I’m playing Toonstruck at the moment. Christopher Lloyd was one of the early pioneers acting in computer games, and he gives everything! The game is so much fun!
Mark Hamill is an accomplished VA in his own right. It makes sense that he’d eventually be in games. No one really cares that he used to be Luke Skywalker.
This was already a thing back in the ‘90s. Several games had actors in them, it was a sign of the times because it hadn’t been done before. After the exuberance wore off we got more professional voice actors to do parts. Guess it’s back in style again.
I’d prefer them to converge from Baldur’s Gate 3 direction. Cast more or less established voice actors and give them the hype and marketing space usually found among movie/tv stars. “films and games converge” yea, when we treat a 200hour computer game the way we treat a long tv series and acknowledge the actors’ contribution on the same level.
I absolutely agree. Every single voice actor from the main party of BG3 was stellar (including the narrator), while J.K. Simmons seemed to be bored while recording his lines and Jason Isaacs was good but nothing extraordinary.
Games aren’t supposed to be films. Set up a setting where your game is taking place and a reason for you to do what you’re doing and then shut the fuck up. Original Doom. Old Mario games. So many classic, real games only care about the gameplay and not all this damn story that is a diversion these days from the actual gameplay. No wonder modern gaming is trash.
You want a game that’s a movie? Just make a damn movie. Problem solved. Get overblown, intrusive story trash out of videogames. Do you want to stop playing chess after every other move and be forced to watch part of some medieval war drama unfold before continuing? No? Then why the fuck do you want story in videogames?
I find that I can connect with characters more in a video game than a movie. It’s interaction on a different level.
I agree that some games want you to overlook poor game play for their story, but many people enjoy games with stories so I don’t see that going away any time soon.
It has negatively affected games for years by creating a world where “games” are style over substance trash that care more about gimmicks and story and other trash than the game itself. There is a very tiny pool of actual gaming left, but when you compare that to games back when games were, you know, actually games, when nearly every single game that came out was an actual game and not 5000 hours of boring, who the fuck cares story, gaming was better. That’s right, it was. And maybe, just maybe, if you go back in your gaming history and play actual games with actual effort made into making the game part fun and next to zero effort put on stupid, worthless, pointless, waste of time story, you’d understand this.
Video games are a combination of all other traditional artistic mediums. As such, they can express their different mediums in different amounts and are the most flexible in their execution.
You like the kind that are heavier on the gameplay side, individual personalities or even mood will dictate what game you might enjoy most at any given time. You may one day find a more story driven game that connects with you on a personal level more than Mario could, unless you’re counting nostalgia.
Why couldn’t they just make that story driven game into a book, or movie, or TV show? THREE TYPES OF MEDIA exists for story and people want to push that into videogames. How does that make any fucking sense?
I play games to PLAY A GAME, not have something “connect with [me] on a personal level”. Maybe you should re-think why you play videogames in the first place.
As a video game you control it, you can explore the world, you can increase or decrease the pace, you can blow through for a surface level casual experience, or you could find collectibles or logs that may expand on world lore, the type of stuff that is either wholesale more thoroughly expected from a book, or cut from a movie for pacing, these things can now be in a player’s control on a case by case and player by player basis.
Parts of a story can be affected by choice, even when heavily scripted. Spoilers for The Last of Us, but near the end Joel is required by by the story to get Ellie back from the Fireflies, and you can justify his motivations for what he has to do to yourself or not, but at the peak moment where he actually finds her, after killing endless soldiers that fired upon him, he encounters surgeons who were about to work on Ellie. The player can decide for themselves whether they kill the surgeons or let them live, and not in a dialogue option way, but just based on whether you actually shoot them or not, and that choice can say things about both the player or possibly the player’s mental image of Joel.
That’s a relatively small example, but only video games can provide these sorts of small divergences in experience affected by player choice, and of course that experience is altered in the tv show version of that game, because its not possible to deliver it in the same way.
You play games to experience a mechanical challenge or expression of your intent and skill, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t go to games to experience story, whether that’s a mostly pre-written experience like The Last of Us, or a story told by the player’s statiscal build and gameplay choices, like Mount & Blade.
Even something you’d expect to be heavily pre-written, like a visual novel, can break the normal flow of time and events to allow or even require you to revisit previous sections and allow new choices that change the path and ending of the game, like 999.
What you consider the ideal video game just isn’t what everybody does, and that’s awesome because video games are such a massive and malleable medium that they can accommodate for all of that. You can enjoy Doom and Super Meat Boy, and other people can enjoy Phoenix Wright and Dear Esther. There’s no art police that said three types of mediums are enough or ideal to express everything, the market and humanity decide that, and we decided collectively that video games can do story in new and interesting ways, too.
I swear, people use “gatekeeping” as a weasel word to mean “THIS KIND OF RATIONAL THOUGHT GOES AGAINST MY PROGRAMMED VIEW OF THE WORLD BOOOHOOO!” You don’t “gatekeep” videogames by saying gaming is about actual gaming and not some horrible amalgamation of a poorly done game and some failed writer’s self-insert fantasy power trip forced on people every five steps you make in a “game”.
Take a deep breath and re-think your position. Games aren’t meant to have overblown, intrusive stories. They suffer from them.
…role playing games - y’know, the ones where you play a character and a story happens around them - are older than video games and, in fact, are some of the oldest video games. Saying story doesn’t belong in games is a disservice to the medium of games, both video and tabletop.
A “story” can happen around a character as long as it’s contained within the context of the game itself (show, don’t tell). But when you bring the game to a screeching halt and have a bunch of flapping mouths spouting exposition for hours on end, THAT DOES NOT BELONG IN A VIDEOGAME.
Gotta monetise to the max that personal brand recognition!
(Whilst in a video game like that I do expect his work was proper acting rather than merelly being famous, he’s still the one there doing it for the big $$$ rather than somebody else because of brand recognition: as in my personal experience there are tons of just as good actors in Britain who simply are not widelly known, as Britain has a massive thing for Theatre thus good acting schools and lots of people going into performing arts).
Big, well known actors in video games have been a thing for a long time now? I remember games from the 90’s that had actors like James Earl Jones, Tim Curry, Bill Paxton, Randy Quaid, and so many more growing up.
What’s interesting is, it doesn’t seem like it’s expanded or shrunk. Most games don’t hire big actors, but a handful of huge budget, AAA things do. There’s also big range in how good these actors are in the game… JK Simmons, for example, was awesome as Cave Johnson in Portal; but his performance in Baldur’s Gate 3 is, by far, the worst in the entire game IMO.
It makes sense for those who are big enough in the Game Industry (which is now several times the size of the Movie Industry in terms of revenue) to try and do the same as movies and leverage that sweet brand recognition of celebrity actors to sell more copies of the game.
However I suspect it doesn’t work quite the same in practice as the “main character in the story” in games is almost invariably the player him/herself and those famous names will never be more than secondary characters with limited interaction possibilities.
They could do the cyberpunk or fallout 4 thing. Have Keanu Reeves in your head, or get someone known to voice the protagonist (only unlike fo4 in that the PC VAs are otherwise unknown afaik).
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I’m playing Toonstruck at the moment. Christopher Lloyd was one of the early pioneers acting in computer games, and he gives everything! The game is so much fun!
Tim Curry in Red Alert
23 will always be the classic thoughSPACE
3*
removed by mod
Some of the best performances in some of the best ever games.
Mark Hamill is an accomplished VA in his own right. It makes sense that he’d eventually be in games. No one really cares that he used to be Luke Skywalker.
deleted by creator
This was already a thing back in the ‘90s. Several games had actors in them, it was a sign of the times because it hadn’t been done before. After the exuberance wore off we got more professional voice actors to do parts. Guess it’s back in style again.
Tim curry did his best work in red-alert 2
If anything could be said about that is that’s most probably an event that happened in time.
Mark Hamill in Wing Commander III, released in 1994.
With Malcolm McDowell and John Rhys-Davies.
I’d prefer them to converge from Baldur’s Gate 3 direction. Cast more or less established voice actors and give them the hype and marketing space usually found among movie/tv stars. “films and games converge” yea, when we treat a 200hour computer game the way we treat a long tv series and acknowledge the actors’ contribution on the same level.
I absolutely agree. Every single voice actor from the main party of BG3 was stellar (including the narrator), while J.K. Simmons seemed to be bored while recording his lines and Jason Isaacs was good but nothing extraordinary.
As long as they are good voice actors too, sure. Otherwise, we have a Mortal Kombat situation on our hands.
Popular actors in cyberpunk 2077 are the worst part of it IMO, I’d much rather have those characters sport a face I haven’t seen a thousand times.
Yeah game companies are using an actor’s credibility to shill their rushed trash. See Cyberpunk
Games aren’t supposed to be films. Set up a setting where your game is taking place and a reason for you to do what you’re doing and then shut the fuck up. Original Doom. Old Mario games. So many classic, real games only care about the gameplay and not all this damn story that is a diversion these days from the actual gameplay. No wonder modern gaming is trash.
You want a game that’s a movie? Just make a damn movie. Problem solved. Get overblown, intrusive story trash out of videogames. Do you want to stop playing chess after every other move and be forced to watch part of some medieval war drama unfold before continuing? No? Then why the fuck do you want story in videogames?
Don’t yuck my yum
I find that I can connect with characters more in a video game than a movie. It’s interaction on a different level.
I agree that some games want you to overlook poor game play for their story, but many people enjoy games with stories so I don’t see that going away any time soon.
I mean, games can be more than one thing. It’s not like putting actors in AAA games is gonna delete Factorio or something.
It has negatively affected games for years by creating a world where “games” are style over substance trash that care more about gimmicks and story and other trash than the game itself. There is a very tiny pool of actual gaming left, but when you compare that to games back when games were, you know, actually games, when nearly every single game that came out was an actual game and not 5000 hours of boring, who the fuck cares story, gaming was better. That’s right, it was. And maybe, just maybe, if you go back in your gaming history and play actual games with actual effort made into making the game part fun and next to zero effort put on stupid, worthless, pointless, waste of time story, you’d understand this.
Video games are a combination of all other traditional artistic mediums. As such, they can express their different mediums in different amounts and are the most flexible in their execution.
You like the kind that are heavier on the gameplay side, individual personalities or even mood will dictate what game you might enjoy most at any given time. You may one day find a more story driven game that connects with you on a personal level more than Mario could, unless you’re counting nostalgia.
Why couldn’t they just make that story driven game into a book, or movie, or TV show? THREE TYPES OF MEDIA exists for story and people want to push that into videogames. How does that make any fucking sense?
I play games to PLAY A GAME, not have something “connect with [me] on a personal level”. Maybe you should re-think why you play videogames in the first place.
As a video game you control it, you can explore the world, you can increase or decrease the pace, you can blow through for a surface level casual experience, or you could find collectibles or logs that may expand on world lore, the type of stuff that is either wholesale more thoroughly expected from a book, or cut from a movie for pacing, these things can now be in a player’s control on a case by case and player by player basis.
Parts of a story can be affected by choice, even when heavily scripted. Spoilers for The Last of Us, but near the end Joel is required by by the story to get Ellie back from the Fireflies, and you can justify his motivations for what he has to do to yourself or not, but at the peak moment where he actually finds her, after killing endless soldiers that fired upon him, he encounters surgeons who were about to work on Ellie. The player can decide for themselves whether they kill the surgeons or let them live, and not in a dialogue option way, but just based on whether you actually shoot them or not, and that choice can say things about both the player or possibly the player’s mental image of Joel.
That’s a relatively small example, but only video games can provide these sorts of small divergences in experience affected by player choice, and of course that experience is altered in the tv show version of that game, because its not possible to deliver it in the same way.
You play games to experience a mechanical challenge or expression of your intent and skill, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t go to games to experience story, whether that’s a mostly pre-written experience like The Last of Us, or a story told by the player’s statiscal build and gameplay choices, like Mount & Blade.
Even something you’d expect to be heavily pre-written, like a visual novel, can break the normal flow of time and events to allow or even require you to revisit previous sections and allow new choices that change the path and ending of the game, like 999.
What you consider the ideal video game just isn’t what everybody does, and that’s awesome because video games are such a massive and malleable medium that they can accommodate for all of that. You can enjoy Doom and Super Meat Boy, and other people can enjoy Phoenix Wright and Dear Esther. There’s no art police that said three types of mediums are enough or ideal to express everything, the market and humanity decide that, and we decided collectively that video games can do story in new and interesting ways, too.
This is such a weirdo position to take it really is. “Real games” bullshit. Gatekeeping crap has no place here.
I swear, people use “gatekeeping” as a weasel word to mean “THIS KIND OF RATIONAL THOUGHT GOES AGAINST MY PROGRAMMED VIEW OF THE WORLD BOOOHOOO!” You don’t “gatekeep” videogames by saying gaming is about actual gaming and not some horrible amalgamation of a poorly done game and some failed writer’s self-insert fantasy power trip forced on people every five steps you make in a “game”.
Take a deep breath and re-think your position. Games aren’t meant to have overblown, intrusive stories. They suffer from them.
legitimately funny, thank you
…role playing games - y’know, the ones where you play a character and a story happens around them - are older than video games and, in fact, are some of the oldest video games. Saying story doesn’t belong in games is a disservice to the medium of games, both video and tabletop.
A “story” can happen around a character as long as it’s contained within the context of the game itself (show, don’t tell). But when you bring the game to a screeching halt and have a bunch of flapping mouths spouting exposition for hours on end, THAT DOES NOT BELONG IN A VIDEOGAME.
Bruh this is nothing new. We had the legend Patrick Stewart and the captain of gondor in Oblivion.
Yeah, but that was just the voice. This (and Keanu silverhand) are trying to be the actors straight up playing characters in the game.
Gotta monetise to the max that personal brand recognition!
(Whilst in a video game like that I do expect his work was proper acting rather than merelly being famous, he’s still the one there doing it for the big $$$ rather than somebody else because of brand recognition: as in my personal experience there are tons of just as good actors in Britain who simply are not widelly known, as Britain has a massive thing for Theatre thus good acting schools and lots of people going into performing arts).
Still can’t afford the damn base game 😅
It’s currently on sale on GoG (at least in the UK).
I’m on PS4 😅😭
RIP
Big, well known actors in video games have been a thing for a long time now? I remember games from the 90’s that had actors like James Earl Jones, Tim Curry, Bill Paxton, Randy Quaid, and so many more growing up.
What’s interesting is, it doesn’t seem like it’s expanded or shrunk. Most games don’t hire big actors, but a handful of huge budget, AAA things do. There’s also big range in how good these actors are in the game… JK Simmons, for example, was awesome as Cave Johnson in Portal; but his performance in Baldur’s Gate 3 is, by far, the worst in the entire game IMO.
It makes sense for those who are big enough in the Game Industry (which is now several times the size of the Movie Industry in terms of revenue) to try and do the same as movies and leverage that sweet brand recognition of celebrity actors to sell more copies of the game.
However I suspect it doesn’t work quite the same in practice as the “main character in the story” in games is almost invariably the player him/herself and those famous names will never be more than secondary characters with limited interaction possibilities.
They could do the cyberpunk or fallout 4 thing. Have Keanu Reeves in your head, or get someone known to voice the protagonist (only unlike fo4 in that the PC VAs are otherwise unknown afaik).
Exqueese me? I thought he was great in bg3.
His just felt a bit flat compared to all the other performances.