Aww. That’s missing the deep growl/snarl component that makes player charr sound kin to Rytlock. He sounds more like the Whispers charr from early charr PS.
It certainly is noticeably different. Perhaps it will fall more into line with some players’ head canon for their characters, but the loss of the growling rasp saddens me as Yuan’s interpretation is just right for my revenant. Otoh I don’t actually play my rev at this point.
It is certainly noticeably different, and yes, the voice does kind of remind me of Korukhan the Blacksmith from early Whispers story (voiced by Neil Kaplan, a really awesome voice actor, for what it’s worth), although the wing 3 male charr doesn’t really sound like Neil. I’m still trying to figure out who I think’s voicing these wing 3 lines – I tend to be overly nerdy about voice actors and can normally name the most prolific game voice actors just from hearing their voice, but I’m drawing a blank here. It sounds kind of like it might be a heavily pitch-shifted Matthew Mercer, but he’s been the male norn since launch… it also sounds a little bit like Sam Riegel at points, but Sam Riegel plays Braham and a whole bucketload of NPCs throughout the game, and I assume that, if they have to replace the male charr VA for some reason, they’re not going to add insult to injury by replacing him with one of their most prolific and recognisable NPC voice actors. Some part of me thinks the new voice might be Lex Lang or Peter Jessop, since the writers did mention on Twitter that they’d added them to the voice cast a few months ago. I guess we’ll wait and see.
All of this said – I do still hope, perhaps in vain, that the ‘news’ Bobby was referring to is that Ron Yuan is being temporarily replaced as the male charr due to some scheduling issue, rather than him being replaced outright. My charr thief has been my main ever since the very first minute of headstart and I’ve grown attached to his voice.
Still – if ArenaNet are replacing the male charr VA I think it’s safe to assume that they’ve essentially had no other choice to do so. Their commitment to voice continuity in GW2 went so far as to get Felicia Day back into the studio to record somewhere around 10 lines for the final episode of season 2 and the penultimate Heart of Thorns story step – and she’s no doubt an incredibly hard – and expensive – actress to get a hold of.
Ron Yuan, we have to remember, is an actor who happens to do voice work. His entire acting career isn’t built around voice work the way Nolan North or Matthew Mercer’s careers are. He does on-screen acting work for films shot both in the US and in China and he himself is a filmmaker. It does seem – sadly – quite plausible that ArenaNet just couldn’t book sessions with him for Stronghold of the Faithful – in which case they may book a session with him once he is available again… or they may simply recast the male charr, permanently, to someone for whom voice acting is at the forefront of their career, since careers in game voiceover tend to live or die based upon how available you make yourself and how easy it is to book consistent sessions with you.
…if ArenaNet are truly going to recast the male charr, though, they really do need to go out of their way to handle it properly. It’s a fairly big transition that is going to irritate or bemuse quite a few people who main a male charr, and it’s also going to cause a lot of jarring moments depending on how they do it – imagine, for example, your character yelling out story dialogue in the ‘new’ voice while receiving a boon and yelling out in Ron Yuan’s old charr voice, or, vice-versa, imagine going back to ‘old’ content and suddenly hearing your charr speak with Ron Yuan’s voice for a story step/map event before receiving a boon and suddenly hearing rerecorded versions of Ron Yuan’s old lines.
