In a half-hearted attempt to uphold some kind of self-imposed standard I've been finishing off some older games I've not yet completed before diving into Skyrim. One of these games is Far Cry 2, a sandbox-style FPS that dumps you straight into the middle of a civil war in a mysterious country somewhere in Africa – and playing through it has got me thinking about audio design and voice acting in games in general…
In many ways Far Cry 2 is a great game. The design of the environment is amazing: there's nearly 50 square kilometres of terrain to explore, and it varies from desert to flatlands and towns to lush forests. There's a great sense of realism to the game: your map is displayed as a physical map held in your character's hand as you walk or drive; guns jam and breakdown; fire spreads through tinder-dry bush and lots of the things around you can be destroyed by gunfire or explosions.
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Far Cry 2's map interface
The audio design, for the most part, is really solid. The swish of tree branches and ferns as you press through a dense patch of foliage while sneaking round the back of an enemy outpost is lovely. The rumble and clatter of a jeep's tyres as you drive over a railway bridge or through a shallow ford is cool too.
So there's lots of nice stuff – but it's far from perfect. The driving and combat do get repetitive, the plot is badly told and the ever-spawning guards and vehicles get really annoying when you're travelling. But the thing that really broke the immersion for me was the voice acting. Along the way you talk to a variety of people, taking on missions and so on. Speech plays a large part in combat too, with your enemies shouting threats, pleas and manoeuvres to their buddies.
But the thing is, every character that you meet, from an idealistic journalist to interchangeable gangsters to the notorious arms dealer you're chasing, all sound like the actors just realised they left the gas on and have to get all their lines done in one go before jumping in the car and legging it off home. Any sense of drama, or character, or suspense, is pretty much destroyed as soon as you speak to anyone because they rip through their words without drawing a breath.
"Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah"
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Dialogue that has the potential to be interesting, if not award-winning, actually comes out as "You've got to help me I need to get out of this country my wife Mikala and my daughter we need to be on the plane we need to", as if all punctuation had been surgically removed.
Terrible voice acting in games is surprisingly common for an industry that routinely pumps literally millions and millions of pounds into development for any new title. It's virtually par for the course to play a new AAA game with however-many-trillion polygons and graphical whizzbangery to make your eyes explode but find that whenever anyone opens their mouth all that comes out is dialogue written by a programmer and acted by a second, slightly more socially awkward, programmer.
Some games, like the recent Deus Ex: Human Revolution, just about manage to get together a cast and people who can act. Having said that, although the standard is higher than FC2 it's still not great. Jensen, the player-character, a bad-ass cyborg Head of Security, comes off like a sulky emo kid a lot of the time, and there are a few truly terrible characters like Letitia.
Of course, not every game can turn in star performances, the way not every film is blessed with actors who can act. But the difference it makes to have quality characters and voice acting is immense.
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As an example of a game with great voice acting, Assassin's Creed 2 works pretty well. It's set in Renaissance Italy – a world of rooftop chases, secret guilds and conspiracies – and you play Ezio, a spoiled son and soon-to-be master assassin. A large part of the game is spent talking to people – mostly the usual gubbins about picking up quests, being given targets and so on – but the quality of the characters and the animations and voice acting supporting them is amazing.
Assassin's Creed 2's Ezio
The thought and effort that's gone into creating those characters really pays off, and I found myself actually caring about what happened to Ezio, rather than treating him as the usual silent, characterless cipher character so beloved by games. When he speaks, he gestures. He throws in words and phrases in Italian as he talks. He speaks in an Italian accent, which makes a real change from hearing generic American voices in games – the original Assassin's Creed, for example, used an American voice actor to play Altair, a medieval Middle Eastern assassin… and he ended up sounding just like Adam Jensen, the 21st Century robotised dude from Deus Ex.
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The difference between a game with good dialogue, acting and characters and one lacking the same qualities is the skip button. In Far Cry 2 and Deus Ex I ended up skipping a lot of the dialogue because I couldn't be bothered listening to characters hamming their way through line after line of tepid dialogue. I didn't really care about the characters, or their motivations – the only thing driving me on was the desire to finish the game, or to find out the next step in the story.
But Ezio, in AC2, is a pleasure to listen to. I've probably listened to over an hour of dialogue between him and various merchants, robbers and Leonardo da Vinci. I care about him. He's funny. He displays convincing emotions. He's a bit of a dick sometimes – but when he does so he seems like a selfish idiot, not just a plot device. Ultimately, he feels more like a real person, and less like the unconvincing, emotionless output of a bunch of programmers.
As games become more realistic, voice acting and characterisation are going to become more and more important in order to sustain belief in the stories that games want to tell. Let's hope that in future we get more people like Ezio and less people-shaped MacGuffins like Deus Ex's Jensen.