As well-voiced as the scripted sequences in Black Mesa were, I felt that given the massive community resource it was not necessary for all of the security guards to sound like Barney or for all the scientists to sound like Kleiner. In Half-Life, all of the security guards looked the same, so a common voice was welcome - the same goes for the scientists. Given the technology with which the developers have availed themselves for unique character creation it seems to me that not giving an individual voice to these individual characters was a wasted opportunity. This is especially evident in sequences that, although being beautifully and interestingly written, lose immersion by involving two or more characters with the same voice. I really do love the game, and I hate to whinge about it, but I felt that this was worth discussing given the potential for a huge range of community voice acting. This would have been a change for good, since a major flaw Half-life 1 as compared to its sequel was the lack of uniquely designed and voiced characters.
There could have been a reason for the lack of variety, but I don’t know what it could be. I agree that I would have liked a wider array of voices, but we’d need to wait for an official answer on the matter. I’d understand if it was about being similar to HL1, but, as you say, it was understandable back then…
At least Eli could have been done better. I find it hard to believe that the best voice actors for Eli and the security guards being the same person was coincidental. This is all to say that I don’t think Eli was voiced as well as he could have been and indeed needed to be given the importance of that character.
Coordinating the quality control for that would be quite difficult. Only people with good equipment would be able to even be considered because it’s already difficult enough to sonically match recordings made on differing equipment of good quality, not to mention different acoustics.
On top of that, you would have to throw out everyone that isn’t a good actor or have a convincing voice.
I would much rather have a few well presented voices than a variety of poor ones. And doing the process I described above would maybe yield 2-4 more voice actors at best. That’s a lot of work for a handful of extra talent.
I’ve been trying to find an eli. To no avail.
It’s not easy, bread. It’s not easy.
Agreed as a voice actor I’ve been trying to get Eli Right forever it seems. Very difficult. Also I think what’s in BM is quite fantastic- grows on me each play through. Taking an iconic voice and reproducing it is one thing (and hard at that) taking that same voice and aging it down as well- much harder.
I’m going to swoop in here right now and point out that all the male citizen characters in Half-Life 2 are voiced by only two guys. Most of them sound pretty much identical. All the female citizens are voiced by one woman.
I feel it’s better to have one or two consistently good generic voices rather than produce subjective variation that may not be as convincing or as well performed.
I found the voicing of the Barneys and the Scientists to be very striking and true to the original, variation was not important in my opinion. It didn’t break immersion.
I find the voice acting in Black Mesa really great and impressive. Only the lack of variety disturbs me. So i totally agree with the original poster. i also complained about that in another thread here.
it disturbed me already in the original Half Life 14 years ago, altogether with the repetitive appearance of the npcs.
I guess 3 or 4 another voice actors would make it perfect.
My voice acting opinion on BM -
Liked: security guards, scientists. I really wasn’t bothered by the lack of variety - it’s kind of nostalgic in a way. Kleiner was spot on. And I thought Catz did excellent work as the tram/PA voice.
Didn’t care for: HECU (kind of hokey), Eli (not convincing).
The danger here is that there is almost nothing more potentially damaging to a game/mod than poor voice acting. If BM had poor VA across the board, it could have done everything else majestically and still people would be lukewarm in their overall opinions because VA is just impossible to ignore or overlook. The quality of any effort is always measured and limited by its weakest component.
On top of that, any community effort would likely end up having to reject 90% of the submissions that were even serious to begin with if a high standard were to be maintained, as amateur level contributors tend to dramatically overestimate their capabilities. And as was mentioned above, sound quality (environment, acoustics, equipment) tend to take a heavy toll as well.
All things considered, BM may be best off as it is now.
Who voiced the Klenier?
There was an issue where two scientists in the starting labs are having a conversation and they both have exactly the same voice.
It brought a grin to my face.
I think the scientist voices were fantastic, I never thought it’s a problem that they’re all the same… However, I find that the marines’ voices were far too silly and exaggerated, it wasn’t like that in the original. Also, the tram voice at the start: while it was good, it didn’t have the same depth and official feel as the original, it just sounded like a normal person speaking. In HL1, the tram voice was a like a super-sci-fi ultra modern announcement system, while in BM it’s quite normal. Not a big deal, really, just thought it kind of stuck out. It’s probably something to do with the post-processing of the voice, not the recorded voice itself.
Soldados sound similar to how ‘Snake’ (or Big Boss) sounds when he talks 
Judging by the way they speak, I can tell that it was done on purpose to emphasize the “bad, trying to be cool, guy”. I do agree however, that it would be much better if H.E.C.U soldados had deeper and lower voices and were more bass-y rather than whispering out air… I don’t know how to explain it.
But I can live with the current voices anyway
They dont have specific lines assigned to specific guards. All the guards pull lines from a general pool. So if you have more than one person doing the voice overs for the guards, then at any moment you could have the guard say a line, and 30 seconds later, he sounds like a different person entirely when he says a different line.
HL1 had a system where individual scientists would randomly have their voice’s pitch slightly lowered or heightened to make things a bit more varied, as I recall.
IIRC, the team tried that and it didn’t turn out as well as it did in HL. Probably because of the sound quality being higher or engine limitations.
Honestly, I didn’t have a problem with any of the voice acting. The small team actually did a wide array of voices, changing the pitch, accents, and tonal range of the base archetypes for individual characters in their performances for most scripted scenes involving multiple NPCs of the same type.
I thought Kevin Sisk did a great job as Eli. It’s a pretty distinctive and hard-to-replicate voice, and he got the accent at least down very well.
fuck no
The one voice item that I was very glad to hear included in BMS:
“They’re waiting for you, Gordon…in the tessst chamberrrrrr.”
To have more than one scientist voice or more than one guard voice would have meant they would have had to hand pick and assign lines to each and every guard. Otherwise you would have multiple ‘voices’ coming from the same guard.
Nice idea to have different voices, but it just didnt make sense in the long run to do it that way.
This is a pity, because I would really love to hear more of that voice from the “test chamberrr” scientist in other scientist NPCs.