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Stellaris Dev Diary #77 - Ethics Voice Packs

Hello everyone and welcome to another Stellaris development diary. This week’s diary I’m taking charge and going to write about Voice Over’s for the (unannounced) Story Pack coming alongside the 1.8 ‘Čapek’ update! We still can’t tell you any further details about the name or release date of the Story Pack, but stay tuned for future dev diaries!

For the upcoming Story Pack we felt that we wanted to experiment with VIR, our friendly advisor, see how it would feel to have different set of VO cues depending on your Empire’s ethic. A VO Cue is a term that we use to describe a Voice Over line that triggers at a certain point in the game as for example “Hostile Fleet Detected” or “Research Complete”.

We started with a test case in-house to try it out and we concluded that it was a great experience! From then on we moved on with the process and allocated time to write unique script for each role, character description, casting, auditions and finally recording sessions. It has been personally a long and hard process but in the end I’m really pleased to finally show of 3 samples out of 10 Voice Packs!


There will be a automatic settings for the VO Packs in the game so that the VO will switch depending on what Ethic you start with in the game and also switches while you're playing if you decided with switch Ethic's in your campaign. If you're not into that you will be able to select with set of VO Cues you want to play and you will always be able to switch back to the original VO if you desire.

Now that you have heard some of the results you might ask yourself how the whole procedure works with recording VO? So I’ll describe to a certain detail how the whole process goes by. :)

First of you need to write a script and if you have talented Content Designers. and we do have in our team, there is no problem to get good a script. Once the script is complete and approved it gets handed to me and I take it to the next step: Casting!

Casting of it’s own is also a long process which takes time. With help of a Casting Director you can get in touch with several possible Voice Actors that can help you to deliver the best result out of each script. When you have picked out potential actors that you think will suit for the role, you bring them in for a audition. In an audition you let the actor read a certain part of the script which usually depict the character the most and also give the best material for the Voice Actor so that they can perform as good as possible. After all the auditions are done you pick the actor that suited the best for the role. Sometimes during auditions actors comes for a certain role to read but during the session you realize that the actor would be more fitted for another role and that happened to our Militarist! We brought her in to do a audition for another role first but while she was reading the part for the first role I heard that she might be better suited as a angry general, so I asked her to try out for the Militarist and it was a really good fit! So good that we ended up with her as the Militarist.

With all the casting/auditions done you move on to the actual recording session, get as much possible material from your actors. It is important that you’re there to act as a “director” for the actors so that you can give the instructions and guidelines so that they can give you all the right emotions and takes that you require for your character in the game.

As soon as the recordings were done I moved on to editing. There is a lot of editing when it comes to VO since it is not only about how the recording equipment sound but also the sheer amount of assets you need to go through..

VY1grVq.png


While editing you usually “zoom in” really close in the waveforms of the recordings to mess around/cutting noise such as clicks and pops. So yes, we Sound Designers tend to get really nerdy when it comes to VO editing:

aHHJbEZ.png


After you have done all the editing which is removing “clicks” and “pops”, ugly breath takes, add fade in/out, you move into adding “effects” to the VO so we can get that cool Robotic style. For each VO I gave them something else than just using the same settings as for “Default VIR”.

So in short terms that is how you record VO!

That's all for today! Next week we'll be talking about robots and robotic modification.
 
Amaror hits the nail exactly on the head in regards to this.
The tone sounds like an overzealous DM or someone hamming up their Shakespear recital.

The main issue I have with the militarist VO is that it kinda only works for Xenophobic Militarists (or Radical Hammists) and even then it's still kinda bad.
Militarist =/= Bloodthirsty Theatre Historians.

You can be a Militarist/Egalitarian and fight for freedom, liberty and all that jazz.
You can be a Militarist/Xenophile and fight for Alien Rights to Facehug people.
You can be a Militarist/Authoritarian and fight for your right to own slaves.
You can be a...

Then use those voicepacks, for those ethics.
 
I really loved the voice of Sidney Beauclair, the default fanatic militarist human faction, in the Utopia trailer. Also makes me wish that megastructures were something important enough that factions would fight over, negotiate sharing in diplomacy.

This is a very good example and I also find it a bit sad that megastructures do not really work like that in game, but there needs to be a balance somewhere. Still, we can hope ;).
 
It seems I'm late for party, but since I'm one of these misogynists, which commented on militarist VO... At first I thought Wiz just got bored and decided to start good ol' internet olympics with gender cards and stuff, but nope, actually went ahead and even threw "80-90%" numbers. All I can say is "Wow". It's over guys, he's got the high moral ground.

I'll just pretend I saw it somewhere else, not in official Dev Diary.
 
Amaror hits the nail exactly on the head in regards to this.
The tone sounds like an overzealous DM or someone hamming up their Shakespear recital.

The main issue I have with the militarist VO is that it kinda only works for Xenophobic Militarists (or Radical Hammists) and even then it's still kinda bad.
Militarist =/= Bloodthirsty Theatre Historians.

You can be a Militarist/Egalitarian and fight for freedom, liberty and all that jazz.
You can be a Militarist/Xenophile and fight for Alien Rights to Facehug people.
You can be a Militarist/Authoritarian and fight for your right to own slaves.
You can be a...
Yeah, you know what the voice actually reminds me of?
 
Haha oh god the military one.

Suppose it might suit the Klingon's but not the citizens federation from starship troopers
 
Y'all are being pretty weird about the Militarist VA.

I'd get ragey too if I was responding to a declaration of war (I assume that's what the line is for), and it may not even be the tone for every other announcement.

Personally I think it's perfectly suited to my default Slaving Despotic Cat empire, for roleplaying reasons I like to think they really get into the rush of a good war or two.

And like Wiz said, you can pick and choose with voice is delivering your announcements, there might be another ethos you like better to deliver lines.
 
Fun to see how all the very angry replies are actually pretty good arguments for Wiz statement

Thinking someone handled something poorly proves that the person himself is right? There you have it folks, thinking Stalin managed the Soviet Union poorly proves there were traitors around every corner that he had to have murdered. Much logic, so wow.

No, turns out seeing how Wiz handles pretty level-headed criticisms (mind you, I'm not one who criticized it, nor do I necessarily agree with the criticisms) and disliking it does not prove they were all just criticizing it because it was a female vo.
 
My oh my did this get ever out of hand...

You know, if that one quote was titled "unhinged", "barbaric", "bloodthirsty" (you know, like the picks you often get in RPGs), instead of specifically "Militarist" (a whole ethic pick of the game), there'd be far too fewer complaints. The basis of the argument against that VO is not gender. It's the mismatch between what we hear and what we see. Militarist ethos is way bigger than the stereotypical Klingon orc horde. @Wiz mentioned "aggressive female"? It's not. It's at best a teenager who just watched too much (already badly voiced) Transformers cartoons. Ivanova's "death incarnate" already mentioned in this thread is aggressive female. Another good example from the same show is Delenn's "be somewhere else". But that is also beside the point. The OP states that these voiceovers are for the advisor, for the lines used repeatedly in various game situations. Such overcooked approach will get real old real fast in this scenario. Supposedly, we'd hear such remarks over and over again. So what, now she'll constantly spell "Rival cockroaches are skittering in our backyard" every time hostiles enter our space? Get real.

I mentioned earlier the MOO remake. "Even without meeee, our scientists made a new discovery!" - in a childish tone, every few turns of the game. If my scientists are making discoveries without you, why the hell do I need you for?

It's the disconnect between these "advisors" and the actual game what makes them so bad. We, as players, command a spacefaring civilization set out to conquer the stars (by whatever means the game allows). That overzealous "dogs of war"... if she was to utter anything else of the sort, I, as her boss (she's my advisor, right?), would personally make sure she'd get the best psychiatric help there is in my empire (which, depending on the ethics of my empire, range from locking her away in an institution to sending her to gene banks so that the scientists make sure that particular deviation never again occurs in my populace). If it was a "he", I'd do the same. There's no room for psychopaths at my advisory board, I'm running an interstellar state, not a drunken cosplay party.
 
My favourite part about this is that you let players choose which voice pack they want to use! This is extremely important and very key to Paradox's core brand! Keep it up with great decisions like this :)
 
I like it, but I'm worried that it will set the tone for your empire,
for instance the militarist one, she sounds like she's about to scream "blood for the blood god!", which very well might be what player has in mind when designing his empire,
but fanatic militarist empire might be much more about war, tactics and discipline than about bloody combat.

And I'm even more worried about the spiritualist one.
Exactly - this is precisely a creeping problem with the apparent design philosophy for Stellaris since Wiz took over. They seem to keep trying to shoehorn players into playing one specific pre-determined thing, rather than let them define their own experience and write their own stories in true Paradox faction. You see this in Wiz's decisions to make certain ethics increasingly incapable of using certain policies, for example (like, the option is just flat greyed out and impossible).

Anyway, they seem to be allowing full player choice for which voice-over to use, so that's good. Automatic switching when you change your ethics is a neat idea, but it will probably annoy most players.
 
I'm a woman, and I think the Militarist voice sounds completely psychotic (aka Fanatical Purifiers, Chaotic Evil, Barbarians). I don't think many people here are against 'tough' female voice-acting, but the voice should fit the core ethic at the very least! I love the voice itself, just not as a Militarist.
 
I think it's time to close this thread. I will admit my handling of it may not have been the best, but I stand by what I said and none of it was 'you're all misogynist'. My point is: there are pervasive attitudes regarding which tones are considered appropriate for women (and men, for that matter), something you have to be aware of when doing VO, and this affects how people react to such a voice in ways they may not even be aware of. If you can't differentiate that from 'you're misogynist' (which I at no point said) then that's your problem.

However, I could have handled it better and accept responsibility for causing this mess of a thread. Time for it to go.
 
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