CD Projekt Red wants its upcoming game Cyberpunk 2077 to redefine the RPG genre for the next generation. The ambition of the project has been matched only by the anticipation caused by the developer’s promises, including claims that every single side-quest in the game will feel like a full story.
Many RPG fans will have heard similar promises before, however. Skyrim helped redefine the RPG genre just under a decade ago, but still had areas, particularly regarding NPCs, where attempts at immersion fell flat. Cyberpunk 2077 will need to avoid these problems if it’s going to feel like a truly next-gen RPG.
One of the best decisions Bethesda made with Skyrim was to give many of the Nords Scandinavian accents, rather than the gruff American accents as they had in The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. Skyrim‘s famous first line is spoken in one such accent, and immediately immerses the player in the world around them.
However, Skyrim, as with Oblivion, has infamously few voice actors in the game. It isn’t long into Skyrim’s introduction when the immersive chatter surrounding the cart the player is in falls victim to this exact problem. There is a moment when a local Nord boy sees the procession and asks “who are they daddy, where are they going?” The moment would add to the immersion were it not for the fact that the child, unlike his father, has a strong American accent that sticks out like a sore thumb among the otherwise Northern European-accented Nords.
This isn’t to say that non-European accents are out of place in fantasy games. In fact, the contrast in the opening between General Tullius’ North American accent and that of the Stormcloaks he’s having executed makes him appear metropolitan in contrast to his rural surroundings, and immediately makes Tullius seem slightly out of his depth despite his air of authority. However, there are key ways that these voice actors can be distributed to maximize immersion and minimize cost.
When it comes to immersion, variety is less important than consistency. The raspy semi-cockney voice used for many of the Dark Elves in the game works despite the lack of variety in part because it is one of the voices used most consistently for a single race. It’s more immersive for a voice to appear multiple times if suspension of disbelief can write it off as an accent. The same goes for the Argonian and Khajiit voices used in the game, all of which are consistently kept within their species.
Arriving in Riverwood at the start of Skyrim, Sven stands out as another character who breaks immersion through his voice. Sven is a Nord who, despite growing up in a Nord village, has a completely different accent to all of the Nords around him. The variation of the voices can’t be immersive if that same variation leads to immersion-breaking inconsistencies. For Sven, this is because he is grouped in with the other male bards in the world, rather than being categorized as a Nord.
It would likely have been easier for players to remain immersed if Vilkas and Farkas, the twin brothers from Skyrim‘s Companions questline, were voiced by the same actor rather than having different voices and completely different accents. The long-term side effect with the voice acting is that the longer the player plays, the less immersed they can become.
Cyberpunk 2077 is going to have a lot of voiced NPCs, and although it isn’t going to have the same race delineations as a game like Skyrim, it is important that the NPCs who have certain voices are chosen with consistency in mind rather than simply variation. Families should sound similar to one another, and Cyberpunk’s lifepaths could be a good guide to which voices should go where.
Nomads should sound like other Nomads even if that means reusing voices, while corporate employees or “Corpos” should have their own voice actors to make their culture sound distinct as well. Details like this don’t require a huge increase in the size of the voice cast hired for Cyberpunk 2077, but rather, by organizing the use of that talent carefully, can make the world feel far more natural and greatly increase player immersion in the game.
Cyberpunk 2077 launches September 17 for PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One, and later for PS5 and Xbox Series X.
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