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Clarste posted:Apparently, Torque's VA wasn't even told she was a snake and she didn't find out until the game was released. isnt this the kind of thing you would ask if you were a sensible person? like "hey im doing acting, maybe i should know what it is i am acting as"
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May 20, 2020 01:57
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Verviticus posted:isnt this the kind of thing you would ask if you were a sensible person? like "hey im doing acting, maybe i should know what it is i am acting as" If the NA VA industry was a well-treated industry and not a blight of NDAs, yes
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May 20, 2020 02:18
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Verviticus posted:isnt this the kind of thing you would ask if you were a sensible person? like "hey im doing acting, maybe i should know what it is i am acting as" You're dangerously close to learning that VA talent often isn't treated particularly well, or given competent direction and clear context. NA companies prefer squandering a budget on a couple high-profile names for the first act who probably disappear from the plot soon after.
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May 20, 2020 02:29
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Verviticus posted:isnt this the kind of thing you would ask if you were a sensible person? like "hey im doing acting, maybe i should know what it is i am acting as" The VA herself has actually said she thought it was the right call to not bring it up. Sometimes you want to emphasize different angles for a role. If you say a character's a serial killer, that might make an actor read more sinister and ominous, but if the serial killer in question is Carcer Dun, you want a tone of cheery innocence that the actor thinking "serial killer" might sabotage. Likewise, calling out that Torque's a space snake would make it more likely she'd sound like any random snake alien instead of like the bratty rear end in a top hat member of the team. It can lead to a more generic performance. (You get something similar from Taro Yoko sometimes, where he gives the character designers false briefs on the character. It means you get people who stand out from their role in a way that makes them more memorable.)
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May 20, 2020 02:38
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yeah that all makes sense
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May 20, 2020 03:16
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Verviticus posted:isnt this the kind of thing you would ask if you were a sensible person? like "hey im doing acting, maybe i should know what it is i am acting as" Now you know why a lot of voice acting is awful in a lot of games: it's hard to act out a character that you have no idea about, or the setting, or anything outside of the lines that need to be read. I think one of the VO's from Fallout 4 was explaining that it's cheaper for a company not to tell voice actors what role or even what game they are reading for because, if they they find out it's a big-budget or popular franchise, they can negotiate a higher salary for the role. The best voice actors are the one's that can find out what game they are VO'ing for and the role by what is in the script and adjust their strategies accordingly. So yeah capitalism is basically the problem.
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May 20, 2020 03:19
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Entorwellian posted:Now you know why a lot of voice acting is awful in a lot of games: it's hard to act out a character that you have no idea about, or the setting, or anything outside of the lines that need to be read. I think one of the VO's from Fallout 4 was explaining that it's cheaper for a company not to tell voice actors what role or even what game they are reading for because, if they they find out it's a big-budget or popular franchise, they can negotiate a higher salary for the role. Video game marketing is also extremely paranoid about leaks so actors will sometimes basically get censored scripts where only their own lines are in there - as in they don't even get to see the other half of the conversation they're having.
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May 20, 2020 03:23
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Same deal with translators, btw. They get told nothing about the game or the characters other than the specific lines of text they're working on.
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May 20, 2020 03:23
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I have to hand it to whoever's doing support on Chimera Squad for 2K. I put in a ticket about the Sacred Coil finale bug where reinforcements down spawn, and the response I got back was personalized, specific, and actually pretty helpful. The suggestions didn't work, but I appreciate the effort.
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May 20, 2020 05:16
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Bizarre Echo posted:I have to hand it to whoever's doing support on Chimera Squad for 2K. I put in a ticket about the Sacred Coil finale bug where reinforcements down spawn, and the response I got back was personalized, specific, and actually pretty helpful. The suggestions didn't work, but I appreciate the effort. Dang, wouldn't have thought they cared. That gives hope that there might actually be a patch one day?
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May 20, 2020 05:26
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Bizarre Echo posted:I have to hand it to whoever's doing support on Chimera Squad for 2K. I put in a ticket about the Sacred Coil finale bug where reinforcements down spawn, and the response I got back was personalized, specific, and actually pretty helpful. The suggestions didn't work, but I appreciate the effort. i sent them 3 videos showing how my agents fired on the wrong enemy. (i want to shoot the beserker but it targets the viper instead) and i got a canned response back quote:Thanks for reaching out to 2K Support. I'm sorry to hear about your agents not following orders in XCOM: Chimera Squad, lets take a look into this. The link tells me basic things like how to setup DirectX... I can run the drat game assholes.
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May 20, 2020 05:35
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Entorwellian posted:Now you know why a lot of voice acting is awful in a lot of games: it's hard to act out a character that you have no idea about, or the setting, or anything outside of the lines that need to be read. I think one of the VO's from Fallout 4 was explaining that it's cheaper for a company not to tell voice actors what role or even what game they are reading for because, if they they find out it's a big-budget or popular franchise, they can negotiate a higher salary for the role. that isn't at all what he said, he talked about peoples' paranoia with marketing leaks. voice actors generally get paid by their own fame and the size/intensity of the role ('voice' actors also frequently lend their mocap to the role, especially in something like FO4) regardless of what franchise it is. fresh franchises (like Binary Domain) get hit up just as hard because the demands put on the actors are extreme. also lmao at yet another bullshit political nonsequitur, keep up that fight on internet forums budd
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May 20, 2020 06:21
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Somehow the capitalism defender in a thread about a game about how bad capitalism has... logged on?? edit: and is the OP?!
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May 20, 2020 06:23
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fuckin yikes dude
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May 20, 2020 06:24
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Hi I'm here to talk about shooting aliens in the face and missing 95% shots. Um, what is this topic that's currently going on because I don't understand it, like trying to understand something alien, and missing the point 95% of the time?
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May 20, 2020 08:33
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BobTheJanitor posted:Yeah you have to accept the occasional bit of jank with custom maps, but it's usually worth it for the novelty of playing in unusual surroundings. There’s a WOTC city map with a kind of sewer space in the middle which i love,tons of height between buildings and a huge gully which i think isn’t used much at all.
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May 20, 2020 08:34
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Entorwellian posted:Now you know why a lot of voice acting is awful in a lot of games: it's hard to act out a character that you have no idea about, or the setting, or anything outside of the lines that need to be read. FWIW, the same is true of localization. I've been told some outfits work differently, but all of the companies & games I've worked on (almost exclusively MMOs, admittedly) send you a giant database of to-be translated text, pell mell. If you're lucky you get a db called "powers.db" that only has spell names & descriptions in it, and a "quests.db" that's only quest journal stuff etc ; giving you a bit of context on what you're stepping into. But mostly what you get is a giant set of daily/weekly files containing *all* of the text written for the game/patch so far, sentence by sentence, in semi-random order of writing (or possibly by writer ? Who knows...). You'd think a flowing dialogue arborescence would follow logically on eg lines 20 to 70 (with all the prompts and questions and answers and exposition & so on ; then on to the next discrete dialogue) but nope. If somebody rewrote a line or added missing punctuation or whatever, the "new" sentence gets its new line at the end of the file (or, better yet, a different file) because that's just proper version control, son. Sometimes on line 1750 you realize you're translating a reply to that question from line 32, and it's actually addressed to a woman so you redo all the pronouns. Sometimes you get an ambiguous item (or monster, who knows ?) name without any context whatsoever. For (real life) example : line 3762 : "Dwarven Spirits". End of. Is it booze or ghosts ? You'll know if and when QA testers (or, yanno, end state players) complain you did a poo poo job a drunken monkey could have done better. Sometimes it's even worse and you get to translate modal adjectives/pronouns/nouns snipped clean out of the sentences they're meant to be inserted in (because the sentence is "Hail my (X) (Y) !" on line 2492 and each of the possibilities for X/Y depending on the player's race/gender/title/class are on lines 4700 to 4800 of another file that may or may not have been farmed out to the same translator) which works fine in English (or Mandarin, I expect ?) but turns wonky in any language with declensions or genders. You're also paid with a slingshot, naturally. At least for English => Any Language - this because everybody speaks (or thinks they speak) English and translation companies are more than happy to hire freelance guys fresh out of highschool with no experience (nor, often enough, a vague notion of what spelling entails) to do the bulk of the work for loose sofa cushion change they're told are "standard business rates" (lol, try half to 1/4th of what you'd get translating in any other specialized field). There's always more supereager young'uns to shove through the grinder until they burn out or realize they're being exploited, after all. Then the file is sent out to trusted (or in-house) proof-readers who are *also* paid chump change because "it's just proof-reading, not translation work" even though you basically have to rewrite every other line... Again, I've been told it's different for big budget titles and big name franchises where everything needs to be super-polished on release day ; but I quit the biz before getting assigned to one of those. All of this to say : if you ever spot a ginormous mistranslation in a game you're playing, assume the guy who wrote it had no bleeding clue what that was all about to begin with.
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May 20, 2020 08:37
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Serephina posted:Hi I'm here to talk about shooting aliens in the face and missing 95% shots. Um, what is this topic that's currently going on because I don't understand it, like trying to understand something alien, and missing the point 95% of the time? You miss 100% of the shots you dont take. And 95% of the ones you do.
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May 20, 2020 08:43
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Kobal2 posted:FWIW, the same is true of localization. Just the other day I got a file that was all dialog, except all the lines were arranged in alphabetical order by speaker, instead of following any kind of narrative order. So I had to basically just guess what they were responding to or what the topic was. This is pretty normal. The way I see it, most people/companies see translation as a purely mechanical affair: input text in one end and text gets output on the other end. Like a photocopier. It's not a job for a "human" that requires creativity or understanding of context, it's a job that can and should be done by a machine yet for some bizarre reason no one's invented that machine yet (I wonder why?). So instead they just grab random people off the street and pay them less than minimum wage (because you're a contractor, not an employee), and then go ahead and treat them like they're machines. Whatever the case, they are absolutely not to be included in the creative process in any way, and will not definitely not have their name in the credits. Even though they will determine the public face of your work for the majority of its audience.
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May 20, 2020 09:02
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Chronojam posted:You're dangerously close to learning that VA talent often isn't treated particularly well, or given competent direction and clear context. NA companies prefer squandering a budget on a couple high-profile names for the first act who probably disappear from the plot soon after. ...And its not just games VA who are more or less thrown out the door if they start asking questions or in general are told next to nothing about their character or the movie behind the characters. Ed O'Neill (Al Bundy/Jay Pritchet actor) admitted in one interview that he had no idea he was playing one of the main characters in Pixar's "Finding Dory", although after a while he started to suspect something when he kept getting more and more recording sessions and new lines.
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May 20, 2020 10:06
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Clarste posted:Just the other day I got a file that was all dialog, except all the lines were arranged in alphabetical order by speaker, instead of following any kind of narrative order. So I had to basically just guess what they were responding to or what the topic was. This is pretty normal. Listening to 8-4's podcast, it really does seem to vary by studio. Sometimes you get that, other times they actually have back and forth where the studio talks about what they wanted from the game's dialogue and how to best achieve it. Apparently, the Armstrong speech in Revengeance actually got some changes in the Japanese version after Platinum liked what they saw from the English localization. Although it's not universal, it does seem like bigger budget releases are more likely to try to make sure their localization teams are kept in the loop. Meanwhile, smaller releases are lucky to have translations at all.
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May 20, 2020 12:35
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The Cheshire Cat posted:Video game marketing is also extremely paranoid about leaks so actors will sometimes basically get censored scripts where only their own lines are in there - as in they don't even get to see the other half of the conversation they're having. There was a reason in the guild strike a couple of years ago part of the terms were 'tell us about the character we're playing.' You also hear stories where they're not actually given any direction as to personality so they have to make it up on the fly. The industry likes to pay out for big voice actors but not so much big voice direction. Synthbuttrange posted:You miss 100% of the shots you dont take. I'm sure we've all had soldiers we got attached to in our runs and my first one from XCOM: EU was a female sniper who despite high ground and such would regularly miss her 95% shots but make the crazy 25% shots from downtown. Whatever nickname the game gave her was I forget, but her nickname was Jinx.
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May 20, 2020 12:59
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chiasaur11 posted:Listening to 8-4's podcast, it really does seem to vary by studio. Sometimes you get that, other times they actually have back and forth where the studio talks about what they wanted from the game's dialogue and how to best achieve it. Yeah, I will say that some studios are more hands-on about this stuff - maybe The Suck happens when it's a third party publisher handling all the localization for a dozen games and they just ain't give a poo poo ? Or, conversely, things are more better when it's a big publisher that has a dedicated localization department which groks how translation actually works handles all that, as opposed to when it's codeheads at the studio who get tasked with organizing the docs, which they seem to be doing along programmer logic rather than language-speaking-person logic ? I really couldn't say, and I didn't work with enough different studios/publishers/translation companies to formulate a General Theory of Suckdom. But I do remember that when I worked on the Champions Online beta we did get sent a ton of helpful stuff, notably the .dbs were full of helpful comments explaining what this or that text snippet was for, or which character was saying this line to whomst in what tone. There was also a daily feedback .db where us translation monkeys could post up problematic/ambiguous lines or open questions, and the writers got back to us pretty quickly. They even sent us a ton of RPG sourcebooks and worldbuilding docs, since the game is based on an established PnP franchise. Because the deadlines were really tight I never really had the time to do more than quickly flip through them, but I thought it was a really nice touch.
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May 20, 2020 13:50
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I find it wild when a voice acted game still has poor translation. Although in that case it's rarely a complete nonsensical mess, it's usually something like stilted sentence construction or awkward grammar. Or not using contractions in normal conversation, which is like an uncanny valley for speech. It's all stuff that's not technically wrong, but sounds weird. And sometimes the VAs will just massage it a bit and put contractions back in or adjust the sentence structure around so it sounds like normal speech, and then it just doesn't match the subtitles. But then some don't, and just read it straight. I always wonder if they just don't care as long as they get that paycheck, or if they've got a director somewhere that's forcing them to follow along exactly, even when it sounds like an alien in a human skin suit.
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May 20, 2020 18:09
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Synthbuttrange posted:You miss 100% of the shots you dont take. 
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May 20, 2020 18:29
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BobTheJanitor posted:And sometimes the VAs will just massage it a bit and put contractions back in or adjust the sentence structure around so it sounds like normal speech, and then it just doesn't match the subtitles. But then some don't, and just read it straight. I always wonder if they just don't care as long as they get that paycheck, or if they've got a director somewhere that's forcing them to follow along exactly, even when it sounds like an alien in a human skin suit. I imagine quite a few of them don't even have the chance to ask. You get your lines, you get told to do it, you do it. There isn't an opportunity to put questions back up the chain like "did you meant to use the word manifest here instead of manifesto?" and too late, VA script is locked because there's a ship date to hit so just do it like specifically for some games I've played the developers aren't native English speakers to start, so translation is done by another team, and then they release in multiple languages simultaneously. The lead time for all that means the time to question that script line was six months before the VA ever saw it, by which point it's far too late for the VA, the last person in that list, to raise the question nobody else did that whole process.
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May 20, 2020 18:37
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other times the lovely translation and awkward wording is the point see also: E! D! F! E! D! F!
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May 20, 2020 19:27
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Coolguye posted:other times the lovely translation and awkward wording is the point giant insects
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May 20, 2020 19:35
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Coolguye posted:other times the lovely translation and awkward wording is the point Yeah for all they know the character IS a human in an alien skin suit. Or a snake lady
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May 20, 2020 19:36
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Kobal2 posted:FWIW, the same is true of localization. This post are sick
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May 20, 2020 19:43
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The redraw meme's been going everywhere else so why not XCOM too? https://twitter.com/Athorist/status/1263052670245494784
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May 20, 2020 20:32
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Clarste posted:Presumably she managed to figure out that she was a maneating alien from context, just not a snake I guess. I don't know what you're talking about. Torque is a perfectly normal earth woman.
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May 20, 2020 21:31
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Doesn’t torque have lines about eating rats? I’d love to see the human cop she thought she was playing, a racist maniac down in a basement gobbling fistfuls of vermin.
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May 20, 2020 22:30
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She voices futaba, that sounds normal
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May 20, 2020 22:31
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Eau de MacGowan posted:Doesn’t torque have lines about eating rats? I’d love to see the human cop she thought she was playing, a racist maniac down in a basement gobbling fistfuls of vermin. I mean, she has a whole conversation about eating Canadians.
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May 20, 2020 23:53
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If they taste like maple syrup, I'd eat 'em too!
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May 21, 2020 00:10
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Clarste posted:I mean, she has a whole conversation about eating Canadians. "So how did they taste?" "Eh"
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May 21, 2020 00:11
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Coolguye posted:other times the lovely translation and awkward wording is the point  I can't believe they created such fearsome machineries! This might really be the end of the humankind.
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May 21, 2020 02:12
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They look just like us!
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May 21, 2020 02:19
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Clarste posted:Just the other day I got a file that was all dialog, except all the lines were arranged in alphabetical order by speaker, instead of following any kind of narrative order. So I had to basically just guess what they were responding to or what the topic was. This is pretty normal. I think it was Oblivion that pretty notoriously did this with their script for the VAs to read out. Just brought them into the booth with a huge list of lines organized alphabetically, and had them robotically go down the list reading each one. Hence why some of the line reads sound a bit schizophrenic - because they may have recorded two lines that were right next to each other in the conversation on completely different days.
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May 21, 2020 02:40
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