Finished my first BG3 run, man the acting is great, especially at the when characters get their big emotional moments. I’m thinking “that’s acting!”, also recognised Omni Man immediately.
Now I’m on to Alan Wake 2 and omg I can’t take the dialogue and voice acting. It feels jarring. The prior game I played was Silent Hill 2 and I remembered it was OK, the MC was very chill in a horror game but its kinda explained by the story
BG3 is a milestone in gaming. It may be a bit unfair to compare it to games that were produced at the same time, they couldn’t hope to compete lmao.
What makes BG3 so great is that it doesn‘t just have voice acting, it has full acting. The actor of Astarion worked for 4 years on it and claimed it was the equivalent to shooting 4 seasons of a TV show. It‘s a huge scope that almost nobody can or want to afford. I mean those studios who can just don‘t take that part very seriously and are eyeing with simply opting to use AI instead. I doubt it will ever be recreated, maybe not even by Larian themselves.
BG3 has great voice acting, but I don’t really think it’s that far beyond any other games. As a personal example, Cherami Leigh as Female V in Cyberpunk 2077 is probably my favorite voice actor in the last several years, even if BG3 is probably my favorite game in that same time.
Dude Cherami Leigh also voiced my favorite gaming character, Gaige the Mechromancer from Borderlands 2. She’s fucking phenomenal.
It’s a bummer none of the echo logs made it into the game, but they’re still great. The fact that she cuts her arm, and then instead of patching it up, she just slices her arm clean off and then builds a mecha arm WHILE she’s bleeding out is so fuckin hardcore. I love it
FemV in CP2077 totally killed it. Her voice acting was one of my favorite parts of the game.
AC Odyssey didn’t have as many emotional beats, but Kassanda was still way better than her brother.
And of course Jennifer Hale as FemShep… I’m starting to see a pattern here, lol.
and mShep, and Mordin, and Liara… the ME series just had a whoooole lotta amazing voice acting.
I felt this way after playing God of War 2018 and ragnarok. Everything else just felt pretty boring for a while. Currently enjoying my first play through of Red Dead Redemption 2.
You lucky bastard.
I’ve got my issues with RDR2, but definitely not with the writing and performances.
BG3 is definitely one of those games with good (even great) voice acting. But there are more of them out there.
RDR2 has some of the best writing and acting performances I’ve ever encountered in a game. The Last of Us is in a similar vein. The Uncharted series has some of my favourite voice acting, especially Claudia Black (Chloe) and of course Nolan North (Nathan).
Claudia Black also voices Morrigan in Dragon Age Origins, which is chock full of stellar voice performances. I’d argue that Dragon Age 2 and even Inquisition had some memorable performances but The Veilguard sucked.
Voice acting? Reject modernity, embrace Dwarf Fortress.
One thing I find jarring about BG3 is the lack of vo for the player character. It seems like a weird omission in this day and age. (Not counting the dumb ‘I clicked here, so my player has to say something’ vo. Like, shut the fuck up with your dumb chess references, Gale!)
It’s supposed to be immersive, I think, so as not to force a voice that doesn’t match the roleplaying in your head.
I’m with you, though, I’d much prefer VA.
They recorded some lines for the custom character. They think aloud when you approach the gith gank squad.
They also reverted a decision to have all the origin characters do a bizarre past tense narration in favor of the present universal narration the familiar narrator VA does present tense. Maybe they abandoned having the player character speak when they changed that course.
Honestly, for the most part I really enjoyed the voice acting in Guild Wars 2. But femme V is probably my favourite as of late.
Femme V really nails the emotional arc of V’s story in ways that the VA for masc V doesn’t, to the point that I’m truthfully less invested in my current playthrough (male street kid origin) than I was in my original (female corpo).
That said, everybody who did voice work in BG3 did fantastic in ways that have made other things I’ve touched feel hit-and-miss – I nearly dropped Avowed due to some early mid voice work making me worry about the overall quality – but Neil Newborn has been rightfully getting acclaim for Astarion, and you have to hand it to him – they gave him the character, but he was the one who decided “I’m gonna chew the scenery so hard I shit splinters” and made it work so damn well.
Kingdome Come 2 has great voice acting too. Some really funny characters (Adder is my favorite crazy Pollack) . They suffer from a lack of voice actors though so some characters have the same actor.
Legacy of Kain: Defiance. They got actual stage actors and real acting veterans to voice a lot of the major roles in that game. It feels like you’re playing through some epic dark fantasy movie because of it.
Also, it may sound weird, but some of the audio logs in Prototype 2 actually fucked me up because they did such an amazing job. The one that’s stuck with me the most is one you can find fairly early on in the game, where a mom is trying to stop a government soldier from shooting her son because he’s nonverbal (and therefore can’t “prove” he’s not infected), and it’s absolutely gut wrenching. I had to stop playing for a few minutes after I heard because it was so intense. Here’s the recording if any of you were curious.
Baldur’s Gate 3 ruined Solasta for me…
JK Simmons performance was absolute dogshit
Well dont play The Last of Us part 1/2 or it will ruin gaming for you.
