It’s easy to underestimate the power of extra voice acting to draw you into a game. I don’t mean audio logs, but rather the little moments where a foe will respond to you or act without your intervention, adding character to these faceless entities and more reason as to why you are shooting X and Y in the face. Such snippets of personality can make you feel guilty, let you be vindicated as you mow down such cannon fodder. Shit, did I just stab a dad to be? Or take out a indiscriminate murderer? Perhaps both? Those kinds of elicit responses are part of the reason why I game.
Stealth-Action games are already great for such moments, from Hitman: Blood Money to Thief and No One Lives Forever. Outside of these games and genre such personality isn’t oft applied to the regular troops, which is a crying shame. Too often the most an FPS will give in terms of extra dialogue is “GRENADE! ARRRRGHHHH”. As an example of how these little details can help bring a game to life, I decided to make a rundown of some non-stealth games and why such extra touches have left big impressions on me.
GTA IV
The pedestrian conversations, in short, are sublime. I’m currently on my 4th complete playthrough of the game and still keep hearing new dialogue that makes me giggle or smirk. It’s also made me feel incredibly guilty at how callous games have made me sometimes. I know it’s all a simulation, but I realise why my girlfriend was so shocked when she saw me play it. On my current playthrough a car clipped me and sent me sprawling, then the driver called me a dickhead. This annoyed me so I got up and shot him in the head. The passenger ran out the vehicle yelling for me to not kill him, another person on the street told me to calm down and some stranger drew a gun and started shooting me. Without breaking stride I shot them all, reasoning no witnesses. Including an old granny who ran and then limped away before I chased her down and shot her more times than necessary. They’d reacted as humans, I’d reacted as a cold blooded killer.
Though this unfortunatley hasn’t turned me into a remorseless killer in real life, it made me question the fact that my roleplay reaction was to become a cold hearted bastard. I wasn’t on a rampage where such deaths are trivial and joky, I was at the time trying to play the game a little bit seriously. So thinking that I kneecapped then executed a running man when not in the heat of the moment shocked me a bit. The kneecapping though was probably my 1/4 Irish side coming through.
Now when I play GTA, I take care to limit myself to non-deadly blows or damaging of their property as revenge. I bought Niko some reading glasses to make him seem gentler even. All because I was immersed in thinking of the pedestrians as actual people instead of the randomly spawned ragdolls they actually were. That change in play was due to those simple vocal responses helping to breathe life into the NPCs that I then felt guilty for taking away.
Max Payne 2
I fucking love this game for so many reasons, from the fluid style and combat to atmospheric plot and levels plus a wealth of little features that refine the overall experience. One of these is the beneath the surface personalities of foes throughout the game. You’ll hear snippets of ordinary banter that helps you with the illusion that these people, even if nasty, are definitely alive and aren’t just faceless Joe 7392# waiting down corridor 178# to jump out at you. Gripping my berretta on the other side of a door I couldn’t help but grin mirthlessly when I heard through it “Shit shit Max Payne is coming. What are we going to do? We’re all fucked.” I was that Max Payne. Thugs like that had shown my family no mercy, I was prepared to pay them back in equal sympathy.
Or hearing similarly the “Cleaners” grumbling rather detachedly how they have to clean up the blood after they shoot a guy, treating it with the same manner that you normally associate with an everyday job. Suddenly they seemed at once both human but also evil, all thanks to some little exposition fleshing out the character in your mind. This is kept up throughout the game too, as opposed to some games that will throw in one or two scenes then just fall back to filling empty rooms with blank faces.
Bioshock
I was asked if I would kindly refrain from talking about the major themes of Bioshock, and just relate instead the power of padded out AI. The voice acting helps create a vibrant and stark picture of what has happened to the citizens of Rapture, and the deformed monstrosities you wrench aside now. Killing a crazed humanoid monster is easy. Killing a crazed human twisted beyond recognition felt like a mercy killing. Apart from the boss foes I never in particularly felt like I was gunning down evil, just putting down unfortunate sufferers who had succumbed too far to be recovered. The way that I’d hear splicers sobbing or talking to themselves, then screaming things as they threw themselves at me evoked a peculiar feeling towards them. I even felt a little bit of guilt after I’d fended them off. I mean I had no choice, it was me or them. But in those little voiced moments, they came across as vulnerable and still very occasionally sane.
In future I’d love to see more humanity from my computerised foes. We’ve passed the stage now where vocalisations of “RUN AWAY” or “FLANK HIM” are all we expect. In the next futuristic space marine action game or soldier-em-up, I know I’ll care about what I’m doing a damn sight more if I can be fooled into thinking I’m part of a wider world. There will always be some who will just blaze through and not give a toss. But if you want to start making the rest of us care about your world and its people, have it live and pulse at even the most basic stages.
