There's been a deep, unfortunate friction between voice actors and videogame studios, recently—the looming spectre of AI hangs large over everything, with some bigwigs salivating at the idea of getting infinite performances out of people without actually paying them.
That is, despite the fact that—aside from efforts so far mostly being bland as all hell, and confusing for the actual voice actors—players seem to have a deep appreciation for human performances. This is especially the case with Baldur's Gate 3, where performers like Neil Newbon and Amelia Tyler have gone on to become evangelists for the game.
Speaking with our friends over at GamesRadar during the Golden Joysticks, Karlach's VO, Samantha Béart, says they've noticed this discrepancy first hand: "There's a weird disconnect between, maybe, developers' attitude towards where we fit in the ecosystem—where we're not actually part of the team—versus the players, who very much see us as the forefront. More like film and TV.
Logistically, there is somewhat of a point behind that—Charlie Cox, voice of Gustave from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, has repeatedly gone on record to say that while he's happy to receive his laurels, he didn't spend all that much time in the recording booth; instead highlighting mocap actor Maxence Cazorla as a huge talent behind the character.
In other words, how involved an actor is in any given game is going to depend on the game itself. Baldur's Gate 3's cast did a huge amount of mocap work, and would often bounce ideas back and forth between their character writers in an involved process.
Other times, as was the case with Cox, you show up for a couple days' work, knock something out in the recording booth (something very, very good, mind—Cox is an exceptional actor), take your paycheck, and then get very confused when people ask you about your character, bless.
But it's also true that voice actors get hard done by, even before bosses at studios started claiming AI was fine because games apparently "don't really have acting", which is an actual sentence uttered by the CEO of Amazon Games.
As for how they push back against that brand of nonsense, Béart tells GamesRadar that: "I feel like we weaponize social media and algorithms to do that. Because I think we're still seen as outsources for a lot of the time."
