Stretch goal revealed - Famous actor/actress motion performance

Yes you are right. For English performing and Czech dubbing it would be better to have UK actors.

But I still hope they will do Czech performing and English dubbing. (Or even old czech/german performing.) Would be no loss for English speakers. Dubbing can be great.

Oh hehe, I meant famous actors/actresses. xD

would be much better then best actor voices…

Ok, so, basically this means:
English gets expensive Hollywood actors, lifelike performances and it’s also the reference for keeping the lip movement in synch;
Everyone else gets nothing of that fancy stuff; just the shit end of the stick?

why are you surprised? you don’t expect them to hire different sets of couple dozen actors to record the thousands of lines of dialog for every language right?

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[quote=“Cerberus, post:64, topic:9488”]
Ok, so, basically this means:English gets expensive Hollywood actors, lifelike performances and it’s also the reference for keeping the lip movement in synch;Everyone else gets nothing of that fancy stuff; just the shit end of the stick?
[/quote] I don’t understand how this is different from any other game? The cost of hiring talented actors for every single language would be extremely prohibitive.

For the option of coherent & authentic language (plus subs of course) which means incorporating lingua franca stuff and such right from the beginning. As someone pointed out in another thread (can’t remember the name) a mod couldn’t achieve this by putting together the voices from the different localizations because some actors have to speak two languages (lingua franca). Otherwise you would have two voices.
Additional expenses shouldn’t be that high as some people claimed because most of the languages will have a localized version anyway and all they need to do is record the “language overlapping” dialogues on top of that.

That’s quite a good suggestion. I do prefer the goal they have already announced, but that is very much a personal preference and as a native speaker of the english language I will obviously gain more from it than people who have learnt it as a second language.

Remember Mafia II?

The voice actors weren’t that famous (at least I didn’t knew them).
I think, they did a very good job. One guy voiced even multiple roles.

I’ve not played it unfortunately. :frowning: But I understand what you are saying and I don’t dispute the fact that even people who walk in off the street with little to no acting/voice-acting experience can give great performances.

Ok, that’s good :smiley:

I have to say, I really don’t like this stretch goal.

As I’ve mentioned previously and some others here appear to agree - I find the use of well known actors in this way to be very immersion breaking. I want to live and breath the game as Henry in his world; how is walking into a room, seeing a character and going ‘Oh look, it’s Sean Bean/Brian Blessed/John Cleese’ in any way not immersion breaking? It’s a slap in the face of the reality of the game world. It brings the player straight back into the reality of our world and IMO massively weakens the character - I don’t remember much about the ruler of Lake Town in the last Hobbit movie for e.g., other than he was Stephen Fry, playing himself,or rather one of his usual type-cast roles… Had it been an unknown, or at least a better disguised face the character would have retained his own personality, but no, it was just Stephen Fry ‘doing his thing.’

What made the announcement even worse for me is that not only do WH aim to hire a ‘star’ but want said person to play their usual stereotyped role and with a matching in-game appearance - This way it’ll be highly unlikely that I might not recognise them (in most other games that use big personalities I didn’t realise who was playing the part due to the character model not sharing the actor’s likeness, which was fine).

I don’t get WH’s thinking behind this decision, it really goes against what I thought the game was aiming for i.e. maximum immersion - Henry is told he must pass a message to the Duke, he reaches the castle and meets the man himself, ‘Well I’ll be damned’ says the player,’ if it isn’t famous actor XXXX, playing himself… as usual’ Duke’s personality - Out, Famous Actor’s personality and likeness - In. The Duke then becomes the famous actor rather than the other way round.

In honesty I’d actually prefer lesser quality voice acting to seeing big stars in the game. That’s how immersion breaking I find it (assuming visual facial likenesses are reproduced).

I wish the SG had simply been ‘money for a better voice acting cast.’ That I totally get, but a desire for recognisable big names and faces in the game - No thanks.

I’m not saying that WH weren’t transparent about their desire to use certain well known actors - I just don’t like the idea and to me it flies in the face of the immersion which they’re otherwise striving for.

Lean towards the side of having good voice actors that add immersion, rather than a famous voice. Whether I like them or not, but if I had to suggest one… Tony Robinson? I am confident he at least has a clever plan for the scripts.

The idea probably came from a thread from before the announced stretch goal where a number of people, myself included, named some of the actors we would enjoy seeing in KCD.

It seems again that this topic split the audience in to the half, at least the core audience of this forum. For the mainstream gamers it would be rather advantage to have some strong name in the cast and it could also sold several more pieces. Lot of you imagine this project as some hardcore European indie film, which may win several trophies on some film festivals for its authenticity and historical accuracy but end up with empty cinemas and few copies sold on DVD. Even though I like the idea to have this game as authentic and immersive as possible, I absolutely understand that WH have to balance the game to be accessible for mainstream. Because £3M worth game can’t be completely paid by history geeks only (considering myself as one). True is that the majority of gamers speak English, therefore it’s absolutely logical to have English cast to perform it (and for some of you this doesn’t mean cast from Hollywood. There are many great actors in GB and Ireland, mainly theatrical actors who are not famous from TV or films, but that doesn’t mean they are bad. Rather otherwise)
I love when films can play with different languages. Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards is good example of the film, where it works absolutely perfectly. But for this project this is too risky. Although I hope they will do at least some scenes with German nobles speaking in their native language. It would be really cool.

Yeah, plus they said that they’d love to get certain big names involved. I’m just saying that I don’t agree with that decision, and I don’t really see why people are so keen to see certain actors playing out their usual roles for the reasons mentioned in my post.

There must be loads of lesser known excellent actors that could make the roles their own without having the ‘Oh, it’s you’ effect. I don’t understand this need to see well known faces in the game. As I say, for me it lessens the experience and only confuses/dilutes the characters.

Actually I do think that the game should be in English as that will be the primary audience. Sub-titles don’t do it for me from an immersion perspective - Playing as Henry you’re a native of the area and thus fluent in the local language; forcing the player to look down at the bottom of the screen to translate dialogue (and miss out completely on additional background stuff) is much less realistic and immersive IMO. Am not sure how I feel about choice of accent, but the current selection of British is fine with me (maybe that’s because I am British though ;P).

Not wanting to see a perfect re-creation of Sean Bean or Patrick Stewart in-game doesn’t mean I want an art-house experience, just a more immersive one (IMO anyway). I also value high quality acting, all I’m saying is that IMO certain big names and their likenesses carry too much history with them to not detract from the character they’re portraying.

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