It’s the finest voice acting I ever seen.
So of course, as somebody already pointed out, those voices would fit better if the HECU actually looked like in HL1 (=arrogant pricks), but still, the decision of making it over the top rocked.
You can’t ask for it to be serious, because the first Half-Life isn’t totally a serious game. It’s a parody of that sort of movies where everything fucks up. There was plenty of black humor (the scientists’s screams, their idle lines asking who ate all the donuts, etc), and that’s what made the atmosphere so consistent.
The only reason the HECU’s voices didn’t look the same is because they wanted them to say a lot of stuff and they had to find a way to make this possible (using cut-off words to make dialogues) though you could still feel that intention of making them nonserious, by earing the 2 marines talking after they captured Freeman (A body ? What body ?)
Voice acting isn’t bad. However, the problem is that implementation of these voices are a bit off. For example, when a HECU marine gets gibbed, it shouldn’t yell :“ARGGEGEAGSDKFJKSF!!!” Also, there are times when it says things it shouldn’t, like the moment you enter a map, and they don’t see you yet, they still say:“DOOO IT” or “I’m tired of playing games, freeman!!”. The thing is that the soldiers say something every time you are in the same area as them, regardless if they see you or not. So it isn’t poor voice acting, just poor implementation (BM’s devs work is still amazing though)
I can’t believe I didn’t notice this until now, but it seems the soldiers never use the “hgrunt_young” voice for some reason. Or well, someone told me that medics use it, but howcome no others? It’s a shame, I prefer that voice over the tough guy voice that they decided to go with.
They should have stuck to the original design of making the young voice for generic soldiers and the tough guy voice for the squad leaders.
I think the voice acting is quite professional and nicely done, although it doesn’t quite fit in this dark and serious atmosphere of Black Mesa.
It’s like putting some comedian character in dramatic play.
I think the issue is that the actual actor isn’t capable of the deeper register that the soldiers demand. It’s not that he did a bad job, he just wasn’t the right guy. Like Kevin Sisk as Eli. We know he’s not a bad voice actor, we’ve seen his work as the Guards (and that other scientist in the chamber) and it’s fucking phenomenal. Just not the right guy.
I wonder what Nihilanth sounds like since HECU and nihilanth has the same actor, will it also be over the top?
Agreed on all counts.
(It’s a shame this didn’t occur to me sooner)[/SIZE]
The voice acting for the soldiers wasn’t that bad - Their voices ought to sound deeper with less emotion though, rather than cheesy. I agree that maybe the guy who did them wasn’t the right guy.
Nah, the Nihilanth is Kevin Sisk, and he’ll knock it out of the park. Some of the files are in BM still. It’s just breathing but you can tell it’s pretty much perfect.
I ended up replacing all the grunt lines with the young grunt lines, and I think the results are pretty satisfying. They don’t sound cold and calculating like they did in Half-Life, but they sound a lot more down-to-earth, and less like an 80’s B-movie stereotype at best, and children’s cartoon villains at worst.
Yeah, ironically the young soldier voices sound way better than the “gruff” ones.
They changed the young voices to gruff because people want the gasmasks to have a deep effect right ? (from ValveTime leak)
They changed the voices to gruff because that’s what they thought people wanted. It turns out that the people don’t know what the fuck they want and no one should listen to them.
I always likes the idea of the Commander having the gruff voice and everyone having younger voices, I dunno who or when it was decided to give everyone gruff voices. I don’t know if that’s still possible to do though, I’d try it but my skill at scripting doesn’t go passed editing variables in text files and adding lines to things (such as giving the vorts extra “alert” lines).
To anyone that doesn’t like how the devs made the voices too fake or unrealistic, I stumbled across this in Half-Life today. Totally forgot about it:
Could you tell me how you did that? I’d like to try it out.
It’s kinda tedious, I just went through and replaced each file manually, moved some sounds around to where they would fix, renamed a bunch of them, and made small edits to npc_sounds_human_shared.txt and npc_human_grunt.txt
I would just upload them for simplicity, but I don’t know if the devs would look down upon that, and getting in contact with any of them is pretty hard nowadays. :zip:
I just backed up the gruff ones and dragged the young ones over :S
edit: that sounds horrible out of context.
There’s a lot of lines that don’t match up, gruff has more lines in some areas whereas young has more lines in others. I moved some things around to make them all match up nicely. Moving everything over works, but not perfectly, which is why I did it one by one.