You can‘t deny it did boost Jennifer English‘s career to a high degree. You could say it‘s not all about her role as Shadowheart alone but it definitely helped kickstart her online presence. She went from voicing children side characters to being one of the most prolific and recognizable voices in gaming within two years and I doubt her role in Expedition 33 where she was heavily featured in promotional material was the last we‘ve heard of her.
This isn’t about me or my perception. I am saying this because she said so herself and the Imdb Page you linked tells the same story. She broke her mold with Shadowheart and now she is getting much bigger and more diverse roles. But feel free to tell me about a game prior to BG3 where she took center stage for marketing like she did for Expedition 33.
What story do you think her imdb page tells? Because she has consistently done 2-3 roles per year since 2022. And a lot of those are games that have been in dev a long time. Like, that covid stretch is likely what led to consistently getting 2-3 releases each year since '22.
Also… is she major marketing for E33? I don’t watch a lot of commercials these days but mostly if ANY VA is involved it is Cox or Starr. Like, I think Alice Duport-Percier (the singer of Alicia) has gotten more face time across the various youtube ads and what not than anyone else (and rightfully so. That song contributes so much to the Vibes of such a Vibes based game).
But either way: That doesn’t actually change the point. The BG3 VAs pretty much all knocked it out of the park. And that isn’t translating to meaningful increase in roles.
Which has come up a lot over the years. Very few VAs see major success even after bringing EVERYONE to tears with how good of a performance they gave. And the Troy Bakers (and Laura Baileys) of the world are a whole different argument.
Just to add on. A twitch streamer I semi-regularly watch is also a pretty successful VA and she has talked about this in the past. People might say that she MADE a game with her performance but that doesn’t translate to future castings. So she can be in mobile trash one year and a GOTY contender the next and still get roughly the same bookings and checks per year.
Which is probably why so much of the BG3 cast were super eager to work with Digital Extremes. Partially because DE and Reb are awesome. But mostly because live service games area potentially a great source of stable income since they’ll need a few lines every year for N years.
Hard to talk about it without getting into spoilers, but Gustave (Cox’s role) was very much a leading face of the game in marketing, and I strongly suspect that was solely because they thought the game would sell better with a male lead.
Those roles are tiny. Like I don‘t even know why you‘re so strongly against the idea that she wasn‘t that big before. You literally just have to look up her actual roles.
And yes she was a major factor of the marketing campaign. Again, you just have to look up the trailers.
She literally talks all the time about how she doesn’t get any offers all of the sudden. She probably did at least once in one of her last four streams. She just has become pickier with what she auditions for. But she still has to audition like everyone else.
She just has become pickier with what she auditions for.
Most actors in gaming are certainly not becoming pickier with AI looming at the horizon so this is a strong sign that she is in fact doing very good. Certainly better than voicing Child #5 in Original Sin 2. And that’s literally the entire point I’m trying to get across here.
I’ve no doubt she’ll continue to do well, but I’m not sure BG3 directly helped her get the role, other than making her voice recognizable to people. I read an article that said that Sandfall did blind voice auditions for E33. They didn’t even know they’d chosen Charlie Cox until after the fact.
Yeah, apparently the director and writer of E33 were actually playing BG3 at the time of the casting. But they didn’t recognise her voice at all. They just knew that they had found the right one for the role.
It’s also saying something that they cast Andy Serkis and didn’t use him for performance capture. That was all done before the voice recordings. Recording over already finished performance was an entirely new experience for him.
She probably did more work on BG3 alone than all previous works combined though. The experience alone boosted their performance immensely. Neil Newbon compared his 4 years at the studio with 4 seasons of shooting a TV show and his role was about the same size as Jennifer‘s. BG3 wasn‘t just any job. Especially not for her. Anyone who actually follows her can attest to that. To say it didn‘t change the trajectory of her life and career takes some serious ignorance.
That’s honestly heart breaking, all three gave exceptional performances. I hope in time people will understand the artistic merit in both voice acting and video games as a medium, but these people deserved to skyrocket into their own franchises.
I mean, the video game industry is about as good as the record industry for its treatment of talent. “You should want to do this for free” seems to be the motto of 8-figure executives.
It’s a weird dynamic, but it also makes sense that a success like that isn’t as correlated to future work as TV or movies. You got <insert big actor here…I don’t know…Tom Cruise> in all sorts of movies because they put asses in seats. The performance is comparatively much more of the appeal in a movie than it is in a game, even a story-driven one. So even if you give an award-winning performance, how important to a game’s success is an award-winning performer? For plenty of games, probably not very. And even if it is important for a particular game’s success, maybe the award winner is more expensive, and you can get a good performance out of someone who’s a great actor but hasn’t had that exposure and is willing to do it for less money.
Yea we loved that game. Overcooked 1 and 2, moving out. Currently playing Minecraft again, teaching our daughter to play it. RE 5 had a good balance of fighting and puzzles.
I don’t think he’s particularly strident here or anything in Japanese, but the headline here would have been better off sticking with the machine translated “nothing has changed” in the article.
There isn’t any optimism in Matsuno’s words here. I would have added “as always” to “economic disparity remains the same” and “again” to his comments about armed conflicts. He sounds tired of the cycle.
[…] The formula to make […] Game of the year is stupidly simple, but somehow it keeps on getting lost.
The studio made their game because they wanted to make a game that they wanted to play themselves.
They didn’t make it to increase market shares. They didn’t make it to serve a brand. They didn’t have to meet arbitrary sales targets or fear being laid off if the didn’t meet those targets.
Furthermore, the people in charge forbade them from cramming the game with anything whose only purpose was to increase revenue, and don’t serve the game design.
IDK but Ship of Harkinian has been around for years, and Nintendo has left that one alone too. This MK64 port is being developed by the same team (HarbourMasters).
Yeah you aren’t wrong, this happened with a switch emulator. I don’t think it had legal footing but it’s enough to scare people off so they don’t need to deal with a law suit
I love the idea of having a 360° monitor and rear view mirrors instead of just smaller rear view screens, or even digital on-screen rear view mirrors. 😄
You’d think it would be the opposite? High FOV when you are far away doesn’t match the expected projection of the things you see on screen. 5 ft is pretty normal I would say, I sit that far from my LG 65" OLED, too. I turn down my FOV in Rocket League so it doesn’t mess with my perception, even though you’d think a high FOV in that game would benefit you as you can avoid demolitions easier. (I do keep the FOV at max in Rocket League when in front of my PC though, because I’m so close to my monitor, probably 2 ft or so.)
5ft is close for a 65" screen. Most people sit about 8-10ft away from a screen that size. And to be clear, I’m referring to distance from my eyeballs. The foot of the recliner is about 2ft away.
It’s not that close. You were right about one thing, the front end of my couch is probably 5–6 ft away from the TV. But I crouched down at exactly 5 ft and the TV still has a smaller apparent size than my 27" LG OLED PC monitor when I sit by the computer for gaming. I would turn down the FOV if I were you, to match the expected projection, but that’s just me. You can of course do what you feel is comfortable. But the distance argument doesn’t hold up is all I’m saying. 😁👍
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