00:30Hi, my name is Joseph May, and I play the Nameless Hero in Gothic the Remake.
00:49The thing I love about voice acting in games is that I'm able to play characters that I would never, ever play on screen.
00:56I'm not the most frightening of people to look at.
01:00So it's really, really great to be able to use my voice to be able to kind of play these really, really tough characters.
01:05It's a lot of fun.
01:05The thing about playing the Nameless Hero is that there's a lot of repetition, going up and asking people, you know, and introducing yourself and asking people for things and whatnot.
01:14And the way to keep that fresh, I found, was just by really bouncing off the directors.
01:17Hello, I'm Beth Park, and I was the lead voice director on Gothic the Remake.
01:22So if I was going to describe Gothic to somebody who hadn't heard of it before, I'd say, you're in a prison colony.
01:28And the prisoners within this colony have been trapped forever, potentially, within this magical barrier.
01:35And so the prisoners have split into different camps and factions.
01:39The thing I love about playing the Nameless Hero is just how resilient he is.
01:45He, you know, he's thrown into the mix there, and he's able to kind of get himself through every situation and get himself out of every situation.
01:53A lot of the time, when you're doing an RPG, you'll come up, like if you're, I've played the leads in them before as well, and you'll come across a character, and you'll ask them a question, and it's just rather dull and just informative.
02:05Whereas this, you're actually having to kind of figure out what they want so you can get what you want.
02:11Sounds like a tricky job.
02:12What's in it for me?
02:13Some point, Diego will ask me what I think of you.
02:18Take a guess what my answer's going to depend on.
02:21Yeah, the lovely thing about Gothic is the world continues no matter what the player's doing.
02:26Like, the world carries on without them.
02:28So when you're walking the streets of the colony, all of these felons have got their own shit that they're doing.
02:34Like, the hero of the game is not the hero of their world.
02:38He's just another guy.
02:39Hello, I'm Daniel Bainbridge, and I was one of the voice directors on Gothic Remake.
02:44One of the things I really enjoyed about working on Gothic Remake is how the characters kind of avoid a lot of the regular fantasy RPG tropes.
02:54And when you do come up and talk to them, often they don't want to waste their time talking to you.
02:59I want to become a shadow.
03:00Then you should find yourself a nice spot of sunlight.
03:02You'll ask them questions, and they will just refuse to give you the answer, which is a real novelty when working on games like this.
03:10Yep, I'm Harry Myers, and I'm playing Zardass, the necromancer, and a load of snarky, cockney colonialists.
03:18There are all kinds of fantasy characters, but they're all so real.
03:22We've got mages and necromancers and kings and trapped people and all kinds of colonialists who do all kinds of crazy stuff.
03:31But then how do you make it different from the other games that are similar?
03:36And for that, I would go with the story.
03:38That's probably the main way, the story and the characterizations.
03:42I'm Adam, Adam Diggle, and I voice a number of characters in Gothic.
03:48To be honest, I think there's a bit of a trend, I wouldn't say recently or the past 10, 15 years or so, for games to get bigger and bigger and bigger.
03:59I've played the odd open world game, but to be honest, I get quite bored with them after a while.
04:05I love the concept of being dropped into a game where you literally can't trust anyone.
04:12It's a criminal colony.
04:14In most games, you deal X, you get Y, you complete a quest, you come back, you get a reward.
04:19In Gothic, you could do everything right and still get screwed over.
04:23I love the kind of world that he's thrown into, all these different camps that he has to kind of get himself involved with.
04:29There's a lot of humor, there's a lot of empathy that goes with it.
04:31It really kind of tests you.
04:33I mean, there's the orcs, there's just a whole wide world to kind of get involved with, and it's really incredible to be a part of.
04:40My name's Andres Williams, and I'm playing Diego.
04:44I don't care who you are.
04:46You're Greenblood, and I'm the guy who takes care of you a lot.
04:49Let's leave it at that.
04:49It's a lot of fun playing a character that's so much cooler than yourself, and I think in Diego, yeah, he's definitely one of those.
04:59So he's a friendly character, I think.
05:02He's probably in that prison world.
05:04He's about as friendly as the player's going to meet.
05:07But then again, to have lived as long as he has in this prison world, and to have sort of got as far up the hierarchy as he has,
05:17I think there has to be an element of danger, a bit of badass about him as well.
05:22Hello, my name is Emma Gregory, and I play the lair and Urnadskrog.
05:28Working on the orcish language for Gothic Remake was a really new and very enjoyable challenge for me.
05:33It's not something I'd worked with before, a sort of totally fictional, made-up language.
05:38So I was a little bit apprehensive at first about how to go about working through that.
05:44I mean, it was amazing because I've never seen a character just written in its language, so I had a lot of translation.
05:55But you start to get to know the patterns of a language, and it's not just sort of gobbledygook, you know, this is properly structured.
06:03So you start to understand where the verb might be in the sentence, depending on the subject.
06:08You start to recognize certain words, like, for instance, ra is you, and ba is me, and trotch is fight.
06:16Obviously, you're having to keep the intention of the line in your mind.
06:30What is this orc trying to communicate, and is that normal for them, or is that unusual for them?
06:36Plus, you're trying to keep an ear out to hear if the actor is actually correctly pronouncing this translated, brand-new language that has been created.
06:47That was wonderful, immersing yourself in a different language.
06:50That was a really beautiful challenge on this game, and then to inhabit it and then make it be Urnadskrog rather than just trying to deliver orc, you know, but actually making it your own.
07:03The language in particular, there's a lot of rolled R's, which I had to really drill to get my mouth around it.
07:10And actually, I made up like a specific tongue twister to prep myself before recording.
07:16I can do it if you want to hear it.
07:18Irreverent, reverend Rory, ruefully rinsed the ridiculously red ripe raspberries.
07:25And I would do that, I would sit in a park and do that again and again before every session, just freaking out members of the public.
07:33I really enjoyed playing the two characters of Valea and Urnadskrog because they're so different.
07:52Valea is human, obviously, and I experimented with quite a few sort of accents with her.
07:58And we, Beth Park, the director, and I fell on Northern being quite a good one for her because it kind of allowed her to really relish that feistiness in her personality to survive this incredibly, incredibly brutal place.
08:11I think the writers really went to town when it came to the Cockney dialect in the game.
08:17So we had a lot of fun with that, you know, trying to just bring all these lads to life and play around with it.
08:23That's one of the things that's been brilliant about the writing in this.
08:27Most of the time, the writers have written brilliant syntax for Londoners.
08:32It's been exactly how we would speak a lot of the time.
08:35And then on the odd occasions when it hasn't been exactly how we speak, they've allowed us to modify the dialogue slightly and say it in our own way.
08:43One of the things that I found a lot of fun doing the game is that you come across these characters who are total jerks and you have these interactions with them and you're trying to get something from them and trying to get them to help you.
08:54And there's no way they will.
08:56They're just going to be as difficult as possible.
08:57And you walk away going, man, that guy was a total jerk.
09:01And it's interesting to see how they cope with being trapped wherever they are, whatever they're doing, how they pass the time.
09:10And I think it's going to be very dark in places, fun dark, you know, grim dark, but dark, magical and mystical and lots of kind of intrigue and mystery and little holes to poke around in.
09:26I think the difference between Gothic and perhaps other games is that it's really dynamic and immersive.
09:35The world is utterly brought to life with the most beautiful cinematic graphic and there's lots going on all the time.
09:44Every character, every detail is immense because it all has its own life.
09:49The great thing about working on this game, Gothic the Remake, was the directors and the help we had from the guys making the game would give you a lot of context.
09:58And frequently when you're making video games, you don't have a lot of context to work off of.
10:02You're just kind of going in, you're giving lines and you kind of ask some vague questions and are given vague answers.
10:07With this, you could be really specific as to what you were talking about, who you're talking to, what the situation was.
10:12And it would really kind of elevate the game and I think probably elevates the performances for all of us.
10:16Often we go into a game and it's called some false name like Project Penguin and I'm playing a character called Dave and I don't know very much about it.
10:24They do tell us some character backstory, anything that's relevant.
10:28So for me, acting in video games is all about imagination.
10:32I think a lot of people want to get into acting in video games and think, oh, I can do, you know, voices.
10:38I can put on silly voices.
10:39I could probably be in video games.
10:40But for me, it's not really so much about transforming your voice.
10:45It's more when it comes to me directing actors, it's more about painting a picture of the world and creating an atmosphere between them and the other characters in that world.
10:55And the voice will follow.
10:56But as we got into this game, they showed us the scenes that they'd made already and the photographs of the characters and really allowed us to get into their world.
11:10Very early on.
11:12And it's so helpful when games do that because you really do understand the world that your character inhabits.
11:18Yeah, totally.
11:19I think the conversations, the script, the way it's written just feels really grounded and a bit dangerous at times as well.
11:27So you don't quite know which way it's going to go.
11:30It knocks you off kilter.
11:31Like you think it's going to go one way and it goes the other.
11:33And I love that unpredictability, which is part of the reason why I'm playing the original and loving it.
11:40Like you think it's going to go one way and it goes the other.
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