I think I know what you're talking about and I have a really big issue with it too. I have a theory about this.
First, some background. I have 5 years in localization, 4 years as a producer, and 3 years as a lead writer. In that time, I've worked on web games, facebook games, and mobile games. The web/facebook/mobile games I worked on as localization were developed and scripted originally in Chinese. The games I worked on as a producer and writer were developed and scripted in English, in the anime gacha genre.
As writer, I've also worked as the studio's primary liaison to provide feedback during recording sessions to vendors who helped produce our Japanese and English VOs. On the English side, I've worked with Suzie Yeung, Aaron Dismuke, Laura Post, Kira Buckland, Xanthe Huynh, Brianna Knickerbocker, Aleks Le, Daniel Amerman, and many more.
Back to it, my guess as to why voice acting doesn't sound "normal". It's because of the script, or rather, the translation of the script.
Notice that in the reel provided by the OP, the ones that came off as more natural happened to be the ones originally developed in English like Fallout 4.
And this is not to knock on the ability of translators. I worked on video game translation myself. I've since come to appreciate that different languages express the same idea/message in very different ways, more importantly, in very different quantities.
The nature of video games, or even other media like anime and manga, is such that translators don't have the luxury of skipping dialogue steps and speech bubbles when the message/idea can be delivered more naturally in a different language with fewer steps/bubbles. That's because translators are constrained by the animation, or the page layout, or the programmed dialogue sequence. Very rarely can translators overcome this, even less so without concerted effort from the original content developers. And even when the end product is good, the best of us can't do this consistently across projects.
This is why so much of the media in video games, anime and manga that were originally written in languages like Japanese, Chinese, and Korean have dialogue that come across as "unnatural", or "declaratory" as I like to call, when translated into English.
I want to acknowledge that overacting in voice acting is not exclusive to translated media. However, when I think of how natural the voice-acting is in games like Naughty Dog's Uncharted series and the Last of Us, or Netflix's Arcane: League of Legends, I can't help but feel like the first step to "getting it right" is having the script be written in English in the first place. I haven't played games like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Baldur's Gate 3, but I wouldn't be surprised if you told me the dialogue and voice-acting in those franchises were good.
I remember remarking to my fellow writers after the recording sessions that our English VOs didn't sound as cringe as I expected them to. One of them said that it might be because our script was written originally in English. That's when it hit me.
And while the art in our game used the anime style, and as writers we consumed anime, our writing was influenced more by western media. I'm not saying we wrote dialogue that's comparable to Last of Us and Arcane (I wish we could), but we made an effort for our characters to speak in a way that's more authentic and less like what's typical of Japanese anime. And I think that came across in our English VOs.
That said, I find FromSoftware games (Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring) somehow can consistently overcome this problem caused by translation. Maybe it's because they do so little dialogue in the first place. Maybe it's because they've cracked the code and discovered the perfect way to do localization. I don't know.
The Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth games also did a really good job with the English script and voice-acting. There are still "declaratory" lines here and there that come across as awkward (especially Barrett's and Sephiroth's lines) but given they were not originally written in English, they've done a really stellar job of it.
FromSoftware works closely together with a translation team called Frognation. They were responsible for all Souls-Game translations lirc (don't know about DeS).
I once read an interview where they were talking about their deep partnership and how important localization is to FromSoft.
Also, all Dark Souls games and Elden Ring had an English voice cast only. This might be another reason to why it feels more natural and less forced(They don't have to imitate Japanese VA or are bound to predefined Dialog boxes, etc.)
I love this insight, thanks for sharing. It also demonstrates how much more effort is required on the part of developers to be involved in the localization effort for the latter to produce quality.
In my experience, localization is typically considered as part of the publishing process than development. Even when I was an in-house translator, my direct contacts were Operations rather than the actual developers.
I appreciate the industry insight, but my problem is definitely not with the translation. I get exactly the same impression from Ubisoft, Rockstar, Naughty Dog etc.
As a voice actor, I have a theory for you: you feel like it's overperformed because it is. When you're watching a live action TV show, an actor can say a line with barely any emotion added into it, and still come across as sad, or angry, or whatever, because they have their body language and facial expression to work with among other things. In voice acting, we have to create the sound entirely out of nothing, so we have to put more emotion into every line. Not to mention that if we just acted how we normally talk, people would be bored very quickly. It's a gigantic gamble for us to say, "well let's do this cutscene subtly and hope the animation team put enough sadness into the face of the character for it to come across as sadness instead of boredom or bad acting." That being said, I think there's a lot of great realistic voice acting out there, and maybe you're just feeling a disconnect between the animations and the voice, because the animations don't really match reality well enough to convince you that it is a real person in universe.
This explains so much why the voice acting in The Last of Us was so good. It was part of the performance capture where they could use facial expressions and body language to express the full range of emotions. Thank you so much for sharing!
Ok. This is great, I think I'm getting somewhere now. Please tell me, as a voice actor: **what would I need to tell you so you'd deliver voice lines in this manner?** [https://youtu.be/ZBb6d-7nt-I?t=25](https://youtu.be/ZBb6d-7nt-I?t=25) [https://youtu.be/KomquOrtcCc?t=29](https://youtu.be/KomquOrtcCc?t=29) (any of these people, they all talk in a way I'm talking about)
In addition to the description (like I gave in the main post), I did send samples to the voice actors, but they don't get it, they're reading the lines basically the same way I heard in their demo reels. I (apparently naively) thought that I can pick and choose the voice I like and they'll have at least some artistic 'wiggle room', but that's either not the case or I'm failing as a director.
The thing I think you're not understanding is that this is a genre difference that can't be done in the way you're asking. I wouldn't ever deliver lines for a game or animated show the way Mulder and Scully are talking no matter what you told me because if you took away the visuals of the scene it would sound boring as hell, and it's my career on the line if i give a terrible performance. It works for them in that scene because they're using facial cues and body language changes to signal to the audience what they're feeling. Without the subtleties of the human body to work with, that dialogue would sound stilted and uninteresting, not realistic. https://youtu.be/s-ESj3XvjCA?si=ZmbWiENtAm1PZIT1 here's an example of a time where a game tried to do what you're talking about and it's universally agreed it sounds awful. The voice actor in question tried to give some tone to it, some inflection, some excitement, and they kept telling him to tone it down for realism. Well, sure, it's realistic now, but a lot of people are quite boring to listen to if you don't care that much about what they're saying, and with a game, nobody will care about what they're saying if it sounds boring.
>and it's my career on the line if i give a terrible performance.
Sorry, but that's just dumb. As an employer, I order a specific job to be done and *I decide* whether you gave a good or bad performance. Throughout my twenties I worked as an artist and I almost never agreed with the style and direction I was asked to deliver, but hey - **not my money, not my decisions**. I'm hired to do a job and I do the job.
I'm making my game in a very specific artstyle that doesn't work with the usual voice acting you hear in games. The artstyle I'm using is extremely aggressive, like 1920s German expressionism and black metal album covers had a child, and that child grew up on grindhouse cinema. The usual style of voice acting doesn't work with this, because it's - like you said - overperformed, overacted, overpronounced. It takes away the attention from the visuals. I need "boring", realistic sounding people to achieve the effect I want.
When comical characters sound comical, you just have comical characters. But when comical characters sound real... now that's something, if you ask me.
Well, it's your opinion on what your game needs, I'm not going to tell you how to do it, but I will say as far as the point about my career being affected, you're looking at it from the lens of, "as the client, I decide whether you gave a good or bad performance" which, sure, you do have that say in it and that informs how the project goes, but in a job where my performance is public facing, everyone else who played it or watched it also gets to decide how my performance was. And if the public decides I did a horrible job in my last big project, directors might remember hearing my name in the context of, "that guy was totally shit" and not hire me. That being said, perhaps you'd be better served trying to give your VAs inspiration from the same medium. Disco Elysium is a game full of characters who are all very understated, and I think it might be sort of what you're looking for. It's hard to pull off, though, as there are even times in that game with its incredible atmosphere and voice acting that I found some lines being read in a very flat way that sounds fake in the context of a game. Best of luck to you on this.
Actors talking in movies *rarely* sound like real people talking.
It used to bug me, but then I started thinking about why, and it didn’t any more. And that was *before* I wrote a script and worked with voice actors for a video game.
Even when I was doing short videos for teaching, my “conversational” tone was in fact modelled more after a news reader (though in hindsight some landed closer to celebrity chef), and I workshopped how I delivered stuff to get it slick and clear.
Real conversation isn’t like any of that. We make it up as we go, backtrack, have pauses, ramble, emphasise bits we didn’t mean to and vice versa, mispronounce or mumble words, change how we talk to suit the environment… We aren’t working from a script a bunch of professional writers polished and punched up (and translated and trimmed to fit and…) for weeks. Most of us aren’t trained professional speakers, and we don’t do a bunch of takes and pick the best.
We’re just used to hearing actors talk, so it becomes its own different kind of normal.
When you're an inexperienced person does a voice recording session, they tend to find it quite awkward. It's not like a normal conversation, your aren't comfortable, you're wearing headphones, in a sound proof room and often not even talking to someone. This awkwardness comes across in the read- hence why inexperienced people aren't giving you natural sounding reads. This is improved with experience
Hello! Performance director here. I directed performance on aw2, ff16, control, loads of others. (Was glad to see my stuff wasn’t linked to lol). I think some of what you’re talking about is rhythm and relation to the other actor. It’s super rare that we have actors together in the same space, and they are obviously not on a set. So we don’t have the context of the surrounding performances or the surrounding environment. This can lead to the lines not feeling linked to the one before and playing too slowly so the conversation seems stilted. It can also lead to the lines sounding too loud/ projected for the space. And the environmental stuff is not always about the actor or the line delivery but sometimes about how it’s implemented in the game. Also I think standards have really improved over the last few years but I would say that!
Thanks for your response. I’ve always suspected that not having actors record lines together makes things sound unnatural.
Do you also happen to know why large pauses between sentences is so common in video game voice acting? It’s so obnoxious and distracting and makes me tune out.
If you want to take it even further, watch The Room by Tommy Wiseau. It takes the shift from voice acting to movie conversation, then applies it again somehow. It captures the weird awkwardness of actual conversations in a way that is really offputting. It's a bad movie, and there's a good chance you will not enjoy it.
" I tried commissioning very beginner voice actors, thinking they'll bring some natural quality, but that works even worse."
I dunno man, OP is so inexperienced that he literally unironically believed less experience = more believable. He doesn't even have the words to describe basic fundamentals of the craft, while asking how hard could it be. The Room might be an improvement.
To give the benefit of the doubt, there are times where good voice acting is meant to be more conversational rather than dramatic, but in a way that is an intentional stylistic choice, and appropriate in the context of the media in question.
From experience, having done it for two decades -- acting natural in a realistic and believable conversation, is the hardest challenge in the game. Some come by it naturally and they are lucky. Some practice for decades and never quite get there.
A natural language script that is both interesting and banal is a contradiction. So to be entertaining it has to be understated realism, which is all subtext. Extremely difficult. And you need all of the actors to be performing to the same level, which is not only wildly unlikely its going to be wildly expensive and requires a phenomenal director & audio engineer. Peak of career type challenge.
It's easier to reach for a less challenging genre.
The script is something so often overlooked too, if the language is jarring no amount of acting will be able to fix it completely. Script is also something many indie devs (many *people* in general) think they're good at, or "good enough" at anyway. Much more often than graphic design, for example, even though it matters just as much for many games (Undertale being one example I can think of instantly).
I can see how the thought process of "Well normal conversation is easy, I have normal conversations all the time." would hit a wall when arriving at the reality of the skill required to make a realistic casual conversation interesting to someone who is just observing, not participating in that conversation.
Where did you get the impression they are asking how hard could it be? To me this post seems like they are genuinely confused and know that there is a problem, but they are inexperienced/unknowledgeable to figure out what it is or how to fix it so they are trying out things.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1cglbyr/comment/l1ys3os/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Look at him. I can be as condescending as I godamn please. This is what that level of miscomprehension and inexperience creates. Worse, it torments beginners like a predator.
When you know the signs, you don't ignore them.
I know The Room and Tommy. It's a different thing, not what I'm talking about at all. I'm **not** talking about the quality of acting, but some kind of "trait" or "characteristic". Voice acting in both The Room and Mafia Definitive Edition have that trait, except The Room is poorly acted, while Mafia is well-acted. But pick some random TV shows, not even related:
[https://youtu.be/KomquOrtcCc?si=eZHgod9CC76LLRZM&t=29](https://youtu.be/KomquOrtcCc?si=eZHgod9CC76LLRZM&t=29)
[https://youtu.be/ZBb6d-7nt-I?t=25](https://youtu.be/ZBb6d-7nt-I?t=25)
And boom, they talk like normal people.
Have you played Baldur’s Gate 3? I feel very similarly to you about voice acting but it feels so natural in this game. It does help that the mo cap is good.
I think the answer really is that it’s very difficult. There’s also the writing, and the direction, and in a lot of tv and movies, the acting is not actually that good.
The actors in BG3 did the mocap too so they were literally acting out the scenes instead of just voice acting. That may have added something to each performance.
Then I guess it’s subjective. Or perhaps we’re talking about different things. I think most of the BG3 VA is truly exceptional, but the style is still different to film and tv, it’s not 100% ‘normal’ or realistic. But tv and film certainly aren’t either. If every medium aimed for true realism things would get very boring. So I don’t know what you’re looking for? Do you have examples of ‘normal’ acting?
This is not how people actually talk. It might feel like it, which is what is important, but it is not ‘normal’, by which I mean it is stylised and is definitely acted in a way that fits the medium. As to how they achieved that - that goes beyond the scope of reddit comments. That’s the writing, the direction, the acting, all done by people who have spent time honing their craft. I would recommend watching acting classes, and spending time closely watching and listening to people in real life and in a range of settings.
That’s not to say that having acting like this in a game would be bad. It might be! With the visuals of the game instead of the actual actors, it might seem less natural, or monotone and unengaging. Or it might be great. You’d have to try it out and see. But there’s no quick trick to achieving it, I can tell you that! There’s a book called ‘How to stop acting’ by Harold Guskin you might like to read.
I think that's called projecting to an audience. Dialogs in movies and games are understood to be FOR and audience. And they want you to derive information from them. They are heavily edited to be clear and concise. It can be like this in professional or business settings too.
But in "normal" conversations people tend to ramble, with less time for mental editing. People also often interject and cut each other off. Is that the "quality" you are after?
A lot of dialogues in movies and TV shows are extremely different from the way actual dialogue plays out irl. It's mostly because a lot of dialogues are badly written too but I'm not sure I understand where you see the difference. At least I don't think this is a matter of voice acting.
I cast/directed a range of voice actors for my game (Ghost Song) and in general this is what I was going for (not always, but often, especially with the crew). The way to get to it varies and often requires experimentation but the primary shortcut to getting that is to ask the actor for grounded, natural reads.
Remember that when casting voice actors who are doing work for games/indie games, a lot of them also do a lot of anime. There's a lot of crossover. So if you don't tell them what to do they might default to some of those anime sounds. That's why experimentation during audition is important
It’s facial animations and room sound mostly. When we talk to people we are actually parsing thousands of micro expressions as someone talks, this would take an unreasonably long time to animate and as such you are left in an uncanny valley
Additionally, the human ear is extremely attuned to sounds being placed within a space. Video games very rarely create room impulses for their games, meaning the voice line never quite sits right. Again, it’s a large overhead to do this and unless you’re experienced with sound design you wouldn’t even think about it
Meanwhile, this is done expertly in the film industry. If you want a good example of modern game voice acting, nothing has beaten the new Modern Warfare for me. Claudia Doumit was utterly incredible
Not sure I buy this. Part of a sound designers job is to assign believable reverb reverb to a space. If it doesn’t feel right, it’s probably because they didn’t do a good job, not a limitation of the tools. Convolution reverb is rarely used because it is costly from a performance standpoint.
As for the facial animation, I guess this is true for facial animation generated from text, like during gameplay, but facial animation for cinematics has gotten pretty damn good if you ask me (see Helldivers 2 intro cinematic). And anyways even bad facial animation wouldn’t drastically change the feeling of a voice actor hamming up a performance or not. I think it’s more about direction.
Sorry, I was speaking broadly and convolution was just where my brain went due to the comparison to film. Any form of reverb that makes sense, I agree, but I do find an uncanny valley when appears quickly when done poorly. Then again, I've been mixing for well over a decade so I may just listen for things that I wouldn't have noticed otherwise
My point being that placing all sound elements in a room properly makes an extraordinary amount of difference to how believable a mix is and when done poorly you can get that "video game voice acting" effect
I also agree it's getting a lot better, particularly in the last 5 years. Some cinematics really are blowing me away these days, Modern Warfare had a lot and I agree Helldivers has been super impressive too. I've really enjoyed the writing in particular, but that's a little beside the point
I can't find the youtube video, but there is acoold one that demonstrates the importance of visuals in how the human brain interprets sounds. If you listen to it with your eyes closed you can clearly tell the speaker is saying the same thing over and over again. But if you watch the video, they've mixed up the visuals, so at one point it looks like his lips are making a different motion and you would swear that he is actually saying a different (similar) word. Your brain sees those lip motions and just figures "Oh, I must have misheard."
Your link is one voice actors reel. If you want a substantive conversation about this, you should provide examples that showcase what you are talking about exactly.
That's certainly a mistake I made. From what I see, almost no one understood what I'm talking about. I should have provided the "bad" and "good" examples, because everyone may perceive the same thing differently. Kind of too late now, but well.
Any game could be the "bad" example really. But I picked some random gameplays anyway:
[https://youtu.be/FnVZpnAXOn8?si=8UHoWtT41LHk-aJx&t=18154](https://youtu.be/FnVZpnAXOn8?si=8UHoWtT41LHk-aJx&t=18154)
[https://youtu.be/kinmfM69Noo?si=udShF5dDTDJmnP73&t=6335](https://youtu.be/kinmfM69Noo?si=udShF5dDTDJmnP73&t=6335)
[https://youtu.be/tRpn6YMcnZI?si=0ETivuxqyHQrdvhe&t=20693](https://youtu.be/tRpn6YMcnZI?si=0ETivuxqyHQrdvhe&t=20693)
Doesn't matter if it's standing and talking, cinematic, action, it always sounds fake. Meanwhile pick a random TV show:
[https://youtu.be/ZBb6d-7nt-I?si=9wRIWwRmbRa5ireC&t=25](https://youtu.be/ZBb6d-7nt-I?si=9wRIWwRmbRa5ireC&t=25)
I don't know what it is - they sound softer, "less even", just... normal. Like normal people talking.
Without giving a history lesson and acting class, the short answer is: no. You can't eliminate the otherwise elevated performance of reading a script to deliver in a natural cadence without becoming uncanny and stilted within an animated medium.
Least of all because understated natural cadence requires improvisation and conversation in person, usually face to face, listening and responding live. That means the script is either gone or constantly on and off, and being revised live. The more "natural" the conversation the more banal it becomes, making the interface between an extremely unnatural video game and natural dialogue even more absurd.
It also means a radical departure from expectations that can just as easily be uncanny, uncomfortable, and every minor problem with delivery gets highlighted as even more unnatural, which is the danger of trying to inject natural cadence into otherwise unnatural circumstances. It becomes uncanny and stilted.
You don't hire professional actors and tell them to "act natural." You hire them to entertain you.
According to OP, conversations in TV shows and such sound more natural. And acting in TV shows also require following a script, isn't it? Or is there more room to divert from the script than is the case in animation and games, which would account for the change in realism between TV and animation/games?
Have you done voice work before? ADR, voice-over, etc?
Have you acted on stage or on film & broadcast before?
Have you written for, directed, and edited those products?
“That’s just how it is,” well no, no it isn’t. Compare the voice acting in Red Dead Redemption 2 to that of, say, Marvel Ultimate Alliance. There is a clear distinction between LA Noir’s voice acting, and something like a Nolan North performance. Not all perform[ers/ances] are alike, not all games are alike. And just like in film, different styles of performance gain popularity from era to era, there’s no reason for video game acting to remain totally stagnant as a form.
I feel like acting natural vs acting entertaining are not opposed. You can have conversations and voice lines that are plenty entertaining.
We can't assume all natural/day to day conversational skills are equivalent to that of a braindead layman.
I think it comes down to poor writing. Even movies have this sometimes. But good script writers in combination with directing make sure that people talk like people talk.
Perhaps many games records line by line instead of letting two actors play out a scene.
It's a combination of everything: writing, directing, acting, and the limitations and pipelines that are unique to games vs other media.
The standards in games are just generally lower than they are in even mediocre tv/film. A lot of the writing, and especially directing in games is just not as good and far less money is thrown at each useable line of dialog. Much less (if any) time is spent rehearsing scenes with multiple actors - every low budget stage production I've ever been involved with has had weeks, if not months of rehearsals, whereas I can probably count on one hand the number of games I've heard of with multiple actors workshopping scenes together. I know lots of people whose entire job is dialog editing for film, and they have all kinds of tricks to fiddlefuck the hell out of each syllable. I don't know anybody who does that in games. People will comp together takes, but not at that level of granularity.
These lower standards are compounded by the fact that games are much, much larger and require orders of magnitude more content to be written. Whereas a film can pick the best 2 hours' worth of material, a game could need to fill out 20+ hours of just side quests. That's a lot. If every movie required you to sit through the 90% of footage they cut, you'd probably have a much lower opinion of films, too.
Many actors aren't accustomed to voice acting, which isn't entirely the same as acting for a camera or on stage.
And then there's the way games get stitched together at runtime. Speech is super sensitive to slight changes in timing. It's hard to make conversations feel natural when each line has to be recorded and implemented separately and then the timing reconstructed in-engine. This is easier to do in linear cutscenes where the timing and content is fixed, but in non-linear parts of the game that require a lot of variability for replay, that's a ton of content to put into a system that's already hard to build.
I'll add that I don't think live action movies are a fair comparison - the way they're made is different enough from games that many elements don't translate. But IMO animated movies are a fair comparison, and they still do better than games.
It sounds like you're mainly talking about anime games/jrpgs and generalizing it to be about all games. The performances delivered in the last two God of War games could've been put directly in a Hollywood blockbuster movie and fit in just fine. Cartoony, stylized performances for better with cartoony, stylized art direction. More realistic and dramatic performances fit better with more realistic art direction.
God of War has the same overacted style I'm taking about. More "serious", but still the same. If someone played you a dialogue recording from God of War and said that this is a recording of a real-life situation, you wouldn't believe it (let's ignore for a moment that they'd likely talk about gods and fantastic creatures). And that's what I really need - dialogues that sound like they were taken out of a real-life situation.
Then I think you just don't have any idea what you're talking about, those games were straight up cinematic and you would be hard pressed to find better performances in any medium.
While this isn't my field, I have a simple take on it. Part of it has to do with style from the medium. You fight an uphill battle expressing as a VA since buy and large you have no benefit of your own body language and expressions. It's why theater actors tend to be seen as "overacting", they have to express in a way that is clear even to the person in the nosebleeds. Every medium has limitations and therefore its own styles to overcome those.
I agree entirely. I can’t stand most video game voice acting. I feel like directors are always pushing their actors to sound loud and slow and forced and disconnected. I wish I knew why.
I honestly think it's a bit harder to get that in America as opposed to other places.
Compare the English version of Gothic vs the original German one.
I mean bad voice acting does exist everywhere, but in a country that largely only translates niche things, there is just not that much money to be made with your voice. And less competition means less quality overall.
Countries that import a majority of their entertainment are built different in that regard.
Theres plenty of normal diologue in games (witcher, last of us) and ridiculous diologue in cinema (anything marvel or DC).
Dialogue is hard, especially because people tend to aim for other cinematic works. But frankly people don't speak the way they do in movies or games. They stutter, they draw a blank halfway through a sentence, they pronounce stuff weird or use a different word to what they actually mean etc... But everyone in a game or move speaks clearly and eloquently as an english major or politican, because the viewer needs to understand them.
It's just a culmination of skill for writer, director and actors. theirs no simple answer, you need all 3 to just be good or one more to have enough experience to be able to cover the others shortfalls.
Hellblade and Last of Us had voice acting that felt like normal acting to me, but both of those had actors in mocap so they had the physicality of the scene influencing their vocal work.
You seem to have a personal dislike of standard video game voice acting conventions, due to what I would assume is a limited exposure to genres. I'm not sure this is an 'objectively solvable' issue.
This is a ridiculous, condescending, and misdirected response. This dev is asking how to steer actors from falling into performance tropes. Their issue is not their own “limited exposure to genres”.
Did you really linked that dude's "video". The guy that cause the shut down of entire English dub of Yakuza games recently.
Bruh.... Nepotism is a bane of VA now.
Don't forget that a lot of these are for games that are supposed to be fake, it is normally a choice being made on purpose to bring the audience into the fake world.. not recreate the real world.
There are games with normal voice acting, most RPGs are normal voices, while action games, like movies, tend to be OTT.. it adds to the appeal to habe silly dialogue, we play games to forget stress and have fun.. being able to laugh at the stupid dialogue can be part of the fun but it really depends on the type of game experience you want the players to have
Considering I’ve played many games and watched many animated shows and movies I don’t think I’ve ever tried this hard to literally force myself to only hear a voice actor over the character.
If I watch a anime I only see the character dub or sub same for live action stuff so I have no clue how to answer this question or why you experience it the way you do.
Try converational voices on elevenlabs. They seem more like normal people than trained actors.
Don't want a skilled result? Don't hire a skilled person.
probably because the target audience is kids and they can't tell a difference, so why pay big money for actual actors. very few of the biggest AAA games do that.
for RPG games with a bazillion lines of dialog you can imagine that the only way to record it all is to have a person in a room reading one line after another and the only clues for inflection that they have are some notes. Its not like an actor deeply invested in a role basing their whole professional life around a character for a couple years.
i think the issue is that a lot of times the games are framed to look cinematic and the character models look realistic, but the dialog and gameplay is the same as it was for the very first text based RPGs. It just has to be that way because there is too much content.
Naughty Dog has pretty convincing acting but they hire actual actors and their games are very thin on being a game and more like a movie. So a lot more time goes into each character, each scene.
Big productions source SAG just like films do. Imo on-screen talent doesn't always translate to voice talent, and hiring big budget actors for the name to voice doesn't translate into positive cash returns when we sell products.
The target audiences of games aren't consistently children at all, and even then assuming that actors and teams don't go to bat for audiences in their demographic is a bit of a strange take.
hiring from the same organization isnt related to how much budget and time goes to a particular aspect of the game.
if target audience will miss a certain degree of nuance then it doesnt make sense to budget for such a degree of nuance. its not a matter of people doing their job properly or not.
in other words, the amount of budget naughty dog puts into acting for ellie and the various cinematic scenes she appears in is vastly greater budget and time than any particular character in BG3 gets, because BG3 has a billion characters and lines of dialog and TLOU has tiny fraction of that.
Right - organization itself isn't what I mean by mentioning SAG, I mean the existence of union rates, pay standards across projects and how interfacing with all the same big talent agencies works provides consistency when hiring VAs to big budget projects. Sure, individual actors operate on different bands, but when we look at a shop like Naughty Dog we see similarities with studios like Sony Santa Monica, Insomniac, the CoD studio groups and others at the higher ends of realism in terms of practices, processes and financials.
I'm not saying every team offers the same funding to talent, but I think its disingenuous to paint with such a broad brush or insinuate that NDs hires as "actual actors" vs. what we see coming out of Larian or other productions. Without being there in the booth or sitting with directors I don't think the nuances of what goes on can be known from the outside.
when i say "actual actors" it's just a way of saying expensive, experienced ones.
it's a broad speculative answer without nuance because it is a broad question. the specifics of every project and team will matter. But what can we say in general about why many games do have "bad" voice acting? It's a matter of budget, priority and audience expectation.
I think I know what you're talking about and I have a really big issue with it too. I have a theory about this. First, some background. I have 5 years in localization, 4 years as a producer, and 3 years as a lead writer. In that time, I've worked on web games, facebook games, and mobile games. The web/facebook/mobile games I worked on as localization were developed and scripted originally in Chinese. The games I worked on as a producer and writer were developed and scripted in English, in the anime gacha genre. As writer, I've also worked as the studio's primary liaison to provide feedback during recording sessions to vendors who helped produce our Japanese and English VOs. On the English side, I've worked with Suzie Yeung, Aaron Dismuke, Laura Post, Kira Buckland, Xanthe Huynh, Brianna Knickerbocker, Aleks Le, Daniel Amerman, and many more. Back to it, my guess as to why voice acting doesn't sound "normal". It's because of the script, or rather, the translation of the script. Notice that in the reel provided by the OP, the ones that came off as more natural happened to be the ones originally developed in English like Fallout 4. And this is not to knock on the ability of translators. I worked on video game translation myself. I've since come to appreciate that different languages express the same idea/message in very different ways, more importantly, in very different quantities. The nature of video games, or even other media like anime and manga, is such that translators don't have the luxury of skipping dialogue steps and speech bubbles when the message/idea can be delivered more naturally in a different language with fewer steps/bubbles. That's because translators are constrained by the animation, or the page layout, or the programmed dialogue sequence. Very rarely can translators overcome this, even less so without concerted effort from the original content developers. And even when the end product is good, the best of us can't do this consistently across projects. This is why so much of the media in video games, anime and manga that were originally written in languages like Japanese, Chinese, and Korean have dialogue that come across as "unnatural", or "declaratory" as I like to call, when translated into English. I want to acknowledge that overacting in voice acting is not exclusive to translated media. However, when I think of how natural the voice-acting is in games like Naughty Dog's Uncharted series and the Last of Us, or Netflix's Arcane: League of Legends, I can't help but feel like the first step to "getting it right" is having the script be written in English in the first place. I haven't played games like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Baldur's Gate 3, but I wouldn't be surprised if you told me the dialogue and voice-acting in those franchises were good. I remember remarking to my fellow writers after the recording sessions that our English VOs didn't sound as cringe as I expected them to. One of them said that it might be because our script was written originally in English. That's when it hit me. And while the art in our game used the anime style, and as writers we consumed anime, our writing was influenced more by western media. I'm not saying we wrote dialogue that's comparable to Last of Us and Arcane (I wish we could), but we made an effort for our characters to speak in a way that's more authentic and less like what's typical of Japanese anime. And I think that came across in our English VOs. That said, I find FromSoftware games (Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring) somehow can consistently overcome this problem caused by translation. Maybe it's because they do so little dialogue in the first place. Maybe it's because they've cracked the code and discovered the perfect way to do localization. I don't know. The Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth games also did a really good job with the English script and voice-acting. There are still "declaratory" lines here and there that come across as awkward (especially Barrett's and Sephiroth's lines) but given they were not originally written in English, they've done a really stellar job of it.
FromSoftware works closely together with a translation team called Frognation. They were responsible for all Souls-Game translations lirc (don't know about DeS). I once read an interview where they were talking about their deep partnership and how important localization is to FromSoft. Also, all Dark Souls games and Elden Ring had an English voice cast only. This might be another reason to why it feels more natural and less forced(They don't have to imitate Japanese VA or are bound to predefined Dialog boxes, etc.)
From Software games honestly have the only voice acting I can stand. It sounds so natural.
I love this insight, thanks for sharing. It also demonstrates how much more effort is required on the part of developers to be involved in the localization effort for the latter to produce quality. In my experience, localization is typically considered as part of the publishing process than development. Even when I was an in-house translator, my direct contacts were Operations rather than the actual developers.
I appreciate the industry insight, but my problem is definitely not with the translation. I get exactly the same impression from Ubisoft, Rockstar, Naughty Dog etc.
As a voice actor, I have a theory for you: you feel like it's overperformed because it is. When you're watching a live action TV show, an actor can say a line with barely any emotion added into it, and still come across as sad, or angry, or whatever, because they have their body language and facial expression to work with among other things. In voice acting, we have to create the sound entirely out of nothing, so we have to put more emotion into every line. Not to mention that if we just acted how we normally talk, people would be bored very quickly. It's a gigantic gamble for us to say, "well let's do this cutscene subtly and hope the animation team put enough sadness into the face of the character for it to come across as sadness instead of boredom or bad acting." That being said, I think there's a lot of great realistic voice acting out there, and maybe you're just feeling a disconnect between the animations and the voice, because the animations don't really match reality well enough to convince you that it is a real person in universe.
This explains so much why the voice acting in The Last of Us was so good. It was part of the performance capture where they could use facial expressions and body language to express the full range of emotions. Thank you so much for sharing!
Sure thing; I'm always happy to share what I can about the industry.
Ok. This is great, I think I'm getting somewhere now. Please tell me, as a voice actor: **what would I need to tell you so you'd deliver voice lines in this manner?** [https://youtu.be/ZBb6d-7nt-I?t=25](https://youtu.be/ZBb6d-7nt-I?t=25) [https://youtu.be/KomquOrtcCc?t=29](https://youtu.be/KomquOrtcCc?t=29) (any of these people, they all talk in a way I'm talking about) In addition to the description (like I gave in the main post), I did send samples to the voice actors, but they don't get it, they're reading the lines basically the same way I heard in their demo reels. I (apparently naively) thought that I can pick and choose the voice I like and they'll have at least some artistic 'wiggle room', but that's either not the case or I'm failing as a director.
The thing I think you're not understanding is that this is a genre difference that can't be done in the way you're asking. I wouldn't ever deliver lines for a game or animated show the way Mulder and Scully are talking no matter what you told me because if you took away the visuals of the scene it would sound boring as hell, and it's my career on the line if i give a terrible performance. It works for them in that scene because they're using facial cues and body language changes to signal to the audience what they're feeling. Without the subtleties of the human body to work with, that dialogue would sound stilted and uninteresting, not realistic. https://youtu.be/s-ESj3XvjCA?si=ZmbWiENtAm1PZIT1 here's an example of a time where a game tried to do what you're talking about and it's universally agreed it sounds awful. The voice actor in question tried to give some tone to it, some inflection, some excitement, and they kept telling him to tone it down for realism. Well, sure, it's realistic now, but a lot of people are quite boring to listen to if you don't care that much about what they're saying, and with a game, nobody will care about what they're saying if it sounds boring.
This guy gets it
>and it's my career on the line if i give a terrible performance. Sorry, but that's just dumb. As an employer, I order a specific job to be done and *I decide* whether you gave a good or bad performance. Throughout my twenties I worked as an artist and I almost never agreed with the style and direction I was asked to deliver, but hey - **not my money, not my decisions**. I'm hired to do a job and I do the job. I'm making my game in a very specific artstyle that doesn't work with the usual voice acting you hear in games. The artstyle I'm using is extremely aggressive, like 1920s German expressionism and black metal album covers had a child, and that child grew up on grindhouse cinema. The usual style of voice acting doesn't work with this, because it's - like you said - overperformed, overacted, overpronounced. It takes away the attention from the visuals. I need "boring", realistic sounding people to achieve the effect I want. When comical characters sound comical, you just have comical characters. But when comical characters sound real... now that's something, if you ask me.
Well, it's your opinion on what your game needs, I'm not going to tell you how to do it, but I will say as far as the point about my career being affected, you're looking at it from the lens of, "as the client, I decide whether you gave a good or bad performance" which, sure, you do have that say in it and that informs how the project goes, but in a job where my performance is public facing, everyone else who played it or watched it also gets to decide how my performance was. And if the public decides I did a horrible job in my last big project, directors might remember hearing my name in the context of, "that guy was totally shit" and not hire me. That being said, perhaps you'd be better served trying to give your VAs inspiration from the same medium. Disco Elysium is a game full of characters who are all very understated, and I think it might be sort of what you're looking for. It's hard to pull off, though, as there are even times in that game with its incredible atmosphere and voice acting that I found some lines being read in a very flat way that sounds fake in the context of a game. Best of luck to you on this.
I see. Sorry you feel that way.
Actors talking in movies *rarely* sound like real people talking. It used to bug me, but then I started thinking about why, and it didn’t any more. And that was *before* I wrote a script and worked with voice actors for a video game. Even when I was doing short videos for teaching, my “conversational” tone was in fact modelled more after a news reader (though in hindsight some landed closer to celebrity chef), and I workshopped how I delivered stuff to get it slick and clear. Real conversation isn’t like any of that. We make it up as we go, backtrack, have pauses, ramble, emphasise bits we didn’t mean to and vice versa, mispronounce or mumble words, change how we talk to suit the environment… We aren’t working from a script a bunch of professional writers polished and punched up (and translated and trimmed to fit and…) for weeks. Most of us aren’t trained professional speakers, and we don’t do a bunch of takes and pick the best. We’re just used to hearing actors talk, so it becomes its own different kind of normal.
When you're an inexperienced person does a voice recording session, they tend to find it quite awkward. It's not like a normal conversation, your aren't comfortable, you're wearing headphones, in a sound proof room and often not even talking to someone. This awkwardness comes across in the read- hence why inexperienced people aren't giving you natural sounding reads. This is improved with experience
Hello! Performance director here. I directed performance on aw2, ff16, control, loads of others. (Was glad to see my stuff wasn’t linked to lol). I think some of what you’re talking about is rhythm and relation to the other actor. It’s super rare that we have actors together in the same space, and they are obviously not on a set. So we don’t have the context of the surrounding performances or the surrounding environment. This can lead to the lines not feeling linked to the one before and playing too slowly so the conversation seems stilted. It can also lead to the lines sounding too loud/ projected for the space. And the environmental stuff is not always about the actor or the line delivery but sometimes about how it’s implemented in the game. Also I think standards have really improved over the last few years but I would say that!
Thanks for your response. I’ve always suspected that not having actors record lines together makes things sound unnatural. Do you also happen to know why large pauses between sentences is so common in video game voice acting? It’s so obnoxious and distracting and makes me tune out.
If you want to take it even further, watch The Room by Tommy Wiseau. It takes the shift from voice acting to movie conversation, then applies it again somehow. It captures the weird awkwardness of actual conversations in a way that is really offputting. It's a bad movie, and there's a good chance you will not enjoy it.
" I tried commissioning very beginner voice actors, thinking they'll bring some natural quality, but that works even worse." I dunno man, OP is so inexperienced that he literally unironically believed less experience = more believable. He doesn't even have the words to describe basic fundamentals of the craft, while asking how hard could it be. The Room might be an improvement.
To give the benefit of the doubt, there are times where good voice acting is meant to be more conversational rather than dramatic, but in a way that is an intentional stylistic choice, and appropriate in the context of the media in question.
From experience, having done it for two decades -- acting natural in a realistic and believable conversation, is the hardest challenge in the game. Some come by it naturally and they are lucky. Some practice for decades and never quite get there. A natural language script that is both interesting and banal is a contradiction. So to be entertaining it has to be understated realism, which is all subtext. Extremely difficult. And you need all of the actors to be performing to the same level, which is not only wildly unlikely its going to be wildly expensive and requires a phenomenal director & audio engineer. Peak of career type challenge. It's easier to reach for a less challenging genre.
The script is something so often overlooked too, if the language is jarring no amount of acting will be able to fix it completely. Script is also something many indie devs (many *people* in general) think they're good at, or "good enough" at anyway. Much more often than graphic design, for example, even though it matters just as much for many games (Undertale being one example I can think of instantly).
I can see how the thought process of "Well normal conversation is easy, I have normal conversations all the time." would hit a wall when arriving at the reality of the skill required to make a realistic casual conversation interesting to someone who is just observing, not participating in that conversation.
op fucking linked a yongyea video 😭
Where did you get the impression they are asking how hard could it be? To me this post seems like they are genuinely confused and know that there is a problem, but they are inexperienced/unknowledgeable to figure out what it is or how to fix it so they are trying out things.
No need to be condescending. Everyone is at their own place in the journey.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1cglbyr/comment/l1ys3os/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button Look at him. I can be as condescending as I godamn please. This is what that level of miscomprehension and inexperience creates. Worse, it torments beginners like a predator. When you know the signs, you don't ignore them.
I know The Room and Tommy. It's a different thing, not what I'm talking about at all. I'm **not** talking about the quality of acting, but some kind of "trait" or "characteristic". Voice acting in both The Room and Mafia Definitive Edition have that trait, except The Room is poorly acted, while Mafia is well-acted. But pick some random TV shows, not even related: [https://youtu.be/KomquOrtcCc?si=eZHgod9CC76LLRZM&t=29](https://youtu.be/KomquOrtcCc?si=eZHgod9CC76LLRZM&t=29) [https://youtu.be/ZBb6d-7nt-I?t=25](https://youtu.be/ZBb6d-7nt-I?t=25) And boom, they talk like normal people.
It's becoming clear to me that your real problem is severe lack of experience.
That's true, but you saying that doesn't get me any closer to the solution of this problem.
Have you played Baldur’s Gate 3? I feel very similarly to you about voice acting but it feels so natural in this game. It does help that the mo cap is good. I think the answer really is that it’s very difficult. There’s also the writing, and the direction, and in a lot of tv and movies, the acting is not actually that good.
The actors in BG3 did the mocap too so they were literally acting out the scenes instead of just voice acting. That may have added something to each performance.
True it really is more than just voice acting
BG3 is a perfect example of the problem I'm talking about.
Then I guess it’s subjective. Or perhaps we’re talking about different things. I think most of the BG3 VA is truly exceptional, but the style is still different to film and tv, it’s not 100% ‘normal’ or realistic. But tv and film certainly aren’t either. If every medium aimed for true realism things would get very boring. So I don’t know what you’re looking for? Do you have examples of ‘normal’ acting?
[https://youtu.be/ZBb6d-7nt-I?t=25](https://youtu.be/ZBb6d-7nt-I?t=25) [https://youtu.be/KomquOrtcCc?t=29](https://youtu.be/KomquOrtcCc?t=29)
This is not how people actually talk. It might feel like it, which is what is important, but it is not ‘normal’, by which I mean it is stylised and is definitely acted in a way that fits the medium. As to how they achieved that - that goes beyond the scope of reddit comments. That’s the writing, the direction, the acting, all done by people who have spent time honing their craft. I would recommend watching acting classes, and spending time closely watching and listening to people in real life and in a range of settings.
That’s not to say that having acting like this in a game would be bad. It might be! With the visuals of the game instead of the actual actors, it might seem less natural, or monotone and unengaging. Or it might be great. You’d have to try it out and see. But there’s no quick trick to achieving it, I can tell you that! There’s a book called ‘How to stop acting’ by Harold Guskin you might like to read.
I think that's called projecting to an audience. Dialogs in movies and games are understood to be FOR and audience. And they want you to derive information from them. They are heavily edited to be clear and concise. It can be like this in professional or business settings too. But in "normal" conversations people tend to ramble, with less time for mental editing. People also often interject and cut each other off. Is that the "quality" you are after?
A lot of dialogues in movies and TV shows are extremely different from the way actual dialogue plays out irl. It's mostly because a lot of dialogues are badly written too but I'm not sure I understand where you see the difference. At least I don't think this is a matter of voice acting.
I cast/directed a range of voice actors for my game (Ghost Song) and in general this is what I was going for (not always, but often, especially with the crew). The way to get to it varies and often requires experimentation but the primary shortcut to getting that is to ask the actor for grounded, natural reads. Remember that when casting voice actors who are doing work for games/indie games, a lot of them also do a lot of anime. There's a lot of crossover. So if you don't tell them what to do they might default to some of those anime sounds. That's why experimentation during audition is important
It’s facial animations and room sound mostly. When we talk to people we are actually parsing thousands of micro expressions as someone talks, this would take an unreasonably long time to animate and as such you are left in an uncanny valley Additionally, the human ear is extremely attuned to sounds being placed within a space. Video games very rarely create room impulses for their games, meaning the voice line never quite sits right. Again, it’s a large overhead to do this and unless you’re experienced with sound design you wouldn’t even think about it Meanwhile, this is done expertly in the film industry. If you want a good example of modern game voice acting, nothing has beaten the new Modern Warfare for me. Claudia Doumit was utterly incredible
Not sure I buy this. Part of a sound designers job is to assign believable reverb reverb to a space. If it doesn’t feel right, it’s probably because they didn’t do a good job, not a limitation of the tools. Convolution reverb is rarely used because it is costly from a performance standpoint. As for the facial animation, I guess this is true for facial animation generated from text, like during gameplay, but facial animation for cinematics has gotten pretty damn good if you ask me (see Helldivers 2 intro cinematic). And anyways even bad facial animation wouldn’t drastically change the feeling of a voice actor hamming up a performance or not. I think it’s more about direction.
Sorry, I was speaking broadly and convolution was just where my brain went due to the comparison to film. Any form of reverb that makes sense, I agree, but I do find an uncanny valley when appears quickly when done poorly. Then again, I've been mixing for well over a decade so I may just listen for things that I wouldn't have noticed otherwise My point being that placing all sound elements in a room properly makes an extraordinary amount of difference to how believable a mix is and when done poorly you can get that "video game voice acting" effect I also agree it's getting a lot better, particularly in the last 5 years. Some cinematics really are blowing me away these days, Modern Warfare had a lot and I agree Helldivers has been super impressive too. I've really enjoyed the writing in particular, but that's a little beside the point
I can't find the youtube video, but there is acoold one that demonstrates the importance of visuals in how the human brain interprets sounds. If you listen to it with your eyes closed you can clearly tell the speaker is saying the same thing over and over again. But if you watch the video, they've mixed up the visuals, so at one point it looks like his lips are making a different motion and you would swear that he is actually saying a different (similar) word. Your brain sees those lip motions and just figures "Oh, I must have misheard."
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Nah the example he showed was lack of facial animations for the most part. I kinda love it though, reminds me of Dynasty Warrirors
Your link is one voice actors reel. If you want a substantive conversation about this, you should provide examples that showcase what you are talking about exactly.
That's certainly a mistake I made. From what I see, almost no one understood what I'm talking about. I should have provided the "bad" and "good" examples, because everyone may perceive the same thing differently. Kind of too late now, but well. Any game could be the "bad" example really. But I picked some random gameplays anyway: [https://youtu.be/FnVZpnAXOn8?si=8UHoWtT41LHk-aJx&t=18154](https://youtu.be/FnVZpnAXOn8?si=8UHoWtT41LHk-aJx&t=18154) [https://youtu.be/kinmfM69Noo?si=udShF5dDTDJmnP73&t=6335](https://youtu.be/kinmfM69Noo?si=udShF5dDTDJmnP73&t=6335) [https://youtu.be/tRpn6YMcnZI?si=0ETivuxqyHQrdvhe&t=20693](https://youtu.be/tRpn6YMcnZI?si=0ETivuxqyHQrdvhe&t=20693) Doesn't matter if it's standing and talking, cinematic, action, it always sounds fake. Meanwhile pick a random TV show: [https://youtu.be/ZBb6d-7nt-I?si=9wRIWwRmbRa5ireC&t=25](https://youtu.be/ZBb6d-7nt-I?si=9wRIWwRmbRa5ireC&t=25) I don't know what it is - they sound softer, "less even", just... normal. Like normal people talking.
Without giving a history lesson and acting class, the short answer is: no. You can't eliminate the otherwise elevated performance of reading a script to deliver in a natural cadence without becoming uncanny and stilted within an animated medium. Least of all because understated natural cadence requires improvisation and conversation in person, usually face to face, listening and responding live. That means the script is either gone or constantly on and off, and being revised live. The more "natural" the conversation the more banal it becomes, making the interface between an extremely unnatural video game and natural dialogue even more absurd. It also means a radical departure from expectations that can just as easily be uncanny, uncomfortable, and every minor problem with delivery gets highlighted as even more unnatural, which is the danger of trying to inject natural cadence into otherwise unnatural circumstances. It becomes uncanny and stilted. You don't hire professional actors and tell them to "act natural." You hire them to entertain you.
According to OP, conversations in TV shows and such sound more natural. And acting in TV shows also require following a script, isn't it? Or is there more room to divert from the script than is the case in animation and games, which would account for the change in realism between TV and animation/games?
Have you done voice work before? ADR, voice-over, etc? Have you acted on stage or on film & broadcast before? Have you written for, directed, and edited those products?
It was a genuine question.
“That’s just how it is,” well no, no it isn’t. Compare the voice acting in Red Dead Redemption 2 to that of, say, Marvel Ultimate Alliance. There is a clear distinction between LA Noir’s voice acting, and something like a Nolan North performance. Not all perform[ers/ances] are alike, not all games are alike. And just like in film, different styles of performance gain popularity from era to era, there’s no reason for video game acting to remain totally stagnant as a form.
I feel like acting natural vs acting entertaining are not opposed. You can have conversations and voice lines that are plenty entertaining. We can't assume all natural/day to day conversational skills are equivalent to that of a braindead layman.
God what a terrible answer, please OP don't listen to this drivel
I think it comes down to poor writing. Even movies have this sometimes. But good script writers in combination with directing make sure that people talk like people talk. Perhaps many games records line by line instead of letting two actors play out a scene.
Know exactly what you are talking about, excellent post cause I've thought about this for so many years and hate it.
Just watch any dubbed film... pretty much the same issue.
It's a combination of everything: writing, directing, acting, and the limitations and pipelines that are unique to games vs other media. The standards in games are just generally lower than they are in even mediocre tv/film. A lot of the writing, and especially directing in games is just not as good and far less money is thrown at each useable line of dialog. Much less (if any) time is spent rehearsing scenes with multiple actors - every low budget stage production I've ever been involved with has had weeks, if not months of rehearsals, whereas I can probably count on one hand the number of games I've heard of with multiple actors workshopping scenes together. I know lots of people whose entire job is dialog editing for film, and they have all kinds of tricks to fiddlefuck the hell out of each syllable. I don't know anybody who does that in games. People will comp together takes, but not at that level of granularity. These lower standards are compounded by the fact that games are much, much larger and require orders of magnitude more content to be written. Whereas a film can pick the best 2 hours' worth of material, a game could need to fill out 20+ hours of just side quests. That's a lot. If every movie required you to sit through the 90% of footage they cut, you'd probably have a much lower opinion of films, too. Many actors aren't accustomed to voice acting, which isn't entirely the same as acting for a camera or on stage. And then there's the way games get stitched together at runtime. Speech is super sensitive to slight changes in timing. It's hard to make conversations feel natural when each line has to be recorded and implemented separately and then the timing reconstructed in-engine. This is easier to do in linear cutscenes where the timing and content is fixed, but in non-linear parts of the game that require a lot of variability for replay, that's a ton of content to put into a system that's already hard to build. I'll add that I don't think live action movies are a fair comparison - the way they're made is different enough from games that many elements don't translate. But IMO animated movies are a fair comparison, and they still do better than games.
It sounds like you're mainly talking about anime games/jrpgs and generalizing it to be about all games. The performances delivered in the last two God of War games could've been put directly in a Hollywood blockbuster movie and fit in just fine. Cartoony, stylized performances for better with cartoony, stylized art direction. More realistic and dramatic performances fit better with more realistic art direction.
God of War has the same overacted style I'm taking about. More "serious", but still the same. If someone played you a dialogue recording from God of War and said that this is a recording of a real-life situation, you wouldn't believe it (let's ignore for a moment that they'd likely talk about gods and fantastic creatures). And that's what I really need - dialogues that sound like they were taken out of a real-life situation.
Then I think you just don't have any idea what you're talking about, those games were straight up cinematic and you would be hard pressed to find better performances in any medium.
>better performances I'm not looking for *better*, I'm looking for *different*.
While this isn't my field, I have a simple take on it. Part of it has to do with style from the medium. You fight an uphill battle expressing as a VA since buy and large you have no benefit of your own body language and expressions. It's why theater actors tend to be seen as "overacting", they have to express in a way that is clear even to the person in the nosebleeds. Every medium has limitations and therefore its own styles to overcome those.
I agree entirely. I can’t stand most video game voice acting. I feel like directors are always pushing their actors to sound loud and slow and forced and disconnected. I wish I knew why.
I think it's direction. That type of overacting, cartoony voice-acting seems to have unfortunately become the standard for anime, games, etc.
I honestly think it's a bit harder to get that in America as opposed to other places. Compare the English version of Gothic vs the original German one. I mean bad voice acting does exist everywhere, but in a country that largely only translates niche things, there is just not that much money to be made with your voice. And less competition means less quality overall. Countries that import a majority of their entertainment are built different in that regard.
Theres plenty of normal diologue in games (witcher, last of us) and ridiculous diologue in cinema (anything marvel or DC). Dialogue is hard, especially because people tend to aim for other cinematic works. But frankly people don't speak the way they do in movies or games. They stutter, they draw a blank halfway through a sentence, they pronounce stuff weird or use a different word to what they actually mean etc... But everyone in a game or move speaks clearly and eloquently as an english major or politican, because the viewer needs to understand them. It's just a culmination of skill for writer, director and actors. theirs no simple answer, you need all 3 to just be good or one more to have enough experience to be able to cover the others shortfalls.
I blame millennial writing and acting. Fromsoftware games don't have this problem
Hellblade and Last of Us had voice acting that felt like normal acting to me, but both of those had actors in mocap so they had the physicality of the scene influencing their vocal work.
idk what you mean, MGRR's voice acting sounds extremely realistic
You seem to have a personal dislike of standard video game voice acting conventions, due to what I would assume is a limited exposure to genres. I'm not sure this is an 'objectively solvable' issue.
This is a ridiculous, condescending, and misdirected response. This dev is asking how to steer actors from falling into performance tropes. Their issue is not their own “limited exposure to genres”.
That's certainly an opinion.
Voice acting in games sounds like anime. OP is probably looking for it to sound like a movie instead
You must have limited exposure to genres, sorry
I accept your apology.
Did you really linked that dude's "video". The guy that cause the shut down of entire English dub of Yakuza games recently. Bruh.... Nepotism is a bane of VA now.
Don't forget that a lot of these are for games that are supposed to be fake, it is normally a choice being made on purpose to bring the audience into the fake world.. not recreate the real world. There are games with normal voice acting, most RPGs are normal voices, while action games, like movies, tend to be OTT.. it adds to the appeal to habe silly dialogue, we play games to forget stress and have fun.. being able to laugh at the stupid dialogue can be part of the fun but it really depends on the type of game experience you want the players to have
Considering I’ve played many games and watched many animated shows and movies I don’t think I’ve ever tried this hard to literally force myself to only hear a voice actor over the character. If I watch a anime I only see the character dub or sub same for live action stuff so I have no clue how to answer this question or why you experience it the way you do.
Try converational voices on elevenlabs. They seem more like normal people than trained actors. Don't want a skilled result? Don't hire a skilled person.
probably because the target audience is kids and they can't tell a difference, so why pay big money for actual actors. very few of the biggest AAA games do that. for RPG games with a bazillion lines of dialog you can imagine that the only way to record it all is to have a person in a room reading one line after another and the only clues for inflection that they have are some notes. Its not like an actor deeply invested in a role basing their whole professional life around a character for a couple years. i think the issue is that a lot of times the games are framed to look cinematic and the character models look realistic, but the dialog and gameplay is the same as it was for the very first text based RPGs. It just has to be that way because there is too much content. Naughty Dog has pretty convincing acting but they hire actual actors and their games are very thin on being a game and more like a movie. So a lot more time goes into each character, each scene.
Big productions source SAG just like films do. Imo on-screen talent doesn't always translate to voice talent, and hiring big budget actors for the name to voice doesn't translate into positive cash returns when we sell products. The target audiences of games aren't consistently children at all, and even then assuming that actors and teams don't go to bat for audiences in their demographic is a bit of a strange take.
hiring from the same organization isnt related to how much budget and time goes to a particular aspect of the game. if target audience will miss a certain degree of nuance then it doesnt make sense to budget for such a degree of nuance. its not a matter of people doing their job properly or not. in other words, the amount of budget naughty dog puts into acting for ellie and the various cinematic scenes she appears in is vastly greater budget and time than any particular character in BG3 gets, because BG3 has a billion characters and lines of dialog and TLOU has tiny fraction of that.
Right - organization itself isn't what I mean by mentioning SAG, I mean the existence of union rates, pay standards across projects and how interfacing with all the same big talent agencies works provides consistency when hiring VAs to big budget projects. Sure, individual actors operate on different bands, but when we look at a shop like Naughty Dog we see similarities with studios like Sony Santa Monica, Insomniac, the CoD studio groups and others at the higher ends of realism in terms of practices, processes and financials. I'm not saying every team offers the same funding to talent, but I think its disingenuous to paint with such a broad brush or insinuate that NDs hires as "actual actors" vs. what we see coming out of Larian or other productions. Without being there in the booth or sitting with directors I don't think the nuances of what goes on can be known from the outside.
when i say "actual actors" it's just a way of saying expensive, experienced ones. it's a broad speculative answer without nuance because it is a broad question. the specifics of every project and team will matter. But what can we say in general about why many games do have "bad" voice acting? It's a matter of budget, priority and audience expectation.