{"id":153542,"date":"2024-02-05T10:00:28","date_gmt":"2024-02-05T10:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/?p=153542"},"modified":"2024-02-12T14:38:38","modified_gmt":"2024-02-12T14:38:38","slug":"more-narrators-in-video-games-please","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/2024\/02\/05\/more-narrators-in-video-games-please\/","title":{"rendered":"More narrators in video games, please"},"content":{"rendered":"
Amidst all of the praise rightfully directed towards last year’s Baldur’s Gate 3<\/em><\/a>, one of my personal favourite aspects of the game has gone somewhat overlooked: the narrator. Voiced wonderfully by Amelia Tyler (whose deeply unserious recording outtakes<\/a> have become my comfort YouTube video as of late), the narrator adds to the already-staggering depth of the game\u00a0and matches the feeling of playing Dungeons and Dragons<\/em>, with a Dungeon Master narrating your adventures. It’s a means of expression that is sadly underused in the modern game landscape, but allow me, for a moment, to argue in favour of the inclusion of voiced narrators.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n BG3<\/em> is a game with an ungodly amount of fully voiced dialogue, so the inclusion of even more might appear ostensibly as an odd choice – I mean, why bother? Well, the narrator is granted the ability to express things that might otherwise be difficult to convey. Upon a successful insight check, listening to the narrator note a character’s inner sorrow, or suggest that another character might be deceiving you works wonderfully to help the game express its smaller details.<\/p>\n One of the most memorable game narrators in recent memory, that of ZA\/UM’s Disco Elysium<\/em>, uses narration similarly to convey imagery and emotion. Upon release, Disco Elysium<\/em> was largely unvoiced and chiefly consisted of a lot of reading on the player’s part; The Final Cut edition of the game changed this, assigning Lenval Brown’s gravelly-yet-familiar vocal work to all of the game’s forms of narration.<\/p>\n Its narration works both externally, describing the world around you, and internally, as one of the game’s key features is its chorus of various inner voices. Shivers, one of the game’s more distinctive narrational voices, speaks prosaically and allows you to tap into the feeling<\/em> of the game’s location. He only speaks up every once in a while, quietly illustrating a small vignette happening in the nearby area. Volition, meanwhile, is your body’s sense of self-preservation and sanity, interpreting the world around you with a manner and voice like a well-meaning friend.<\/p>\n