Voice acting of the new party-joinable NPC's.
Khyron
Member Posts: 636
I've listened to that which has been released to us so far and I've got a few questions.
1. The samples we've heard, are they just raw samples that will still be prosessed, filtered or whatever you audio-dudes call it?
2. Has anyone else noticed how they sound completely out of place, compared to the original npc's? Both in terms of quality of the sound itself and the general feel of the chars?
Going in depth of question 2.. It's just.. they sound so.. American, know what I mean? None of the original npc's (that i can think of) have such an obvious American accent like Neera does.. and I'm not sure I like it.
I'm not even sure what I want to point out here.. it just sounds so wrong, in comparisin to the original voicesets.
1. The samples we've heard, are they just raw samples that will still be prosessed, filtered or whatever you audio-dudes call it?
2. Has anyone else noticed how they sound completely out of place, compared to the original npc's? Both in terms of quality of the sound itself and the general feel of the chars?
Going in depth of question 2.. It's just.. they sound so.. American, know what I mean? None of the original npc's (that i can think of) have such an obvious American accent like Neera does.. and I'm not sure I like it.
I'm not even sure what I want to point out here.. it just sounds so wrong, in comparisin to the original voicesets.
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Comments
It's a pretty good balance of American and not-American dialect. Her dialect doesn't bother me.
Also, I think the files haven't been filtered yet. The bass levels for Rasaad, for instance, seem just a little bit high in comparison to the rest of the game. (I'm not used to feeling my subwoofer vibrate for dialogue, y'know?)
it sounds like an american trying to do a different accent, it does not sound natural. I prefer the use of natural born accents or actors like Frank Welker who does xzar's voice where the actor can do many voices which sound seperate. some people can imitate accents really well, Omi dhajil can make a really natural sounding nigeria accent though he is from a british and arabic background.
I agree with @Khyron I understand what he says, however I do not mind, the characters sound full o character and the stories are great, I think in game they will sound better.
Out of the voices in BG1, I think Gorion and Thalantyr at least were doing their best not to sound American. I'm trying hard to think how Montaron sounded, but I seem to remember him being kind of Cornish.
Does anyone remember the Legacy of Kain series? God I loved the voices in that.
To my ear most, if not all, vanilla npc's have such generic accents that it's not really anything to notice.. these new ones just struck me as completely out of place and alien. Especially with Neera's voiceset.
Maybe I'm just being dense.. but it's off.. so very off >.< Perhaps it'll sound a lot more natural once I hear the voicesets in-game, with all the stuff that's there.
And lots of "foreign" accents in games are done by American (or in Rashaad's case, Canadian) speakers.
The classic cartoon pirate accent is a Cornish accent. It doesn't sound like Steven Fry or Ian McKellen so people might not instantly associate it with Britain. Still, I can't remember Monty well enough to remember how piratey he sounds...
Montaron can be heard in this clip.
I think I'm going to leave this thread now....maybe the whole forum for a while. Quite frankly, I think people are looking for any excuse to complain about BGEE, up to and including pretending that an American accent isn't American, so they can say that Neera is "Too American".
As for Neera, yeah, it was pretty American. But then again, I have a very low tolerance for sickly American accents.
Edit: listening back, when she says 'fuiiitchuureee' it really makes me cringe.
I don't particularly like Neera's voice but I think that's because she reminds me of Imoen. As to the quality of the voice acting, the new voices are above quite a few of the BG1 & 2 in terms of quality. Throwing a blanket statement that they don't fit is... ...silly. You had a female voice in BG1 who sounded like an American trying to sound like a stern German schoolmistress. And it was funny not wrong!
Considering I'm not a native English speaker I can't tell the difference between an american trying to speak with an Arabic accent or an arab trying to speak English with an accent. Maybe that's why it doesn't bother me.
I'm doing some extra work including basic dialogue cleaning as well as the usual suspects of audio processing to make the new work match the old stuff, so rest assured I'm doing my best to ensure it won't sound jarring in-game.
As for things feeling out of place - when you get a chance to hear it in game, I'd be surprised if you still felt that way but time will tell. The bottom line is that this is new content being added to a game that people have been hearing for 14 years at this point. The recording quality has changed, the tools being used to cut it and process it are vastly different, the voice actors are different - even if we got the same ones it wouldn't feel the same because they're older. It'll feel different at first, but given time to adjust it should feel natural going forward.
As an aside:
Accents are a funny thing - when I was working on Dragon Age: Origins, the voice actress responsible for Leliana was a French voice actress (from France, not Quebec) who couldn't speak English, and had to sound out her English lines with the help of a translator. The kicker: people complained about the accent sounding fake. Seriously, check out this youtube and its comments.