Out of Austin’s GDC, Gamasutra gave us a little look at the Writer’s Track talk with Marianne Krawczyk, of God of War III notoriety. Also joining Krawczyk on stage was voice actor DB Cooper, and so the two discussed how to save game voice acting from it’s… less than desirable state.
As Cooper points out, voice actors are usually given individual lines with a one-word descriptor as to how to act, with no real connection between the lines. Sometimes the voice acting in the anime industry isn’t all that great, but that’s even worse. Matching to lip-flaps can be a killer for voice acting, giving off de-contextualized lines is even worse.
So, what are they doing to fix this? Well, according to Krawczyk, they’re doing table reads of the script, which was written in a screenplay format, in order to get people more familiarized with the script.
Krawczyk highlights that the script comes out to about 120 pages, and is “a very specific three-act experience.” Script translations generally convert to one page equals one minute of screen time. So, in terms of writing out the game’s action, combined with the dialogue, should turn out to be a bit more of a meaty game.
I’m really glad to see the two are taking the whole issue of videogame dialogue a lot more seriously. I’ve only gone through the original God of War, but hopefully Krawczyk can help gear the dialogue and story away from the over-the-top silliness that broke suspension of disbelief for me. And make sure that the Greek gods don’t have British accents, please.
