Hubby has been playing a new football game. I’m really amazed at the level of commentary and the way it blends seamlessly with the action. How is it done?
Does the voice actor go into the studio and record hundreds of lines of dialogue (including all of the jersey numbers, names of NPC players, all of the football plays, etc.) to be cued when the situation warrants? Does the actor need to say, “Number 36 goes in for the touchdown,” followed by “Number 37 goes in for the touchdown” and so forth? Or do they just record him saying all of the numbers and then blend it with whichever of a series of actions is appropriate? How do they deal with changes in tone as he’s reciting them?
How many lines of dialogue does the average game contain?
I’ve seen similar things in Elderscrolls: Oblivion. The way an NPC character talks to you is dependant on whether they like you. Does an actor have to record a series of “gruff sounding” responses and a set of “pleasant sounding” responses for each character, including the variations?
Maybe it’s gotten better in the last couple years. In Madden 2005 you can clearly hear where the software splices in several different recordings from Al Michaels. It’s kinda hard to describe, but it’s like Al Michaels says “At the end of the third quarter it’s [beat] the Colts [beat] 27 [beat] the Jaguars [beat] 7.” And you can tell that it’s happening other times as well, for instance it sounds like “The Broncos (kinda upbeat and loud in tone) are set to kick off (normal announcing voice.)” It’s the same file used for that line as for the score line above. Most of the time it’s pretty clean, but it’s obvious in some areas, either because it doesn’t flow naturally or the tone changes obviously.
It’s nice to see video game dubbing has come a long way from the old days when they got 4 or 5 voice actors to play 30 characters with hideously fake accents and mispronounced words. Ah, the good old days…
Probably. If you have a professional voice artist and all the lines already prepared, it doesn’t take all that long to record quite a lot of repetitive dialog. If they were filming, each take would require stopping to re-set the lighting, resume positions, re-apply makeup, adjust costumes, and get everybody ready. In the studio, the director just says “can you give us happy, angry and nervous versions of lines 5-48?” and a good voice actor will rattle them off in a few minutes.
Where there is a lot of repitition, the dialogue is broken into some sort of logical unit and the units are spliced together by the software. This can be done well, but sometimes you can hear the unnatural breaks. Using your example, the raw sound files would contain “Number 36,” “Number 37,” (or possibly “Number,” “36,” “37”) and “goes in for the touchdown.” In asterion’s example, the [beat] markers show where the separate sound units are spliced together but don’t quite match.
I’m a videogame designer and I’ve directed dialog recording sessions.
The answers people are giving you are pretty much on the money. You can use software to stitch together little snippets of dialog so you don’t have to record a zillion variations. But you still have to capture hundreds or thousands of little dialog chunks to use as your raw material.
Professional voice actors are remarkable consistent in their delivery. Typically you’ll record multiple takes of each line then pick the best take to use for the game. I’ve seen situations where two takes that were recorded six months apart were spliced together and you couldn’t hear any difference in tone between them.
It depends on the game. A recent action shooter that I was working on had several thousand lines of in-game chatter plus several hundred lines of cinematic dialog. A sports game or an RPG could have 10 times that.
It doesn’t take that long to record most of it. I’m betting that with Madden they get most of what they need in one or two takes. There’s not much of a dramatic performance involved in saying “It’s second and five.” If you’re not doing multiple takes you can easily record several hundred lines an hour.
It takes longer to record dialog that has emotional weight behind it. When I’ve been in cinematic recording sessions I’ve occasionally done ten or twenty takes before getting the right line reading. That really slows things down.
Yes, you would need to record each variation separately. You CAN use SOME studio tricks to change how a line sounds. You can speed things up or slow things down or change the timbre of the voice. But you can’t change the basic emotional weight of a line.