Attention all video game writers voice acting directors:

When you have a voice line that is intended to sound like a corrupted, spotty voice transmission, from which words are missing in order to convey a sense of urgent desperation and loss of control, please record the actor reading a version from which the words are not missing, and then have your sound team edit it to actually sound corrupted and garbled.

On top of that, how preposterous must it feel as a voice actor to actually perform something like that? I realize that video games aren’t necessarily the cream of the prose crop to begin with, but this is more of a technical issue than a creative one.

Come on, now. This isn’t hard. Why do, time and time again, video games feature actors actually reading the lines with the words omitted? It is painful to my ears to hear a person reading something like, “Can’t being overrun oh God we’re Johnson is please help they’re here and.” Except there are pauses in between every other word which my brain, after a lifetime of interacting with humans and being able to discern what an artificial pause sounds like, is supposed to interpret as signal loss.

That is awful. Really, guys. If you’re spending tens of millions of dollars on a game, especially a dialogue-centric game, you can afford to write a few extra words for the two instances of this scenario in your massive script of hundreds of pages, and yet I hear this cringe-inducing faked transmission crap all the time. BioWare, pay attention.

It isn’t that hard! It won’t even increase your budget! I promise!

Tags: bad sound recording, mass effect, tons of other games

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 11:01 pm and is filed under game design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.