In the comments of my last post, my esteemed Thumbs colleague Duncan pointed out another terrible property of most video game voice recording, one on which I have often commented elsewhere.  It is the tendency of voice actors, under poor direction or using poor scripts, to perform an interrupted statement by actually stopping where the ellipses or dash occurs in the script, rather than actually being interrupted.

Now, in this case, it’s slightly more understandable.  I realize that most games aren’t budgeted to actually have actors in the same room during the same session, able to play off one another and cut each other off if the script calls for it.  But, in the end, there’s really no reason the actor can’t simply record a longer version of the line, and have a sound designer or editor cut it off convincingly.

There’s also no excuse for that unintentional pregnant pause that inevitably occurs between the end of the interrupted actor’s painfully weak trail off into ellipses, and the so-called interruption.  With the amazing dynamic sound blending and manipulation that goes on across five channels in so many of today’s games, it should not be too much to expect a sound engine that can, in a completely pre-scripted sequence, position two recordings close enough to one another to produce a vaguely realistically abrupt interruption during a–

Sound designer: Can’t be done, you see, because–

Snake: METAL GEAR?!

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!