March Roundtable: Voice Acting

The 2024 SAG-AFTRA video game strike began in July 2024 and, despite falling out of the news somewhat, is still ongoing. The strike began after failed negotiations to protect voice actors from replacing voice actors with artificial intelligence-generated voices.

Struck companies include Activision, EA, Epic Games, Insomniac, Take Two, and Warner Bros. Many of these companies have continued to release content despite the strike, sometimes replacing lines that would have been voice acted with subtitles or “base recordings” without updates. Last year, SAG-AFTRA struck deals with Replica and Narrativ, two AI companies, that included session fees and revenue sharing with the union. But many voice actors, who require different protections from the ones writers and actors the union struck to secure in 2024, aren’t satisfied by those deals, and negotiations between the union and struck companies have yet to reach a deal—so the strike continues.

So this month, we’re taking some time to discuss voice acting in video games—the depth it can bring to a story, what performances have moved us, and when it’s necessary.

What do you feel that voice acting brings to a game? What games really exemplify this?

Melissa Brinks: Voice acting can bring a lot of depth to a character that wouldn’t be there if we saw rather than heard the dialog. The best voice acting goes beyond reading the words in the script, bringing a sense of personhood to a character. An excellent example of this is Ashly Burch’s turn as Chloe in Life is Strange, where, according to Burch, she turned to her real-life experiences to inform the anguish that Chloe experiences in a pivotal scene. When Burch was not able to return to the role for Before the Storm due to the 2017 SAG-AFTRA strike, her absence was felt—Deck Nine used non-union talent, and Rhianna DeVries unfortunately wasn’t as strong a performer as Burch. Despite, in my humble opinion, the writing being generally better in Before the Storm, the performance doesn’t hit as hard because it lacked Burch’s intensity of feeling for the character.

Zora Gilbert: Like Missy said, voice acting can add a great deal of dimensionality to characters and scenes. I think that addition goes beyond just character, though—in addition to adding nuance to a character’s scene-by-scene emotionality, voice casting and direction can do a lot to flesh out the world those characters inhabit and the way the characters choose to inhabit that world. In Baldur’s Gate 3, which I’m sure we’ll return to later, Neil Newbon’s deliberate flamboyance is an efficient shorthand for the performative way that Astarion moves through the world; the presence of that flamboyance in one character also adds meaning to its absence in others. On a more straightforwardly phonetic level, accent work, when done consistently, does a great deal of worldbuilding in the background… but when done inconsistently, can be confusing and frustrating. Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dragon Age: The Veilguard are, respectively, very good and very bad examples of accent work contributing to worldbuilding. If Dorian, a perfect Tevinter son in every way but his sexual predilections, spoke in Received Pronunciation English, why the fuck was Mae American, Veilguard? Why aren’t the ancient elves Welsh??

Kathryn Hemmann: I was very impressed by how voice acting is used for the ambient conversations in Final Fantasy VII Remake. As Cloud walks through crowded urban spaces, he’s surrounded by the chatter of people going about their daily lives. Unless the player stops to eavesdrop, you can only catch bits and pieces of dialogue, which lends an extra degree of immersion. The purpose of the background voice acting is to give the player a sense of moving through a place where people actually live without the visual distraction of written text hovering over each NPC.

Melissa: Some characters literally speaking actual French in Veilguard made me laugh so hard I forgot what was actually happening in the scene. I know Orlais was always pseudo-France but to hear them actually speak French was an incredible way to shock me out of the story.

Zora: Missy, every time Lucanis said “mierda” I had to restrain myself from screaming out loud and turning off the game. I am begging BioWare to have some self-respect.

More seriously, getting on my sociolinguistics soapbox: multi-lingual people in the real world don’t pepper their speech with a single swear word and an occasional “amigos,” and there’s no defensible narrative reason why they should in a fantasy world, either. To write characters that way betrays a lack of respect for both language in general and all the people who code-switch across languages as part of their daily communication. My critique here has moved past voice acting, I guess, but it’s so profoundly frustrating and gross to see this “foreign”-language-as-seasoning behavior perpetrated in work that aspires to “diverse” representation when it would be so easy to just not add the stupid word, and making some poor performer read it out loud just means the bad decision can assault my ears in addition to my eyes.

When, if ever, do you feel like voice acting is not an asset? Does this have any impact on your decision to buy or otherwise engage with a game?

Melissa: I am so sorry for what I’m about to say, and I know it’s going to sound antithetical to my answer to the last question, but bear with me.

I alluded to this in my review of Vampire Therapist, but… if I’m playing a visual novel, I don’t care about voice acting. I read much faster than people talk, and I have yet to see a visual novel that I feel was improved by voice acting. Even in CRPGs and regular ol’ RPGs, I often skip the tail end of dialog because I am horrible and read too fast, but I also refuse to play without subtitles on. This by no means suggests we should get rid of voice acting because of freaks like me, but I don’t find it at all necessary in visual novels. That said, it doesn’t have any impact on whether or not I’ll play a game because it’s very easy to simply mute it if it’s bad and click through if it isn’t. Bad voice acting hasn’t stopped me from playing anything.

Kathryn: I’m in exactly the same boat as Melissa. I always have subtitles turned on, and I read faster than people talk. On top of that, I don’t want anyone distracting me while I’m trying to read. If I can’t turn off the voice acting, I turn off the game.

I’m also onboard with Zora’s earlier comment about “why the fuck is this character American.” I don’t need everyone to be posh and British, and I find many “vaguely ethnic” intonations to be weird and unnecessary. Still, it stretches my suspension of disbelief to hear certain characters speaking like they’re from Ohio. To give an example, I have nothing against Matthew Mercer as an actor, but Ganondorf in Tears of the Kingdom would not talk like that.

Zora: I do. Stop putting Matthew Mercer in stuff when you could get someone with a more interesting voice instead. He’s got enough going on, I promise.

Melissa: God, it really is always Matthew Mercer, isn’t it? I have no beef with him but he was the big voice actor in Vampire Therapist that made me feel the need to complain about it!

What are some of your favorite voice acting performances? What did you enjoy so much about them?

Melissa: Shadowheart is far from my favorite Baldur’s Gate 3 character—I’ve just never really jived with God’s Favorite Goth Princess. But Jennifer English, who voices Shadowheart, does an incredible job. The strength of her performance is one of the many reasons why Shadowheart and I don’t get along. She brings the exact level of snootiness to the character that she needs to feel real. English is also queer, and like all of BG3‘s romances, Shadowheart can be romanced by a Tav or origin character of any gender. A queer voice actor isn’t necessarily crucial to depicting a queer character, but English infused her portrayal of Shadowheart with queer text—her genuine and immediate thirst for Karlach—and how she sees Shadowheart’s story as one with queer parallels in both her religious trauma and her journey of self-discovery. This may not be obvious to all players, but in having it in her mind while delivering her dialog, English brings it to her characterization of Shadowheart whether or not the writers meant for it to be there.

Kathryn: Instead of highlighting individual performances, I’d like to make a generalization about my favorite games that employ voice acting. I tend to enjoy voice acting only if it’s exceptionally well done, and only if there isn’t a lot of it. Final Fantasy XII was a perfect sweet spot for me. Because of the technical limitations of the PlayStation 2 when the game came out in 2006, voice acting only appeared in a few short cutscenes, and each one of these scenes made an impact. I’m also a fan of the voice acting in Elden Ring, in which every voiced line is meticulously produced and narratively significant. I love when the inclusion of voice acting makes me sit up straight and pay attention, and I always appreciate when a game’s voice actors aren’t trying to mimic the line delivery in Hollywood blockbusters.

Zora: I’m a known Gale girlie, but even disregarding my terrible taste I think I’d still be absolutely tickled by Tim Downie’s reads for Gale in Baldur’s Gate 3. Downie’s Gale is always on the edge of a chuckle, be it self-effacing or in genuine amusement, and that tremor makes his more authoritative deliveries all the more impactful—something that would be clumsy at best in text. I also want to highlight Samantha Béart and Dave Jones, who play Karlach and Halsin, respectively, in Baldur’s Gate 3 as well as Thomasina Bateman and Charles Briden in The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow. I found both BG3 performances delightful in a solid sort of way, if not as engaging as Tim Downie’s or as eye-catching (ear-catching?) as Neil Newborn’s, but their characters in Hob’s Barrow couldn’t be more different while their work is just as solid. I can’t tell you how wild it was to be playing both games at the same time and find their names on both cast lists, without any expectation of overlap.