I’m reminded of old video games where they had the developers help out with the voice acting. Like, couldn’t you do this here? Just have someone who happens to have a high quality microphone do the lines? Maybe even pay a starving artist on one of those “voice acting for hire” sites?
I get that deadlines are usually way too tight on games, but this is just poor quality control. I guess that is the AAA games industry noways though.
I feel like if this was truly an accident because the character was overlooked, then wouldn't they just not have any voice at all? Even copy/pasting dialogue into some (free, according to the article) software and then inserting it into the game takes some effort.
The article says that often during development they’ll put in simple text to speech stuff for characters as a placeholder. I’d imagine to make sure certain audio hooks work and sound isnt broken
A bad voice probably also just feels much better and complete than having no voice at all. At least based on the observations I’ve made when adding sound effects to my games as a hobbyist. A silent game just feels bad.
I can believe it being an accident. The character only has 8 lines of dialogue and it seems (if I am reading right) it’s just the English dub that has this problem? He’s voiced normally in the 4 other fully dubbed languages. It’s truly a bizarre thing to have happened though
While we really dug the game (you can check out our review for more on that), there’s one odd detail that stuck out we can’t help but give its own article: one of the game’s minor NPCs will be voiced by a text-to-speech program at launch, seemingly because someone — probably Ubisoft — forgot to record and add a human being’s voice for the role.
what a… weird thing to have happen. i’m not sure what the utility of it would be for one minor NPC but this being an accident honestly strains charitability, i think
Now, on a scale from 1 to 10, please tell us how strongly you feel about this. And, hypothetically, whether you’d mind if a few dozens more NPC were like that too.”
“On a scale from 0% to 500%, how much more would you pay for a game where main characters used [insert your favorite actors/people]'s AI cloned voices?”
Yep, looks really suspect. Even if it’s true that they forgot to get someone to record the lines, it does seem implausible that they couldn’t source any voice actor (or even someone on their own staff) to record the dialogue and get it added to the game, even at short notice.
Not saying this was a honest mistake, but I do see how that could happen:
Game story gets written
Dialogs are worked on
TTS versions of all dialogs are generated
Once they get approved, talent is cast
Talent is scheduled to record the dialogs and get paid
Final dialogs get included in the game
Knowing how game studios love to push everyone into “rush mode” the months before launch, I can see how, for a minor NPC, someone could have forgotten to cast and/or book a recording of some dialogs… while everyone is getting pressured to release NOW OR ELSE!!1!
Honestly, I wonder how many minor NPCs in games have been TTS all along, and nobody noticed or cared.
This smells like WB making the game instead of Rocksteady. Arkham made you feel like Batman. Here you have Captain Boomerang and a Shark man using guns?!
Trailer looked interesting to me. Last performance of Kevin Conroy as Batman too, if I’m not mistaken. The Arkham series are part of my favorite games. Was hoping this would’ve been a decent continuation of that.
Insomniac, the dev team behind the wildly successful Spider-Man games just had a leak. In the leak, it’s discovered that they were strong-armed by Sony (who owns Insomniac) to downsize staff despite exceeding sales targets and hitting goals. They needed to downsize to help balance Sony’s books, who have acquired a slew of failing or underperforming studios.
Sony owns Studio A, and Studio B. Studio B have underperformed for the last few years, whilst Studio A has outperformed their targets. Because of the shortcomings in Studio B, Sony are now out of pocket, even accounting for the earnings of Studio A. Studio A are forced to eliminate staff roles to make up for Studio B’s mismanagement. A well oiled and well performing Studio have to butcher their teams to balance their parent entity’s books. It’s so fucking short sighted and stupid.
This isn’t just a Sony/Insomniac issue either, I guarantee this goes on throughout the industry whenever there’s a parent company. It’s just how it will always be in those circumstances.
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