“I'm not very good at playing the game.”

January 27, 2017 9:22 PM

The Voice Behind 'The Witcher' Is A College Professor [Eurogamer] “He isn't gruff, either, or arrogantly aloof. He is mild-mannered and friendly. And as we walk to an onsite cafe for a cup of coffee we make everyday small talk about students leaving for Christmas and oh my isn't it getting cold. He buys me a coffee with a handful of change from his fleece pocket. It is an entirely unremarkable situation. Then I hear his American accent, half growl, half purr, and I remember who he is, like it's some kind of secret, like he's wearing some kind of disguise. I realise I know, and I'm not the only one. "I don't know when people really clock," he says, "some of my students I think still don't know. I do share it when I'm recording something; if the students ask, I'll tell them. But I was supposed to be very tight-lipped about The Witcher 3 so I didn't say a lot about it. I got told off once for just tweeting. But the ones who were listening knew.”
posted by Fizz (21 comments total)

A story that warms your cockles.
posted by ersatz at 10:19 PM on January 27, 2017

To be honest, Geralt's voice acting is the weakest of anyone's including some random bandits and stuff. It's certainly not any significant part of what makes the game so good.

If gamers/game makers are really exalting this dude's acting work in The Witcher, then, well, the first step is pinpointing the problem, isn't it?
posted by cmoj at 12:14 AM on January 28, 2017

Huh. I loved Geralt's voice! It's like a cat's tongue.
posted by mochapickle at 1:31 AM on January 28, 2017 [14 favorites]

Yeah, hard disagree. His ability to convey emotion in a flat and affectless way was unique and very talented.
posted by painquale at 2:56 AM on January 28, 2017 [10 favorites]

I love the voices in Witcher 3, never minded the incongruity of playing a guy with an American accent in a world where everyone else has British accents. But it was recorded by an American living in Bournemouth, that's hilarious.
posted by yoHighness at 3:31 AM on January 28, 2017 [3 favorites]

To be honest, Geralt's voice acting is the weakest of anyone's including some random bandits and stuff. It's certainly not any significant part of what makes the game so good.


Get out of here!!! Geralt's voice acting is the best thing about the Witcher!!
posted by Pendragon at 4:17 AM on January 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

His ability to convey emotion in a flat and affectless way was unique and very talented

I think this is important, because Geralt has to be both an actual character and a player surrogate. That's both difficult to do, and quite significantly different to what other sorts of voice acting require (never mind the difficulty of churning out an estimated 70,000 lines of dialogue on your own in a recording booth). Video game Gerald works as a protagonist because he manages to suggest emotional depth while maintaining a privacy that the player can project onto. It's not what you'd necessarily want in a film, but the demands of different media and different projects are different. As radio acting is different theatre is different to TV is different to film, video game acting is different again.
posted by howfar at 4:39 AM on January 28, 2017 [9 favorites]

I would be that asshole who strings red crepe paper between this guys office and classrooms ahead of time.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:13 AM on January 28, 2017 [3 favorites]

Interesting points. I just started playing Wild Hunt (well, 7 hours in), and I remember a distinct moment where I was acutely aware that some townsman had sort of disproportionately expressive voice acting that stood in contrast to Geralt's. But now that it's mentioned, I don't think it's fair to characterize Geralt's acting as "weak." I'll probably pay more attention to the tightrope he's got to walk in terms of being able to allow a player to project onto the character going forward.
posted by cmoj at 7:58 AM on January 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

The other part of Geralt's voice acting is the lore about Witchers that says that they are STRIPPED OF EMOTIONS, despite this being demonstrably not true despite them all being a little weird sometimes. I mean, it's ridiculous in the way that pretty much everything from Witcher is ridiculous, which is why it's so pleasing to think of THE MANLY MAN WHO MAN MAN MANS as really a mild-mannered professor.

I don't know, his voice fits the game. It is ridiculously gruff and kind of affectless, but the entire game projects an adolescent boy's idea of masculinity, so it fits pretty well.
posted by dinty_moore at 8:10 AM on January 28, 2017 [10 favorites]

I just started playing Wild Hunt (well, 7 hours in)

7 hours definitely counts as just started. Man that game is fucking big.
posted by howfar at 8:41 AM on January 28, 2017 [4 favorites]

I've put it aside for a while, but it really is. And if you want to you can avoid triggering a certain plot point that throws the story forward about 30% in and then it sort of turns into Skyrim w/o a MQ until you kick it into gear again.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:07 AM on January 28, 2017

It was Extra Credits who pointed this out, but The Witcher is more or less a pulp detective in a fantasy world, and Geralt's voice is perfect for that. The fact that the VA is a professor works as well, particularly if you take Chandler's Marlowe, with his chess problems and filter-siphon coffee, as a model.

In another parallel to the noir detective, Geralt is not really an actor, he's a reactor. Something external has to move him into action. In the games this is variously his home being attacked, being framed for murder, and Yennifer/Ciri. In general, Geralt would much rather not be here, and much rather not be doing this, but he doesn't have a choice because of who he is, what he is, and what just happened. The voice acting is apposite for a character who is not just in that situation, but for whom this happens regularly enough to be his lot in life.
posted by Grimgrin at 9:14 AM on January 28, 2017 [19 favorites]

Those are great observations.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:17 AM on January 28, 2017

I can't believe Geralt and Yenn haven't ever met in real life.
posted by Damienmce at 10:34 AM on January 28, 2017 [2 favorites]

I really liked Ciri's voice acting. She sounded young but strong, yet had a quirk to her voice that made her seem like an individual vs. an archetype.
posted by jeff-o-matic at 10:46 AM on January 28, 2017

I only played 3 but I LOVE the voice acting in all of it. It's really great. Similar to the Mass Effect games. I love how he plays these little sarcastic parts and you can just HEAR the eye roll in his voice sometimes. It's one of the few games where the humor in the dialogue and acting had made me laugh.

And I also hate the "I'm the gruff dude hero" voice since I'm a lady. But Geralt is fantastic.

I can't imagine the games without him. I looked up who did the voice before and was like "him?!" It reminds me of H Jon Benjamin or something where the voice is larger than the person.
posted by Crystalinne at 1:28 PM on January 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

Hearts of Stone, the DLC, where he's playing someone else playing him but not caring that much about doing a good job of it (long story) is genuinely fuckin hilarious in places.

The fact is has my OG bae Shani is icing on the squee cake.
posted by Sebmojo at 3:26 PM on January 28, 2017

And I'd disagree that it's the traditional videogame caricature of masculinity in W3 - Geralt is someone who has all the traditional fantasy accoutrements of power, but it really doesn't help that much.

He's basically an overqualified exterminator who's lived way longer than he should have and the game goes right into what that means. Whenever he takes a job to find someone the answer is almost always 'they died, horribly', then he collects his pittance and moves on to the next town.

I liked Tom Chick's take on it:

CD Projekt RED has made a game that remembers what the “R” in RPG stand for. You’re not some generic warrior or wizard tasked with saving the world. You don’t get to choose between being lawful good or cartoonishly evil. You’re the Witcher Geralt. Sometimes that means you’re a smartass. At other times, you’re a grumpy sourpuss. But through it all, you’re trying to do the right things in troubled times.

When something bad happens and Geralt has to take care of it, the consequences are sometimes far-reaching but you immediately know it has had an impact. You don’t need to be told “Clementine will remember that.” You can see it on the faces of the people you help or hurt. The Bloody Baron will never forget what you’ve just done. It’s right there in his sad eyes. His life was a mess before and Geralt just heaped more misery onto his back. He doesn’t thank you for the tidings you deliver. He simply pays you for the work done and then looks at you. The things unsaid are more powerful than any binary dialogue option that you’d get in a lesser game. There are characters and stories here that you’ll remember forever.

That’s really the bad news for players of The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. It raises the bar on story and personality so much higher than its been for RPGs. After spending some time as Geralt, it’s tough to shake the sense that being Commander Shepard, The Dragonborn, or even a Jedi Knight is so much less exciting than simply being a monster-hunter in fantasy Poland. Saving the universe is nothing compared to the look you’ll get when you confirm someone’s worst fears.
posted by Sebmojo at 3:34 PM on January 28, 2017 [10 favorites]

Guys, he's a witcher. It's mentioned repeatedly by NPCs and just the general descriptions of that order that emotion is partially stripped out of them by the transition process. Which, now that I think of it, is a pretty clutch in-world explanation to use for a character who is, to quote, "an actual character and a player surrogate". Having not read the books the games are based on, though, I don't know if that effect is canon or was invented by the developers.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 4:01 PM on January 28, 2017

I was so excited when I started up the game and first heard Geralt's voice. I assumed from the very beginning that it's a deliberate homage to Clint Eastwood as The Man with No Name. Geralt's selfish -- a mercenary, not a hero -- but he's also not evil, which means that sometimes he's forced to be good.
posted by phoenixy at 7:29 PM on January 28, 2017 [2 favorites]