Guild Wars 2

There seem to be a lot of complaints about the lack of voice-overs for new LS content. Well, you know that skinny guy in the Environmental Arts Dept….the one that does impressions? He has quite a voice. As does that new girl from accounting. I would even wager that Bobby Stein and Colin Johanson could do a couple of unique voices if they were to try.

So, why not use in-house talent for voice-over work rather than hiring external voice actors? It would seem to be far more cost effective than the using professional actors and would also allow much more voice-over work to be presented in each release (purposely not taking into account the per-release character allotment for audio as the data budgeting can be altered).

I don’t use the other language selections, but are the voice-overs just in English? Should Bobby and Colin and Mary Beth from Accounting do this work with no compensation? Or should the 10 hours, or so, it takes to properly voice these parts delay their other work?

It sounds like a plan, and they do utilize some of the talent there where the music soundtrack is concerned, though it might not be that cost-effective to audition people for the parts, and it does take some amount of talent to act (even in voice-over), and we all know how particular the player-base can be when it comes to quality. Lol.

Quality >>>>>>>>>> Quantity.

And your suggestion is purely about quantity, imho.

Doing voice overs isn’t as easy as you would think (I work with that routinely). I’d say that it might be a good idea for random ambience banter, but I wouldn’t do it for main characters.

As a bit of trivia, BTW, it’s actually common sometimes to do that during production before bringing in the actors to record the final lines. Animated movies do it all the time, specially when doing the animatics (very rough animated storyboards)… and sometimes it does work good, the magic mirror voice in Shrek was Christopher Miller, the storyboard artist.

Xzaander.4123:

Quality >>>>>>>>>> Quantity.

And your suggestion is purely about quantity, imho.

As far as quality is concerned, it could be better than using professional actors. For the in-house voice over work, the flow of the conversations could be improved as the voice actors could be in the same room with one another while recording….rather than being in separate studios, hundreds or thousands of miles apart. The actors could then take visual cues from one another and react to variations in inflection and tone in a way they cannot do at present. Remember that last NPC conversation from the Tavern with all the awkward pauses in dialogue and the ambiguous tonal inflection? That could have all been prevented by having all of the voice-actors in the same recording studio at the same time.

Blizzard (not a fan. just using them as a real-world example), for years, has done a massive amount of in-house voice-overs. Most of their main characters are voiced by their developers and other employees. They don’t seem to be trading quality for quantity but rather have improved upon both. Why couldn’t ArenaNet do the same?

For whatever it’s reasons are, Anet seems to like dealing with actors unions.

One of the downsides of that, in my experience, is that unions don’t like it when companies hand over significant voice work to in-house employees (over 300 lines of dialog, recurring roles, or any other way they might decide to measure “significant”) and reserve union actors for special purposes. Union representatives could just deny actors to that company in the future.

Then the burden of time and resources falls on the company to handle open call auditions when they can’t fill a role in-house. That leads to more problems if the independent actor is needed again later and isn’t available for whatever reason or demands higher compensation.

tl;dr
It could just be as simple as Anet not having the time or desire to micromanage auditions, terms, schedules, and actors so they streamline that through a union and they avoid in-house, open call or guest work so they don’t make the union mad.