voice acting and Blizzard

[Don]

So I was looking at threads talking about the major voice acting people for SWTOR and apparently they're all like people who are known to be really good at sounding awesome/hot/whatever. And then you look at say WoW and you wouldn't be surprised if it says Thrall's voice was done by the janitor.

Now I've been in Anime clubs so I know you can certainly try to put your best imitation of whoever, but just because you think you can say, "I am your father" like Darth Vader doesn't mean anyone's going to hire you to do his voice. There's a reason why Solid Snake always had the same voice actor as opposed to hiring a random fan to do it. I'm going to rule out that everyone in Blizzard just happens to have professional voice acting skills. I know voice acting isn't everything, but it's kind of an expected thing in games now and certainly it hurt you if it's not good enough. Now Blizzard's voice acting isn't bad, but I think they're really just equivalent of a bunch of guys at an Anime club trying to dub the stuff on their screen. After all, a random group of Anime watching guys have as much qualification in the career of voice acting compared to the design team of Diablo 3. The former might be even a bit better since they'd have seen more voice acting stuff!

And it's not like Blizzard can't afford these guys, but I think they still largely use in house staff, and again it's not like they have some guys who are just extremely good at doing this that happen to be the lead programmer. It seems like it's almost like the top guys in the design team gets the important characters perhaps as a reward, except a top programmer really has nothing in common with good voice acting.

[Flip]

I thought SC3 had some good voice acting. I understand what you mean, though. I'm sure all the WC2/3 voices was just the staff goofing off, for the most part, and Blizz went with it.

[Don]

Even a bunch of guys at the Anime club trying to dub an Anime could sound okay if you happen to have the right guys, but no way would anyone actually consider these guys professional voice actors. It works when voice acting was something cool just to have, but now it seems to be an integral part of game. It's not like Blizzard can't afford these guys. Of course their voice acting isn't bad, but a game like SWTOR has voice acting considerably better than 'not bad'. I'm sure whoever does Solid Snake's voice is willing to star as your 'totally awesome maverick hero' for a trivial amount of money (relative to the game's budget). I think he's the Bounty Hunter in SWTOR, or at least it's someone that sounds like him.

[Shrinweck]

It's a different guy doing the male bounty hunter than Solid Snake. Steve Blum voices the bounty hunter and apparently some guy named David Hayter does Snake. I don't know how much dubbed anime you watch Don, but if you check out Blum's imdb page you'd be surprised how much of his work you've probably seen. Lots of high profile stuff.

The guy was Spike Spiegel for pete's sake heh

[Don]

Yeah I figure that guy must be pretty high profile since I'm sure I've heard the voice before. That said, I really doubt the cost to get those guys is a significant amount compared to the budget of the game, so it seems like a no brainer to get the pros.

Checked the wikipedia entry and the guy was definitely involved in a lot of low profile stuff, so clearly it can't possibly require too much money for his services if he was also doing voices for Anime no one has heard of. Wikipedia says he's Andronikos Revel and Baron Deathmark, though, not the male Bounty Hunter.

[Shrinweck]

He was credited and then they removed the credits when the official stuff came out and apparently it's some guy named Spackman. It certainly sounds gruffer than anything Blum would have done before, so I guess I can understand how it isn't him. It still resonates the exact same way as Blum, though.

[Eric]

I thought SC3 had some good voice acting. I understand what you mean, though. I'm sure all the WC2/3 voices was just the staff goofing off, for the most part, and Blizz went with it.

I thought the voice acting was pretty good in WC3, while WoW has been notoriously awful.

For example:

This is Tyrande's old voice



And her new terrible voice introduced in 4.3:



Blizzard claimed it was the same voice actress, which makes me think they want their voice actors to sound as awful as possible for WoW? I dunno.

Here's another example of some terrible WoW voice acting that was going one way then went the other. lol The dragon was pink so.....

[Don]

I remember looking at WoWWiki and a lot of the major characters are voiced by random Blizzard employees so I assume they don't actually have anyone professional doing this. I attribute the voice change similar to how say if you just practice how to sound like Darth Vader you might be able to say a few lines convincingly but no way you can do that consistently. I recall all the major characters in Diablo 2 was voiced by Blizzard employees. It's fine if you just have to say "TIME TO DIE" but as voice becomes more prevalent, characters tend to talk for longer than 2 sentences so the difference between a random guy and a pro shows.

Which is pretty mind boggling since I'm sure it actually doesn't cost a lot of money to get the pros...