4kidz dub *Cencoring....... making people cousins *Random redrawing, ex chaning a piece of something into a sandwich........ *Etc So it lacks effort, voicing and is cencored............ Why would i want to watch this crap? PS: There are exceptions, some swedish dubs are good, the english dub of Full Metal Alchemist works, and more :P

Re:Like the games themselves

[Tekfactory]

Of course I also don't understand people who say "Babylon 5 has lousy acting"

Many of the actors in B5 were theatrical stage performers not TV actors, you get some things like Delenn's visual shorthand of biting her knuckle whenever she was concerned, worried, distressed because in the theater people can't see you make a concerned facial expression from the back row. In TV-land and the movies, cameramen will do closeups so you get that shot, but some of the B5 actors hadn't made that transition.

I expect the actress was better by the time 'Lost' came around, but I never watched.

Sinclair (can't remember the actor's name) is cut from the same Oak as Kevin Sorbo where wooden acting is concerned. On balance I'd put JaKar (Andres Katsulas) and Londo (Peter Jurassik) up against Alan Rickman and Kenneth Branagh for scenery chewing and watchability anyday.

And no, B5 (Casablanca in Space) was no worse off than Star Trek TOS with its two-fisted Captain and strong Western influenced (Wagon Train in Space) themes.

Re:Like the games themselves

[pugugly]

The average actor's skill versus the average performance, is hardly an independent variable.

That's like trying to say the average IQ test is independent of the actual answers given on one.

Logic: You're doin' it wrong.

Pug

Re:Like the games themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what you got out of his post? He's talking about a quality mix, you fool. Listen... take your favorite band, then pull all the instruments down in the mix so you can only hear the lead vocalalist. Now listen to that over and over on your ipod. Not so great any more, is it? Think it will sell?

*Hah!* ?
What an idiot.

Re:Like the games themselves

[Blakey Rat]

Voice acting is a very important component for making an immersive game, but you also have to have a good script.

Yup!

Compare Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time with Prince of Persia (2008). The voice acting in the latter is passable, but frankly-- nothing could have saved that awful writing and that awful cliche-ridden story.

Re:Like the games themselves

[Therilith]

And my copy of Love Hina (old but a classic) is just as funny whether I watch in Japanese or English.

It took me about five episodes of the english dub to decide to switch to the original jap with subs. The voice acting wasn't bad, it just sounded wrong, somehow.

Not to mention the one english dub I actually liked, Ranma ½. All the characters seemed to be voiced perfectly. Then season 4(?) hit, and they decided to change the main characters voice actor. The new guy wasn't bad either, but I'd flinch every time he started talking. After a short break, I switched to the japanese version and rewatched the whole thing.

I usually prefer fansubs anyway. They tend to stay true to the original to a much greater extent than the "official" stuff.

Re:Like the games themselves

[b4dc0d3r]

I think you're forgetting that many actors audition for a single role. There are lots of "actors" out there who bring down the average. The problem with this thread is the usual problem with discussions - the lack of specificity or boundary setting.

The average actor will give a terrible performance. To correct that, we can say the average actor who wins the role will give an average performance. Or the average performing actor will give an average performance. If you took all of the actors, all 50k of the non-cited anonymous registered actors, and had them perform whatever they wished in whatever setting they wished, you would have a few remarkable performances, a lot of average performances, and decide to euthanize the rest for the good of humanity. It would be American Idol auditions scale terrible.

So AC's point was, out of 6 billion people, only 50k have officially put any thought into acting. There are probably many more closet cases of "I did a community theatre production of Annie or Wizard of Oz once." But out of those 50k, the best are going to be performing more, probably as much as they can manage to. The not-best actors will win an audition when the role suits them more, or when the best can't make it due to performing on live world-wide television.

So the fundamental assumption we must make is that above-average actors will have more performances, on average, than below-average performers.

To conclude, the "average actor" is not representative of the "average performance".

How does this apply to the argument at hand? One guy says that anyone can read a script (6 billion people) and an actor says nuh-uh it's more like some other number that I can't really decipher, but there are numbers involved other than 6 billion.

Who's wrong? They both are, but because the second guy rambled into incoherence it's hard to pin him down. You can't hand an English script to any of 6 billion people and have it work - some will be too old, too young, or the wrong sex. Or not sound just right for the part. Or they might not even be able to read English, or not pronounce it correctly. Unless you want a foreign accent in there, you're going to need to limit yourself to 400 million, to round up. Gender takes that to 200 million, age maybe makes it 20 million. Then remove people with speech impediments or other reasons not to hire, maybe you're down to 10 million. So the potential pool of voice actors might be 10 million, at most.

Out of those 10 million, how many people could readily study a script, have a conversation with the director, and make a recordable performance? I've spoken with a lot of people, and the clarity of voice and inflection necessary to convey meaning and emotion varies wildly. In my experience, I'd say less than 10 percent, leaving 1 million hypothetically capable people in the pool, of which most are busy in other lines of work.

Of these, the other guy as I've been calling him says 50k actually work - and that's not just voice, that's apparently everything. Whatever calculations were henceforth derived are far more plausible than the 6 million figure, making the second guy more right than wrong. digitig (1056110) took the word average out of context, and the responding AC posted a short version of this overly long comment. Out of context, digitig (1056110) and yourself are correct and you are doing logic correctly. In the context of the conversation, however, you fail. Sorry, I was trying to be polite but that last part just slipped out.

Now, specifically for The Ultimate Fartkno (756456), "stupid monkey" referred to how the actors were being treated, which is the whole point of the article. Voice actors are treated as if they simply follow steps and poop out a result, and fling it at the audience. Your offense is misplaced. Forgive me if I don't stick around, you're not the only person to be wrong on the internet.

Re:Like the games themselves

[mjwx]

Of course I also don't understand people who say "Babylon 5 has lousy acting"

For the most part the acting was pretty bad, 95% of the characters were 2 dimensional and 80% of the scripting was crap. But what made it good was the story which was 99% good, fairly consistent, the rest of the dialogue was classic and Londo.

Re:Like the games themselves

[walshy007]

Strange thing is most modern attempts at voice acting pale in comparison to when it was first starting

Take jon irenicus from baldur's gate 2, best voiced character ever

That we don't have any better these days is just a shame.

Re:Like the games themselves

[BikeHelmet]

Oblivion had terrible voice acting.

Not because it was bad. Just because every second character you meet has the same voice.

And the best voice actor (Jean Luc Picard!?) was only used briefly for the King that dies 5 minutes in.

Re:Like the games themselves

[Phoghat]

Yadda, Yadda, Yadda. But it must pay pretty well

The direction sounds like it needs work

[myocardialinfarction]

As the legendary tape of Orson Welles walking out of the 'All Your Base' recording proves.

Left click

[Threni]

solves that problem. Left click...left click...left click.....ooh, I can play the game now - cool!

Note to developers: I play games to avoid having to watch tv (along with all the hackneyed plots, poor acting, terrible dialogue etc), not so I can experience more of it.

Re:Left click

[bheekling]

I think they're talking about in-game interaction with NPCs, not cut-scenes. In Modern Warfare for instance, you *need* to listen to your friendlies or you won't get anywhere.

Re:Left click

[kalirion]

While I agree that unskippable cut-scenes are an atrocious, there are many of us who actually [i]like[/i] stories in our game. Why do you think Prince of Persia: Sands of Time is widely considered to be better than its two sequels? It's not the gameplay!

Wing Commander II

[tangent3]

Wing Commander II was the first game I recall that had some sort of voice acting. Now that I think about it, the voice acting was crap... but back in those days where most PC users were probably still using PC Speaker and do not have Sound Blasters, having voice acting in the first place was consider OMGWTFBBQ awesome.

How times have changed.

Re:Wing Commander II

[Monkeedude1212]

Yep, times are a changing. I recall the Wing Commander series being amongst the pioneers in story-telling, voice acting, multiple story-pathing, even cinematics. If you look at any of them now, they seem so ridiculously dated in every regard. A time when all the acting was done by the developers, because they didn't have money to hire anyone else. You've got your Lead Developer who was a bit of a shut in during his senior year trying to sound like the hero everyone can relate with. Or better yet - if there was no female on the team, you just knew one of them coaxed their wife to come in, and she didn't even want to be in the game. So of course it was terrible!

Now I've got Captain Jean Luc Picard in my Oblivion, Jedi Qui Gon Jinn in my Fallout, Seth Green in my Mass Effects... The list goes on.
You know that videogames have become a huge industry when they can branch out and grab talent from other sectors to help out with some value-added services.

Re:Wing Commander II

[Fnkmaster]

And I remember the voice acting in Wing Commander (don't remember which one specifically) because they had Mark Hamill (AKA Luke Skywalker) doing voice work for it. It was memorable in a time when the idea of a real actor, even a has-been, in a video game was sort of mind-blowing.

Re:Wing Commander II

[Chaos Incarnate]

You're thinking of either III or IV, where he also did some screen-acting too. :)

Re:Wing Commander II

[phorm]

And let us not forget John Rhys Davies, who - in addition to being on many geek-popular shows - has done voice acting for various animated programmes and video games including Wing Commander, Freelancer, etc

Re:Wing Commander II

[agrif]

Myst and Riven are two examples of games with exactly these opposites. In Myst, the only three characters in the entire game were played by Rand and Robyn Miller, who designed the game. The acting was not terrible, but you could sort of tell that acting wasn't what they did. Rand ended up playing Atrus in all the Myst games, but he always said he was never an actor. (He was better in the later games.)

Riven, of course, saw the return of Rand as Atrus, but all of the other actors were professionals, if not well known. Gehn was played by John Keston, who is a theatrically trained British actor, with a bit of skill at opera. There's an easter egg in Riven that shows Gehn singing "O Sole Mio". This acting was wonderful, and it made Riven a great game to play.

How about just not having voice acting?

[MGRockwell]

What is the problem with reading the text on the screen? I remember characters "sounding" a lot better in my head before voice acting started. This is especially relevant for RPG's. I guess I don't mind in an action game if the characters are voice acted so that it doesn't tear you away from the action but for RPG's and slower games I'd much prefer to just read the script.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[IBBoard]

Except that surely it would be jarring in a different way to have all of this background noise but then not have the characters speak?

I do agree that the voice acting can be terrible in RPGs, though. Oblivion and Fallout 3 sounded very "samey" with a lot of characters, even if you've walked miles to get to them. They also didn't always match the character that well.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[marcansoft]

Except that surely it would be jarring in a different way to have all of this background noise but then not have the characters speak?

Not at all, you get used to it pretty quickly. What you can do is replace the voice with some gibberish noises. For example, Zelda games tend to use vocal "calls" (think "hey!", a laugh, or some other attention-calling noise) but then the actual dialogue is text. Quite a few RPGs just make some sort of semi-random gibberish noise as the dialogue text is being scrolled onto the screen. It all works pretty well. You don't have to hear actual voices to convince yourself that the characters are speaking.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[crocodill]

What is the problem with reading the sub-titles on the screen? I remember silent film characters "sounding" a lot better in my head before voice acting started. This is especially relevant for the teletubbies. I guess I don't mind in an action movie if the characters are voice acted so that it doesn't tear you away from the action but for the teletubbies and slower programs I'd much prefer to just read the script.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[illaqueate]

yes, the pool of voice actors for games is also shallow, especially for localization of japanese RPG games where the actor will put on a ridiculous high pitched voice or try too hard to sound like a badass. I wouldn't necessarily blame the actors alone in this. There's something wrong with the casting process. For example Final Fantasy XIII several of the actors were putting on a bad accent or sound like a Japanese person picked the voice actor because their voice sounds like they should be reading the dictionary.

It isn't only the line reading process. Many of these people are not very good actors and their range is constrained by putting on a voice; it doesn't sound natural if the actor hasn't put in work to develop that character and the blind reading makes it that much worse. If they went with a live recording with the actors in the same room like in the Uncharted series it would turn out quite a bit better and some of the characters putting on absurd voices would be filtered out because it wouldn't sound natural.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[TiberiusMonkey]

You can't have that these days, it just wouldn't feel right having amazingly real visuals and sound effects, and then not having any voice. That said, Monkey Island 1 and 2 was a lot funnier to read than the later (and remixes) games that had voice overs.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[MGRockwell]

It would feel right to me, better than having to listen to half the males sounding like 9 year olds and having to listen to horrible forced laughter and giggles from the females.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[TheKidWho]

Dragon Age Origin was all voice acted, and it was amazingly well done.

Reading text on a screen tends to kill your immersion, I guess that would be one of the big reasons for voice acting.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[delinear]

Alternatively have them record their lines then play through the key scenes so they get a feel for how their character should be emoting and re-record where necessary (and usually it's only one or two places where the emphasis is placed on the wrong word). The reality is that this all comes down to money - the reason voice acting in games sucks is that actors are brought in, they sit in a booth and read ten pages of lines then they go. If they had to be properly directed or involved or rewored their lines it would cost a lot more which means you can't afford to have $CELEB_A_LIST plastered on your marketing. There are enough total on-rails games with sucky dialogue to instantly disprove the "alternative interactions spoiling the acting flow" excuse.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[delinear]

XIII is a great example of why TFA is wrong - it contains hours of dialogue where your characters are completely on rails, they know exactly what level you will be, what choices you will have made, who is in your party, what interaction you've previously had with the NPC, etc and yet it still sucks. Considering how much effort they put into the visuals it just shows up the voice acting even more, what they need is good actors (not necessarily expensive actors) a solid casting process and most of all a director who knows the format and how to get the best from it.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[illaqueate]

The games with celebrities doing voice acting like Mass Effect and Dragon age tend to turn out pretty good which is a credit to them because they use a traditional process although Bioware pays more attention to getting the performances right than some of the other game studios. The actors are allowed to improvise somewhat and the writers will change lines that don't sound right.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[grumbel]

I remember characters "sounding" a lot better in my head before voice acting started.

I don't. Everything I read happens to sound kind of like myself, my imagination isn't quite up to matching the cast of dozens and dozens of talented voice actors. On top of that text just can't replace voice, sometimes you want to have your teammates shouting out meaningful dialog within a fight, you can't really do that with subtitles, as you are way to busy to keep track of them in the mid of a firefight.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[wjousts]

No, not catching what a character said because of their stupid, highly affected accent and not being able to ask them to repeat it kills immersion. Not being able to interrupt the cliched wised old man character and tell him to cut the exposition and just get to the fucking point kills immersion. Just turn the subtitles on and let me read it instead, or skip it altogether, especially if this isn't the first time I've play through this part.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[lofidan]

I got a kick out of the voice acting in XIII, Adam West's delivery especially! I found it matched the atmosphere perfectly.

Are you telling me you ever got sick of hearing the startled dudes say "What the....?"

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[VGPowerlord]

I don't know... Earl Boen as LeChuck in the Monkey Island games is pretty good. Although LeChuck doesn't have that many lines in the first game's remix. He has more in the second game, but only in cutscenes until right before the end of the game; the special edition of MI2 was just announced, so we'll see how well that works.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[Dorkmaster Flek]

Rare took this approach in the Banjo Kazooie games back on the N64. The characters had gibberish noises that played while their text scrolled. Okay, it was more to save space on the cartridge instead of having full voice overs (which they did a few years later in Conker's Bad Fur Day) but it works. The downside is the repetition can become annoying pretty fast, which it did for some of the BK characters. Fortunately, the witty writing made up for it. Damn, Rare really did make some great classics in the N64 days...

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[selven]

Exactly, and you could easily justify it by having all the characters speak Sindarin.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[Jer]

There's nothing wrong with it at all, it's just that the technology and money didn't exist before to do it so now it's a sparkly thing that all the big games think they need to have. Some games actually do need to have it, and others would be better off just dropping it and putting in subtitles instead. But hopefully we're reaching a point where that can be a design choice (or, probably more realistically, a marketing choice) rather than something "new and shiny" or something that you "need" to have to have your game be taken seriously.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[Hatta]

Yes, very much so. Who bothers to sit around and listen to all the dialog anyway? It takes longer to listen to a character read several lines of dialog than it does to read the subtitles, so I just read the subtitles and get back to the game.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[Hatta]

Reading text on a page doesn't kill my immersion when reading a book. Why should it when playing a game? In fact, halting all game play to give a character time to go through his spiel breaks immersion. Letting me read at my own pace and get back to the game as quickly as possible does not.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[theangrypeon]

That's true, but keep in mind it was easier to do that for Mass Effect because aside from the customization of your character, you could only be human.

They'd probably have to hire 6 voice actors for Dragon Age to cover the 3 races and gender combinations. It'd just feel weird if they were all done by one male and one female character.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[TheKidWho]

So are you one of those people that mutes his TV while reading close captions when watching TV shows?

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[mister_playboy]

Rare took this approach in the Banjo Kazooie games back on the N64. The characters had gibberish noises that played while their text scrolled.

I'd like to know why this technique was used on Civilization: Revolutions. It's absolutely terrible. Surely there is enough room on a Blu-ray for real dialog.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[Hatta]

Muting TV doesn't let me get back to the good stuff any quicker. Skipping dialog does.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[Toonol]

I haven't played Revolutions, but voice acted is inherently limiting in some games. Civ has lots of dialog strings that are generated: "Alexander, may I have some silks for your iron and polytheism?" You can't record speech for all possible combinations.

That's one of the reasons that I think ubiquitous voice-acting has been a really bad development for RPGs and simulations. It forces a very finite cap to the diversity of lines. That's fine for a straight-forward FPS or RTS, for instance, but some games have algorithmically-generated, potentially infinite text.

Re:How about just not having voice acting?

[TheKidWho]

But the dialog is the good stuff?

Regardless, your point is moot since in dragon age you could enable subtitles and skip dialog quickly.

Want to pay $100 per game?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what it's going to cost to deliver across the board AAA assets consistantly in games.

Re:Want to pay $100 per game?

[dingen]

Mass Effect 2 has outstanding voice acting, performed by quite a few well-known SciFi actors. That game doesn't cost $100.

Re:Want to pay $100 per game?

[OMFG it's Rici]

You are talking about Bioware, they are masters at what they do and the reference point for the industry. And I believe they rarely use the single line method for recording the voice for the characters, you can find a few videos about their recording sessions on youtube and see how they do it.

Re:Want to pay $100 per game?

[delinear]

Clearly further evidence then that the issue isn't the format, nor is it the money that's thrown at it, but rather the way it's carried out. If one company can manage to do this consistently well without charging a premium then others should be able to do the same.

Re:Want to pay $100 per game?

[Enry]

One of the Command and Conquer games had James Earl Jones. It didn't cost $100. Now that I think about it, most of the games in that series had someone from TV or movies doing the cutscenes.

It's not just the voice acting

[91degrees]

Decent writing might help as well. In my experience, dialogue is written by game designers. Writing dialogue is not always their main talent.

Re:It's not just the voice acting

[deniable]

Writing helps, so does good talent. Silent Hunter IV kept pissing me off when the American sailors kept speaking with European accents, almost like the used the same talent from the previous U-boat games.

Re:It's not just the voice acting

[grumbel]

If I remember correctly KotOR, along with some of their other earlier games, suffered from having a mute main hero. You select lines, but they never say them out loud, thus you end up with a very unnatural dialog flow in the game. That kind of high level game design stuff bothers me much more then any lack of voice talent when it comse to individual lines.

Re:It's not just the voice acting

[The End Of Days]

It seems like there is a sizable contingent of the games industry that really, really wishes they were making movies instead. The reason they aren't, obviously, is that they aren't actually good enough. Thus, we get Uncharted foisted upon our hobby, and it is praised as having an amazing story and voice acting despite the fact that as a movie, it would be distinctly third rate, and probably go straight to video.

(I really liked Uncharted and the sequel, so back off, fanboys with mod points.)

Re:It's not just the voice acting

[Blakey Rat]

Prince of Persia (2008) had a writer-- it didn't help. The story was awful, and the incidental dialog was mind-numbingly worse-than-awful. If I were him, I sure as hell would have been credited as Alan Smithee.

(Either that or purposefully made so awful that it becomes surreal-- and you're actually thinking to yourself, "maybe medieval Persians really did speak like 1990s Californian surfers!)

Re:It's not just the voice acting

[grumbel]

Speaking the line you've selected doesn't make sense since you already know what the content is and it stops the game from advancing for a few seconds

It makes perfect sense, LucasArts adventures have been doing that since forever, even before they had speech, and it never was an issue, quite the opposite. And even if you don't like that, just do it like The Dig, Dreamfall or Mass Effect, let the user select the intention/topic of the dialog instead of the exact wording, gives you less reading for the user and more talking for the characters and thus better and more natural voice acting.

Having a mute hero always felt for me like having a piece of story telling missing from a game.

Re:How is this different from a cartoon?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Likely because cartoons have a defined narrative flow(even the ones where coherence between episodes is considered minimally important).

Unless the game is totally on rails, a fair bit of the voice acting will basically consist of delivering lines used to fill out obscure corners of some dialog tree, or to be shouted pseudo-randomly by NPCs of various flavors. Cartoon voice acting may well, particularly in lower budget stuff, be done on the cheap; but it is much more likely that the voice actor(s) will have access to something resembling a script, which will allow them to inject some degree of plausibility into what they are doing.

Final Fantasy XIII

[My Iron Lung]

For a game that was out in Japan 3 months previously, I am astounded at the quality of the dubbing and voice acting of FFXIII. Even previous titles in the franchise had acting that made me wince (FFX most of all, the first in the franchise to attempt it). There's a heavy cost for this sort of quality, however, and if anyone has the money to throw at this kind of thing, it's Square-Enix on their flagship franchise.

Re:Final Fantasy XIII

[illaqueate]

They spent an extra month recording and re-recording voices but even then I'm not too impressed. It's nowhere near as good as the Uncharted series which has a fundamentally better process, including the casting. Bioware uses a traditional process afaik and it turns out decently but they are spending money to hire working actors who are quite good at acting in tv/movies and have a range, not just voices who go way over the top reading lines.

Re:Final Fantasy XIII

[Xtravar]

I'm not too bothered by the acting. I find it pretty good, actually. But the lips often don't match up, and what's with all the "unh", "ahh", etc. grunting and pouting noises? That's the part that really annoys me. It's like the characters do that instead of possible lines of dialog. "Let's write this whole section in grunts so we don't have to re-do it for the English market."

Re:Final Fantasy XIII

[revlayle]

Also FXIII is probably pretty linear compared to many western RPG or open-world titles. The dialog can be more refined and less bits of choppy elements (barring all the "poke every retard in town and see what one-liner they give you" dialog lines seemingly present in every single RPG ever)

Re:Final Fantasy XIII

[dannycim]

I absolutely hate FFXIII for very many reasons except three: Gorgeous graphics, nice story and superb voice-acting.

It's not the process that makes VO bad, it all depends how much time and money you're willing to throw at it.

Re:Final Fantasy XIII

[My Iron Lung]

I had heard that they slightly altered the timings on the North American version, to more accurately match their lips to what they're saying.

Japan begs to differ

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why do the Japanese manage to get it right in every single hentai game?

Re:Japan begs to differ

[nicodoggie]

It's basically because Japan has a HUGE pool of voice talent. They make hundreds of anime and interactive novels every year, it makes sense that they'd have decent voice acting.

Plus, how hard is it to say "ahn ahhhn, yamete kudasai!!" a hundred times over?

Jason?

[feepness]

JASON!

Re:Jason?

[biscuitlover]

Shauuuuuuuuuuuuuuun!

Re:Jason?

[Dorkmaster Flek]

Just to find a father?!

Re:Jason?

[nacturation]

I was about to post the same. The voice acting for the father is decent, but comes across as an actor rather than a father. And the shopping mall "JAYson... JAYson" stilted lines? Ugh... that line should've been redone.

How about fixing accents?

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting voice over artists who understand the accents they're meant to be using would also be nice.

Having CoD4 ruined by the "British" voices pronouncing "depot" and "missile" in the USAian way (DEE-pot and MISS-le; rather than DEP-ot and miss-ILE) and using "cellphone" instead of "mobile". Five minutes work with a British person would have highlight this and minimised that ranting that I shouted at the computer screen.

Re:How about fixing accents?

[dingen]

Or better even: claiming that someone is British and then letting them refer to someone's butt as her "fanny". That doesn't mean what you think it means, Americans.

Re:How about fixing accents?

[feepness]

Or better even: claiming that someone is British and then letting them refer to someone's butt as her "fanny". That doesn't mean what you think it means, Americans.

It's where you might keep a pack of fags, right?

Re:How about fixing accents?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's where you might keep a pack of fags, right?

If you're Bill Clinton.

Re:How about fixing accents?

[HopefulIntern]

What really threw me is the word "lieutenant" which in US english is pronounced lew-TEN-ant, but in British english "leff-TEN-ant". When one of the british guys in COD4 said it the latter way, the subtitles actually wrote out "leftenant" complete with the quotation marks. A similar thing happens in Need for Speed Shift. The "coach" which appears simply as a voice instructing you, is British. The courses you drive are also mostly British. And yet, instead of driving a "nis-san three fifty zed" he makes you drive a "nee-sahn three fifty zee".... On a similar note, can Seth McFarlane please learn british words/phrases properly, rather than just putting on a faux accent?!! Case and point: "fanny", "sweater", "sneaker" (words americans use, or have a different meaning for).

Re:How about fixing accents?

[AP31R0N]

i checked the wikipedia entry for fanny (as Brit slang), which linked to vulva. i've forgotten which part was the vulva so i clicked.

That page is NSfW!

And not a bookmark.

Re:How about fixing accents?

[dingen]

i've forgotten which part was the vulva

Only on Slashdot...

Re:How about fixing accents?

[Abcd1234]

i've forgotten which part was the vulva

Only on Slashdot...

Now now, to be fair... he could just be married.

Re:How about fixing accents?

[tophermeyer]

On a similar note, can Seth McFarlane please learn british words/phrases properly, rather than just putting on a faux accent?!! Case and point: "fanny", "sweater", "sneaker" (words americans use, or have a different meaning for).

I can't speak with absolute certainty on this one, I've noticed these as well and my thought has always been that it is intended to be satirical. Americans have stereotypes of Brits that we like to see confirmed, little pretentious Stewie is one of them.

Re:How about fixing accents?

[AP31R0N]

i got married on Sunday (3.14).

i know which parts are the labia and the clit. The vulva wasn't mentioned in my health class i think. *shrugs*

Re:How about fixing accents?

[elrous0]

Yes, blast you, you've got me. I have a funny accent and carry around a teddy bear. I'm humbled by the biting criticism of a man who sits around on /. all day trading Star Wars witticisms and computer tips with other girlfriendless basement-dwellers. Well played, sir.

Re:How about fixing accents?

[Hurricane78]

That’s nothing! Every single one of the Wolfenstein games hat ridiculous American accents for their German characters, and the whole think looked more like a parody.

MAIN LÄBBEN!
JAHAHA!
WUNDABAR!
NAIN!
FÄRBOTTEN!

It’s practically a meme here in Germany.

And the ridiculous German signs stating “ACHTUNG! VERBOTEN” (Attention! Forbidden!), but no other text explaining what it is that is forbidden. Which makes no sense at all!

Also the characters’ names... The best one was Dr. Betruger from DOOM 3. “Betrüger” is German for “scammer” or “cheater” (exact translation here), Which fits very well with his untrustworthy behavior.

On the other hand, a German game holds the title for the worst voice acting in human history: Far Cry!
The enemies literally say things like “Hey du da mit dem Hemd! Dich mach ich fertig!” (Hey you there with the shirt! I’m finishing you!) Which is about the lamest possible thing you could say in German.
That, out of the face of someone looking like a real evil soldier grunt... is incredibly silly. I always had to laugh my ass of when I heard it. ^^

Re:How about fixing accents?

[tophermeyer]

No need for the hostility, its just part of what most of his humor is about. Look at other characters in Family Guy, they're all superficial and ridiculous stereotypes of various races, genders, nationalities, etc. Stewie is no closer to an actual Brit than Cleveland is to a black man, or Meg is to an awkward teenager. You could even consider those characters to be caricatures of stereotypes. American Dad is the same way.

I apologize if I offended you, I definitely did not intend to do so. I am most certainly not the bigot you are looking for.

Re:How about fixing accents?

[stewbacca]

You spelled "minimise" wrong...oh wait...

Re:How about fixing accents?

[stewbacca]

As an American who lived in England, I can also say that "knocking somebody up" has two completely different meanings.

I have CoD4, but haven't played it yet. I'm sure I'll rip it to shreds knowing they Americanized the Brit portion.

Re:How about fixing accents?

[dingen]

So what's the other meaning, apart from getting a girl pregnant?

Re:How about fixing accents?

[Killjoy_NL]

Congrats on the marriage, now you are one of the few people who 'get' my nickname in Warcraft.
My warlock Vulvarius :D

Re:How about fixing accents?

[HopefulIntern]

That is interesting, I guess I had not considered that. Who knew Family Guy had such depth? I do like when they poke fun at the Brits though. Drive-by arguments was a good one. And when the english football team take steroids and vent their roid-rage by having a pillow fight. Good stuff.

Re:How about fixing accents?

[stewbacca]

It just means to drop in for a visit, sort of unannounced. We'd say "knock on somebody's door" when they say "knock somebody up".

Re:How about fixing accents?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the ridiculous German signs stating “ACHTUNG! VERBOTEN” (Attention! Forbidden!), but no other text explaining what it is that is forbidden. Which makes no sense at all!

I don't know about the reaction in Germany, but among my peers in the USA at the time we just assumed it meant the same as "Authorized Access Only". As far as signs go it makes at least as much sense as, "This door must remain closed at all times".*shrug*

The enemies literally say things like “Hey du da mit dem Hemd! Dich mach ich fertig!” (Hey you there with the shirt! I’m finishing you!) Which is about the lamest possible thing you could say in German.
That, out of the face of someone looking like a real evil soldier grunt... is incredibly silly. I always had to laugh my ass of when I heard it. ^^

Yeah, you'd think that with the commitment required by even informal German to state anything meaninfully, native German speakers would invest more thought into what they say.;)

Re:How about fixing accents?

[dingen]

Ah, like ringing someone up. Thanks!

Re:How about fixing accents?

[Anonymous Coward]

Case and point:

And apparently in Britain they say "case and point" rather than "case in point" like we do in the US.

Re:How about fixing accents?

[Psychochild]

I think part of the issue is what the audience expects. The biggest audience for CoD4 is the North American market, so pronunciations conform to that. Even voices with supposedly British accents will probably pronounce words the American way to conform with American expectations. Perhaps this isn't accurate to the real world, but meeting player expectations makes them enjoy the game more.

Some thoughts from a game developer/designer.

Re:How about fixing accents?

[Blakey Rat]

The Xbox game Sudeki almost made me put a bullet through my brain every time any character opened their mouth-- talk about bad accents! Christ.

Whoever did the voice acting for that game, if there's any justice in the world, they're all living in dumpsters now.

Re:How about fixing accents?

[Rathum]

"Prizes and surprises!"
Every. Single. Chest.
What is this? A cereal commercial?

Re:How about fixing accents?

[HopefulIntern]

*Embarrassed* Well at least I never said "For all intensive purposes".

Re:How is this different from a cartoon?

[SharpFang]

What REALLY annoys me is if they get more voice actors than lines. When you hear the same exact sentence repeated by three different people.

"You seem to be wounded. You should see a healer" delivered by a female orc husky voice, a stern guard, and a singing elf female, this is really horrible. Why can't they come up with some variations that would mean the same, or even ask the voice actors to improvise a little? How hard would it be to write variations of these lines, one per voice? I thought writing random dialogues for the characters is the cheapest part, and since each voice actor needs to read his/her sheet separately, why can't they be provided with different sheets?

Re:How is this different from a cartoon?

[somersault]

Or even worse, when one NPC has different voice actors or personalities depending on which dialog flow you choose.. the beggars in Oblivion sounded all crotchety and old for their own dialog, but ask them for some gossip and suddenly they're speaking with a perfectly enunciated middle class accent.

Award for all-time worst voice acting goes to...

[biscuitlover]

...the actor playing Sheogorath in the Shivering Isles expansion pack for Oblivion, purely for the comically bad accent. Was Sheogorath intended to be someone who spent equal amounts of time living in Scotland, Ireland and America? Or did Bethesda just decide that one of the pre-existing cast of 4 voice actors was probably good enough to pull off an additional regional accent, seeing as the same person had already voiced half of Oblivion's population of NPCs?

There are exceptions...

[Ransak]

... Mass Effect or Dragon Age: Origins (the latter more so than the former). They tend to use real actors, not just students or developers that want a shot at it.

Of course this works under the premise that acting is a profession, which some disagree with.

Re:There are exceptions...

[Dorkmaster Flek]

I don't see why acting wouldn't be considered a profession. There are people who are really good at it, and (many, many more) people who are terrible at it.

Re:There are exceptions...

[mackil]

One of the great things about Thief was the voice acting, particularly Stephen Russell as Garrett. He made such an impression on the fans, that when Thief 4 was announced, that was the first question asked on the Edios forums.

Re:There are exceptions...

[sammy baby]

DA:O was very good. Mass Effect 2 is uneven - I'm not a big fan of the acting for male Shepard, but the supporting cast is almost uniformly excellent.

Except - oddly - Legion. I don't know what I expected a Geth to sound like, but it ain't him.

The absolute best voice acting I've heard in a game is in Uncharted 2, though. Watch some of the cutscenes if you can. It helps that the writing is also very good.

(Your guy is attempting a stealthy climb up the side of a building. As you reach the edge of the roof, your buddy frantically whispers, "There's a guy above you! There's a guy above you!" When he arrives at the ledge, you pop up, grab him, and hurl him over the side, prompting your friend to follow up with, "There's a guy below you! There's a guy below you!")

On the other hand, Uncharted 2's dialogue is all scripted, which removes the whole "recite this dialogue tree leaf-by-leaf" problem discussed in the original article.

Re:There are exceptions...

[Coopjust]

Male Shepard's dialogue was very good in my opinion. Except the fact that Mark Meer shows that he's Canadian on certain words. Mainly "about" ("aboot").

Re:There are exceptions...

[Fishbulb]

Having played both ME and ME2, and done a stint as a voice actor, I actually found the voices to be a little wooden. Now, that's not entirely a problem with the actor; they could be reading the line exactly as they're being told to.

It also has to do with both:

The Writers - for ME, the conversation options are somewhat circular; you come back to the same points, so even if the conversation took a bad turn with an NPC, when you exit the conversation that NPC may still say "Cheerio!" even though they were pissed a second ago. Doesn't happen in real life.

The Producers - the folks who (often) sit in the recording booth with the engineer while the actor reads the lines, to make sure they're done right. If a character says, "Fine." - are they fed up and trying to end the conversation, or did they just see someone who looks attractive? If the producer doesn't know where the writers were coming from, they will misdirect the actor. This is further complicated by the circuitous conversations that occur in games like Mass Effect.

As far as professions go, acting is certainly as art. It's not easy to get in front of a microphone and have a deeply connecting conversation with someone who isn't in the room. Without creating that connection, the acting sounds hollow and fake. Add to that, for commercials, talking about something you could care less about (Say, Coors beer or a car you would never drive or a store you would never shop in) and make it sound convincingly great, takes real talent.

Re:There are exceptions...

[Ransak]

I agree 100%. However I've run into more than a few people that consider acting a childish waste of time (I live in the Mideast US - not exactly the most enlightened bunch out here).

Re:There are exceptions...

[Rallion]

That was probably my single favorite line in Uncharted 2, and what I've realized about it is that it doesn't really work in text. It was only funny because it was delivered really, really well.

Hey now...

[Anonymous Coward]

I see Mass Effect 2 has been listed as a game with good VA, which is cool; how about The Legacy of Kain series? Without a doubt, that's the bar for voice acting-- possibly even storytelling for the interactive medium.

I'd be interested to hear Cam Clarke's take on this issue (primarily known as the voice of Leonardo).

Re:Hey now...

[illaqueate]

Amy Hennig who wrote the Legacy of Kain series is also director of Uncharted. She has a film degree and the good voice actors in Legacy of Kain come from a theater background.

Re:Hey now...

[Rathum]

Simon Templeman ranks in my top 5 favorite voice actors.
He's amazing whether he's Kain, Loghain, Roman, or Han'Gerrel.
You can actually hear him sneering.

The "True irish" problem

[Tei]

The real problem with voice acting, is that most people don't really know how the voice of a irish, dwarf, russian, french, spanish, etc.. guy sounds. So you can get a irish actor acting with his real irish accent called fake.

Another problem is economical. English voices are usefull only on a subset of the users. All your users can share the models and textures, music and sound effects, but voice is only user for english people and the like. And this thing get aggravated wen you hire "know actors". Maybe I know the face and the name of a actor, but I will not know his real voice, because here in spain all movies are translated to spanish, so all I know is the spanish translator voice, that can be poor compared to the original one (or better... you never know).

And we all know that MUD's are superior to all that newfangled "MMORPG's" thing.

Re:The "True irish" problem

[mdarksbane]

My dad's a midwestern folk musician who plays a lot of Irish stuff. His stage "Irish" accent sounds about as authentic as the leprechaun on the lucky charms commercials. And he constantly gets people asking him if he's actually from Ireland. He says he just cringes inside every time someone asks.

Voice acting as a bullet point in marketing

[Vaphell]

i absolutely hate that

one example i really can't get over with is Starcraft 2 and the change of Kerrigan's voice. Blizzard replaced relatively unknown voice actress who did magnificent job at fleshing out the character with Tricia Helfer (Caprica Six from BSG) for her sex appeal. She sounds god awful and nothing like the original.
Blizzard simply had to fix what wasn't broken. Earlier they tried to replace Raynor's voice but due to serious backlash they reverted back, only to change Kerrigan who was so good in sc1 that everyone thought she is safe. No amount of whining on official forum can make them change their mind. They only pretend to listen when they expect that players pretty much agree with them on a given matter, if there is a serious criticism - people meet complete silence, no comments.
Apparently showing piece of famous ass in marketing campaign > consistency and feel of the key character. All other VAs are there.

This will greatly reduce my pleasure of experiencing single player campaigns, i don't need to give Helfer a chance, i know it. Old voice is too entrenched in my brain, cognitive dissonance is a given.
God damn it...

Re:Voice acting as a bullet point in marketing

[delinear]

The problem here is that people who were planning to buy the game likely won't change their mind because one of the VAs changed, while a few people who otherwise might not be buying the game might be enticed in by it being linked to a known name. Another example where the real fans get screwed in the name of a few extra dollars.

Re:Voice acting as a bullet point in marketing

[HopefulIntern]

I was pleased to hear Keith David's voice as Sgt. Foley in MW2. He is iconic for that role, since most of his best roles are just this; an angry big black guy screaming orders at soldiers. This persona was only slightly ruined by the fact that MW2, despite being an 18 and controversial for its adult content, has no swearing at all. Which makes the soldiers' discourse seem less than credible.

Re:Voice acting as a bullet point in marketing

[Vaphell]

no, she was available, willing and reportedly dirt cheap. She was even dubbing Kerrigan initially in first available trailers.
Besides, why would anyone working in a voice acting business throw away an offer from blizzard? it's not like you get better offers from TV with a 6 figure pay thanks to your fame.

And yet...

[Viredae]

It doesn't explain why JAPANESE voice acting trounces its English-speaking counterpart so easily, maybe the English VAs are hacks? Proof of that is Atlus and the Persona VAs, they're actually good, aren't they following the same "awful" system?

Re:And yet...

[illaqueate]

yes, I do think the quality of the talent is a problem. CAPCOM has always had actors who have a good voice but little acting ability and many of those bad actors are recycled into their various games. In the last years they have gotten to a point where the acting is pretty good even when the lines are still over the top e.g. Devil May Cry 4, although the writing has also improved.

Re:And yet...

[illaqueate]

although, one point to add to that is the limits of budget. Devil May Cry 4 has English voice acting only, as is the case with Demon's Souls. The English is frequently an afterthought for Japanese developers but when they do an English only title it ends up being pretty good.

Re:And yet...

[Chad Birch]

Do you speak Japanese so fluently that you can pick out a poor actor or a good one? Can you tell when someone is "overacting"? Things like that take an extremely high level of proficiency in a language. I think this is often why people prefer the Japanese voices, because they don't know the language, so can't tell when someone's doing a poor job of it.

Honorable mentions

[Bluebottel]

It would be a shame not to mention Call of Duty 4 and its clever system. Your team actually shouts usefull things when in combat such as "RPG on the balcony second floor to the left!", at least i found it both accurate and useful.
The monkey island games are excellent examples of voiceacting and portal should be mentioned too. Who doesnt love glaDOS?

Re:Award for all-time worst voice acting goes to..

[biscuitlover]

I think you're being a bit too kind here. A made-up accent is one thing. A performance that sounds like someone with one accent doing a laughable job of a completely different one is something else. Doesn't really help with immersion when all you can concentrate on is how badly they're mangling the dialect.

Why not put them in a story

[g00ey]

Instead of a list of spreadsheet lines, why not put together the lines into acts with continuous story-lines that give support for interaction and context? The acts may even be lined with content that may not be used in the end product just to make it easier for the actors to enter into the plots. Letting the actors interact with each other during the recording sessions may also be a way to improve the acting. That together with good direction ought to improve the results. Of course it requires good script writing and more time but I think it would be worth it.

Re:How is this different from a cartoon?

[ZosX]

I think morrowind went the correct route and just used text versus stilted dialog. I think bethesda though that with the greater budget for oblivion they could do the same thing with speech and it sounds awful and disjointed. Freelancer had the same problem with terrible pauses between the segments of speech.

Re:How is this different from a cartoon?

[Logical Zebra]

... Unless the game is totally on rails, a fair bit of the voice acting will basically consist of delivering lines used to fill out obscure corners of some dialog tree, or to be shouted pseudo-randomly by NPCs of various flavors. Cartoon voice acting may well, particularly in lower budget stuff, be done on the cheap; but it is much more likely that the voice actor(s) will have access to something resembling a script, which will allow them to inject some degree of plausibility into what they are doing.

That's why Final Fantasy X had decent voice acting. It was, perhaps, the most linear of all the modern Final Fantasy games.

start with the basics

[fish waffle]

Games have improved tremendously in this respect over the last few years. Using the narrative context more so it's not just a collection of spoken phrases cut-and-paste together would help a lot. But you know, there's some even more basic problems remain:

1) Use the same actor for the same character. Always. If you need to re-record or add more dialogue, and your original actor isn't available, then live without or re-record everything.

2) Record the sound in the same place, or use a standard background sound. It is disconcerting when the recording quality and background noise changes between sentences.

3) Tell your voice actors not to replicate the errors in the text. Convince them they are voice actors, not just fleshy text-to-speech translators.

4) If your voice actors attempt to mimic strong accents of any form, beat them.

Re:start with the basics

[stewbacca]

4) If your voice actors attempt to mimic strong accents of any form, beat them.

Well that eliminates Hugo Weaving from the conversation.

Re:start with the basics

[magus_melchior]

1) That might get cost-prohibitive, as games are already multi-million-dollar enterprises. But as a general rule, most companies should stick with the same actor for the same character, or find as close a vocal timbre/cadence equivalent as possible if the original cannot be summoned. Done properly and with the right director, most players might not pick up the differences immediately.
But the problem does get compounded when (shudder) sequels come into play.

2) Usually most studios have similar soundproofing standards, and background noise can be cleaned up; the bottom line here is, don't try to trim the audio budget by cutting out the studio you went to last time.

3) Ellen McLain had a comment in Portal where she said that in most voiceover jobs she did, the direction was stultifyingly boring or restrictive, until she started working with Valve on the character of GlaDOS. I'm sure she would be the first to tell any dev house that if they wanted a text-to-speech translator, they could just hire college students at minimum wage (and I'm sure some houses do just that) or, if the characters are sufficiently robotic, they could use a synthesizer. Hey, if it worked for the Invasion of the Gabber Robots...

4) This is apparently a fundamental lesson in acting or performance art of any form: Accents and mannerisms are ornaments. Do not add ornaments to your performance until you have the fundamentals of the piece down. You will hear every good drama and music teacher tell their students this, and if they do not, they should be fired.

Re:start with the basics

[CopaceticOpus]

Another problem to be addressed is repetitive quotes. These are not lines from cut scenes, but rather lines that are triggered based on game actions. For example, a sidekick who says "nice shot" or "they're everywhere" in response to the action.

If the game is a shooting game, those lines will be repeated many times, and this really takes away from the sense of immersion. It sounds like an audio clip, not like a genuine comment.

The way to handle this is to include many takes that mean the same thing, and cycle through them. I don't mean to cycle through 3-5 lines, I mean to cycle through 50-100. Some of those lines might be the same words, just spoken with slightly different timing, but they need to feel unique.

Re:How is this different from a cartoon?

[MSojka]

Daggerfall also had great voice acting. Too bad Bethesda dropped the ball while creating Oblivion ...

Instead of whining

[AP31R0N]

Let's talk about some voice acting we liked.

My favorite example of voice acting is Bioshock. Withing that my favorite is Armin Shimerman.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001734/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1094581/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEjqY3_bCDk

His speech at the beginning of the game gave me chills.

Re:Instead of whining

[stewbacca]

I thought the Vice City GTA was good (but the others extremely overrated).

Re:Instead of whining

[mjwx]

Let's talk about some voice acting we liked.

My favorite example of voice acting is Bioshock. Withing that my favorite is Armin Shimerman.

I agree, games that have professional voice actors (or even professional actors) tend to produce good voice acting. It is a shame that this is the only good thing I can say about Bioshock, System Shocks retarded cousin.

Decent voice acting

[autoevolution]

Freespace 1 and 2

Re:Decent voice acting

[sammy baby]

Oh hells yes.

I still remember the "flying a captured fighter" mission from FS2. "What, do I look Shivan to you?"

Starcraft will be better

[Snaller]

Well, its odd they replaced the actress playing Kerrigan 10 years ago - guess we'll never know why - but I doubt it matters than much.
And Starcraft 2 so far shows signs of being very well done.

Check out the Starcraft 2 lore panel from last years Blizzcon, where they have several of the actors on stage. The voice director Andrea Romanov (who has won SEVEN Emmys for voice directing) was very enthusiastic and talking about how much TIME they had to do this. They edit it all together and if they felt it didn't work they could call in the actors again and do things over.

And Blizzards director in charge of creative development, Chris Metzen, has planned the story in detail - he briefed her about where they were going. And they where there when the actors came into record their dialog, so they could tell the actors all the needed to know about the characters (this from the actors themselves)

Seems the whole Blizzard bit is up on .. well where else

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfD7kz6ZtZc

Re:Starcraft will be better

[Vaphell]

Glynnis Talken Campbell dubbed Kerrigan in early SC2 trailers and that shit sounded the same, people at blizzcon were cheering after hearing first second of the sentence with her classic voice. Tricia Helfer is not the real deal and never will be. They brought back all the old voices (except Zeratul, guy dubbing him died) so you'd think they care about details and consistency only to discover in horror that the arguably most memorable voice of whole SC1 is replaced by a chick with fake tits.

Metzen is not always right, you know, being the main lore guy he singlehandedly destroyed whatever was left from warcraft universe in WoW with retcons, ridiculous plot twists and such.
Recent voice acting in WoW addons is sub-par in opinion of many - almost all cool classic character voices from WC3 were 'upgraded' to mediocre voices but with shitload od digital effects slapped on top of them.
SC2 also follows the path of cheesiness - believable field medics replaced with dropships healing with magic ray, double scythes that have 0 usability in reality and should belong to fantasy or giant walking mechs that no military force would ever use because of fragility, complexity and mediocre mobility. There is a need of change to keep things fresh, but offending the intellect is entirely different thing.

Re:Finess hates speed and vice versa

[VGPowerlord]

The Half-life series seemed "intelligently" voiced.

I wouldn't say Half-Life one has the best voice acting. Although it's not really bad.

Valve did a pretty good job for all their Source-based games, though.

(OK, yes, the voices in Team Fortress 2 are a bit comical, but they fit the various class' personalities.)

I've notice this.

[orsty3001]

Belmont: Die monster you don't belong in this world! Dracula: It was not by my hand that ... You steal men's soul and make them your slaves!

Not convincing

[Inconexo]

It doesn't explain why cutscenes, as static as movies, are equally bad dubbed. At least in spanish dubs, I am not usually able to distinguish an English bad dubs.

Re:Not convincing

[GospelHead821]

Probably because the speech for the cutscenes is mixed into the spreadsheet with all of the other speech. The voice actors have no more context to recognize speech that occurs within a cutscene than any other.

Re:Not convincing

[Inconexo]

That's awful! Actors should be able to see the cutscene, as they see a movie or cartoon when dubbing it.

Legacy of Kain

[MoNsTeR]

Which of course is why basically linear games can have excellent voice acting. And by this of course I mean Blood Omen, Soul Reaver, and their sequels, which to this day have the best voice acting in any game ever made. I mean, just watch the intro to Soul Reaver, and play the first 10 minutes of the game, and compare that to more recent rot like Final Fantasy 10 and up, the Metal Gear Solid series, and even Modern Warfare 2 (which is good, but not the equal of, say, SR2).

Re:Legacy of Kain

[Dorkmaster Flek]

Ah, that takes me back... The LoK games are some of my absolute favourites. The acting is overly dramatic and very thespian, but it fits with the style of the game. Tons of fun, and great writing.

Re:Legacy of Kain

[aldo.gs]

Alas, poor Nupraptor! I knew him well... well, not really.

hmmm

[nomadic]

At least games don't use the developers and their friends' voices anymore. Good grief that was painful to listen to. Like the guards in Thief.

DON'T dub!

[Stormwatch]

Here's two things I wish developers would do:

- Do NOT change the voices of foreign games. I want my Japanese games with Japanese voice acting, thank you very much.

- When developing a game set in a specific foreign country, take a hint from Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ -- do it in that country's language. For example, I REALLY think God of War should be spoken in Greek, and Stalker, in Russian or Ukrainian. Is it set in a fictional land? Create a fictional language, like they did for the Panzer Dragoon series.

Re:DON'T dub!

[grumbel]

There is a much better solution: Do Dub, but let the user select the language. See Heavy Rain for example, not only does the game come with quite a handful of languages, it also lets you select the language of the voice acting, the subtitles and the menu independently, something that is still missing in quite a few games. Some PC games (Mass Effect) even require a full reinstall just to change the language, which is pretty stupid. Missing languages due to lack of storage on DVDs is also pretty annoying, the Xbox360 version of Mass Effect for example only includes a single language, something that could be solved with downloadable language packs, but those hardly ever happen.

When developing a game set in a specific foreign country, take a hint from Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ -- do it in that country's language.

Depends, it can often times be fun and authenticity, but lets not forget that most of the time all the actual characters in that story spoke that language and understood it quite well, it wasn't forgein for them, so using a foreign language introduces an alien element that isn't really part of the story.

Re:DON'T dub!

[Killjoy_NL]

Actually for the Naruto RPG on the Xbox, they released the original Japanese voicepack for free, I thought that was quite nice of them (Ubisoft).

Another game with good voice acting: Half Life

[Happy Nuclear Death]

The original one. The character I remember most is the unnamed G-man. There was something jarring about his phrasing and the timing of his lines. He was a good example of "less is more" in characterization.

Over Analysis

[stewbacca]

This is quite possibly the most over analyzed story I've read this year.

Or maybe the reason voice acting sucks in video games is because video games can't pay big time actors...or maybe because video games don't need big time actors...or maybe because some video games are mindless time-wasters that good voice acting would be lost on the target audience...or...

It's a video game, not a movie. It's expected to make money, not $100 million in the opening weekend.

Ob.

[sootman]

Techie: Talking doll, take eight.
Lisa: "When I get married, I'm keeping my own name." Oh, no, that should probably be "If I choose to get married."
Techie: Uh, look, little girl, we got other talking dollies to record today.
Krusty: [barging in with cue cards] All right, you poindexters, let's get this right!
  One: "Hey, hey, kids, I'm Talking Krusty."
  Two: "Hey, hey, here comes Slideshow Mel" -- again -- "Here comes Sideshow Mel". "Sideshow Mel".
  Three: [does a Krusty laugh]
  Budda-bing, budda-boom, I'm done. Learn from a professional, kid.

+1 for text

[BetterSense]

The way I see it, you can't win with voice acting--I stopped playing FFX solely because of the unskippable voice acting--so I don't understand why more games don't just use text for most, at least minor dialog. It's faster to read, you get to use your imagination, and it's easier to translate. Games as late as FFVII had absolutely no character voices anywhere, yet told very character-centric stories. Some games like Kindgom hearts had voiced minor dialog, plus text bubbles, but you could instantly stop the talking and skip straight through to the text bubbles.
Odin Sphere had the option to choose any combination of original Japanese acting, comically bad English redub, and japanese or english text bubbles. I put on Japanese dialog with english text bubbles because lets face it, when it comes to imported games it's a cheap localization issue for the most part.

  In an era where dvds all come with multiple languages and at LEAST the native one, I don't understand why all japanese videogames don't include the original voice tracks, for those who don't want to listen to the $3/hour redub.

RE

[GastronomicalEvent]

I think this game is linear enough to get high quality voice acting.

Re:Award for all-time worst voice acting goes to..

[stewbacca]

...Kevin Costner in Robin Hood.

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Award for all-time worst voice acting goes to..

[stewbacca]

I think the bigger problem is why do all Fantasy Realm characters speak with British/Irish/Scottish accents? Was there no Canada in Middle Earth?

Re:How is this different from a cartoon?

[bertoelcon]

That's why Final Fantasy X had decent voice acting. It was, perhaps, the most linear of all the modern Final Fantasy games.

You haven't seen Final Fantasy XIII yet then. (I mean the linear part not the voice acting.)

Re:How is this different from a cartoon?

[mister_playboy]

That's why Final Fantasy X had decent voice acting.

You're joking, right? The VA on that game was so embarrassing I hesitated to initiatie a cutscene whenever someone else was around.

Re:Finess hates speed and vice versa

[SharpFang]

I could argue other characters, but you'd be hard pressed to find any flaws in voicing of the protagonist of the Half-Life series...

Needs more Chaos Wars

[Dwedit]

How do we have a thread about Bad Video Game Voice acting and not mention Chaos Wars?

Not true, actually

[Moraelin]

Actually, it seems to me like a pretty good solution existed for a long time. Just because some developers are too stupid to figure it out, doesn't mean they need to be given twice the money.

If you look for example at the texts in some games (e.g., Bioware games, but also, say, in Vampire Bloodlines), you'll notice that they include a lot of hints to the voice actors that aren't displayed. You as the player might only see, a text like "But that's not what I meant! geesh!" but the actual text in the resource files would be something more like "{irritated voice}But that's not what I meant!{with emphasis on "meant"}{sighs}{more silently to himself}geesh!". The game just filters out the parts between curly braces, but the voice actors would have right there what emotions they have to put in that voice acting.

So it seems to me like all that TFA says is that some devs/publishers simply haven't figured out that a text that says "But that's not what I meant! geesh!" doesn't have to be delivered exactly like that to the actors too.

Physical Modeling of voices...

[AthleteMusicianNerd]

We need to get that to a very advanced level. No publisher will ever invest in the tech though. Surely the first will be a garage implementation.

Vanille

[BigSes]

I just can't grasp why here British accent comes and goes at completely random times (even mid-sentence). Since Fang seems to speak with an Aussie accent quite acceptable, I wonder how hard it would have been to hire someone who spoke with a decent British twist? Hmm...now that I thought about it, I'm not actually sure what accent Vanille is supposed to have. Even sounds a bit French, and a bit like she is handicapped, at various parts.

Re:Vanille

[atomicstrawberry]

That's an Australian accent, not British. Her actress is Australian, and I think she was being deliberately directed to try and cover it up for story-related reasons. Plus there's the fact that they're trying to translate an extremely Japanese character archetype into a context where she doesn't quite work.

If I was to complain about anything in the dub, it wouldn't be Vanille, it would be the constant grunting and groaning. It's distracting and I'm sure that the original Japanese dialogue didn't have as much of it. It's like noise for noise's sake.

Re:Award for all-time worst voice acting goes to..

[Blakey Rat]

Considering he's:

1) Mostly insane

2) A complete prankster

I think the accent fits just right in the context of the game. (Although you might have been kidding, sorry but I really couldn't tell.) Anyway, the best character in that expansion was obviously Big Head.

Don't call it Directing

[lesv]

It's really not the actors fault if they can't do any script analysis and create a performance. It's the directors job to get a good performance out of an actor. You hire folks who can do it, and you don't keep something until you've got what you want. If they guy 'directing' isn't doing quality control, no one is. It just sounds like there isn't yet consumer demand for quality acting, or the companies would fix this.

Re:How is this different from a cartoon?

[KeatonMill]

This. I've been recently playing FFX with a friend and can't stand the voices.

Final Porn XIII

[kenp2002]

The wife keeps checking in on me playing FFXIII because Vanilla ;) sounds like she's constantly having sex... Worst acting ever.... or best depending on the mood...

Re:Final Porn XIII

[Lunzo]

I haven't played FFXIII, but I do remember the "Sexy" voice announcer from UT2k4. Let's just say it makes kill streaks "interesting".

The real problem...

[Yunzil]

Is when the developer blows the voice budget on a couple famous names, leaving the rest of the game voiced by the same 3 people. See also: Oblivion.

Metal Gear Solid on PSX had good voice

[noidentity]

I remember the opening to Metal Gear Solid on Playstation 1 over a decade ago. It was the first game that had good voice acting that actually improved the game, rather than made it comedic. The opening was like a movie, and you wanted to play. I'll always remember this game as the first that had solid voice acting throughout, and a serious tone. I booted the original up recently and was still impressed by the production quality (despite the PS1's polygon inherent difficulties). They managed to keep the quality in later games as well.

Re:Metal Gear Solid on PSX had good voice

[Captain Fallout]

I'm amazed at how well the MGS1 voice acting holds up. But if you're a fan and have a Gamecube or Wii, grab a copy of MGS: The Twin Snakes. Supposedly David Hayter(Solid Snake) wasn't happy with how his voice turned out in the first one, and asked if they could rerecord all of the dialogue. It turned out even better when they got rid of Hunter's fake Australian and Mei Ling's "Asian" accents.

Actually, Metal Gear probably has my favorite voice acting out of any game series. It got a little funky with MGS2, but they recovered nicely by the time MGS3 hit.

Re:Metal Gear Solid on PSX had good voice

[noidentity]

Yeah, I liked that the redid MGS1 for a newer system with better 3D capabilities, though I was put off by the excessive number of cutscenes. I didn't even bother to finish (was a rental), as I was constantly thinking, "OK, I've been playing the actual game for two minutes now, I guess another cutscene is about to interrupt."

Acting

[ucblockhead]

As opposed to movies and TV, which never, ever suffer from bad acting.

Could be worse...

[Polo]

Reminds me of voice acting part of this funny history of the development of Marine Heavy Gunner Vietnam:

http://hakstrap.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/marine-heavy-gunner-fna/

I already pay $100 per game you insensitive clod.

[mjwx]

I live in Australia, with the strength of the AUD I can import games for half the price. Why is it I have to pay between US$75 and US$110 for games locally (if anyone says tax and distance I will shoot them, GST is the only tax applied to digital media which is 10% and I can fed ex a game from the US for less then US$20, scale of economy tells me when I move 1000 units it is significantly cheaper per unit).

Also this is FUD, if big publishers spent less on marketing (paid off reviews, hiring out expensive Vagas hotel rooms for demo's, blitz TV/Print/Web advertising) and stopped hiring superstar developers who really add nothing (Bleszinski, Kojima, Molyneux) there would be plenty of room in the budget for a decent script writer and professional voice actors. Plenty of low budget games have better voice acting then big budget games because they put their money into voice actors (by the same token, more then a few big budget games did the same and got similar results, strange that).

Re:How is this different from a cartoon?

[MoriaOrc]

Halt!

(for those who sadly never played it: link)

Re:How is this different from a cartoon?

[Rallion]

Err, FFX had BY FAR the worst VA of any FF game. (Actually, I didn't play X-2, that could easily have been worse.)

Besides, ALL FF games are linear enough in terms of VA. There aren't any dialogue trees or anything, the actors are mostly just voicing set scenes. It's almost just like doing voice work for a cartoon.

That's some resume.

[Weemz]

Jeebis! Sobolov has been in EVERYTHING! That's what's happening with Keith David, he does v/o in like 1 out of every 5 games.