Voice acting is a tricky thing. Let’s see how tricky.
It’s one of those really tricky things to pull off in any video game. It’s got relatively small margins of error; sound too dramatic and you sound like a parody of 18th century theatre, don’t sound dramatic enough and you sound like you don’t give a shit. And it can really fuck up a game if you get it wrong.
Two Worlds is a game that had absolutely atrocious voice acting, and my attempt at playing it ceased after about the a third of a sentence. The iffy graphics and slightly sub-par controls didn’t bother me half as much as the silly speech.
The whole Resident Evil-series, I think, is just the biggest pile of dung you’ll ever find in the industry in this regard. The acting constantly sounds like it’s spoken by people who’ve heard about the concept of speech but haven’t actually spoken a word out loud in their entire lives.
The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, meanwhile, got a lot of flak for its bad voice acting, but I don’t think it was entirely fair. Sure, the lines were often ridiculous and said in very questionable ways, but most of that I’d scratch up to bad directing rather than poor performances by the actors. The hilarious interactions between characters where lines were randomized weren’t the fault of the actors either, as that was due to terrible game design. The voice acting in Oblivion is something I’d describe as “Not good, but not awful enough to kick me out of the experience”.
Something that often causes problems for games is when the developers decide to bring in famous movie actors, thinking they must automatically be great voice actors. At least that is the most generous assumption. More likely they do it to capitalize on their star power for marketing purposes. This is a bad idea. Patrick Stewart in Oblivion, Sean Bean in Oblivion, Peter Dinklage in Destiny, Matthew Perry in Fallout: New Vegas. All of them completely phoned it in. That doesn’t make them bad actors; voice acting in a game is completely different from acting in a movie or TV-series. In the case of Destiny, the devs even realized that Peter Dinklage made a shit performance, and replaced him with Nolan North, IE the guy who does the voice for every male main character in all of gaming.
But let’s not focus entirely on the negative examples. There are many games and entire franchises with stellar voice acting. One that I’ve followed for many years is Warcraft, where the guy basically in charge of storytelling, Chris Metzen, also is a fantastic voice actor. Dead Space has really credible voice acting for a very dramatic horror-action game.
Then there’s Simon Templeman. He is the greatest voice actor in all of human history. He also constantly sounds like he wants to piss in your cornflakes. He’s simply got the best evil voice in the industry. Funnily, then, that in the Legacy of Kain-series, he plays the perpetual anti-hero trying to save the world in his own way. Or an evil bastard trying to rule the world. Or just a guy with a personal vendetta against the Hylden lord. It’s not clear. Other than that series, he’s probably most well-known for doing the voice for Teyrn Loghain in Dragon Age: Origins and Admiral Han’gerrel vas Neema in Mass Effect 2 and 3. His voice is simply amazingly punchable, which makes it all the more satisfying when you actually get to punch his character in Mass Effect 3.
So, to sum up, I think the conclusion here is that we should all want to punch Simon Templeton, but not actually do it.
Toodles.
