Voice Acting for Dunmer

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Rats's picture
Rats
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Moved to Quests&Dialogue since the Audio forums are being removed. -10Kaziem
Moved to Implementation since the Quests&Dialogue forums are being removed. -Kevaar

I’ve been in touch with the person behind MorrowindShorts, a Youtube channel which features some pretty impressing Dunmer voices.

For those who don’t know or remember a couple of years ago TR decided that the Ordinators in Mourning (arguably the coolest thing TR ever invented) needed some unique voiced dialogue. Back then MorrowindShorts agreed to record the dialogue, but the whole project died when we couldn’t agree on what the specific lines should be (sigh). He even recorded some test lines, but those were never used.

Either way, MorrowindShorts was still ready to help us out with his voice acting skills, provided that we can guarantee that this time we will follow through with this. I told him I’d bring this to the Saturday’s meeting, but decided to make a post instead in case I don’t make it to the meeting. I promised I would get back to him once we’ve agreed that yes, we still want new voiced dialogue for Dunmer NPCs in certain locations.

The way I see it we just have to figure out two things:

1. Which locations/NPC types need new dialogue? (Ordinators in Mourning; generic “What do you think of <town name here>, outlander?” stuff; what else?)
2. What would the specific lines be?

I remember there being a handy Excel file of proposed dialogue entries for Ordinators in Mourning, but that wasn’t available anymore in the old forums. Maybe someone has it on their hard drive?

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What are the Ordinators in Mourning? I don’t have access to any of the old stuff, but would be glad to put together some new stuff.

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 “Respect the ancestors, outlander.”
”Do not tarry here.”
”The winds blow my kin away.”
”Bones to ash... pass the Door... faith in Three-as-One.” --muttered, like a prayer.

Alternatively, some taken from the Book of Dawn and Dusk might be nice--
How black my heart, roasting fiercely.
From glowing ashes the Poet's wrath shall shine. (replace Poet with ALMSIVI?)
Fate, monstrous and empty… (Cut off from full quote)
Death does not diminish… (cut off from full quote, may be good as an on-death script)
Count the happy hours, outlander. (a bit out of place?)
(...) yield to faith. (cut off from full quote, may be good as a battle cry)

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Need some shit for all Houses. Redoran dialogue would be nice; about shielding Morrowind. Indoril lines referring to Velk, Mournhold, and numerous Tribunal things. Dres NEED to have a bunch of voilent stuff about outlanders. Hlaalu would benefit from clips of voice about the general backstabbing nature of the house. Bloodmoon and Tribunal both make REALLY good use of localized voice clips, and you can see the near-transition they had to fully voiced dialogue.

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This is something that would potentially add a lot of immersion, I really hope it gets done smiley
I know I’m not a good writer but I still tried my best at some voice lines for Necrom:

Friendly: May our ancestors not mind your stay
Neutral: Stay away from the sacred halls of our dead outlander
Annoyed: Defile our tombs and you'll be cursed forever SCUM

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Interesting thing about Bloodmoon – some characters, like Falco Galenus, say unique voice lines after you pick quests.  If TR had this in… I don't know, in Akamora maybe, it will be awesome.

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Sounds like a great opportunity to combine my favorite mod with one of the best Dunmeri voices out there. I think you should definitely use this to add more specific flavor to Necrom instead of rewriting the Ordinator lines because those cannot be topped anyways. So perhaps you could try something different with those in Mourning. I thought, perhaps not that groundbreaking, about some memento mori sentences with Almsivi twist, lines related to the sending of Veloth and the Exodus / Promised Land aspect, Necrom as City of the Dead and Waiting Door, The Ghost Walk Among Us and Sermon 35 – all of this a step beyond the common unfriendliness of Ordinator Guards. I’m not a native speaker, so please excuse if this is not the most intuitive Ordinator way of speaking, but a few murmurings came to mind, just in case your old document can’t be retrieved:  

May He pass The Waiting Door … [taken from the Pentannual Census]
The ending of the words is Almsivi. [classic]
Can ghosts or justice change with time? [from the Book of Dusk and Dawn, as Kevaar has quoted above]
Death does not diminish; the ghost gilds with glory. [from Book of Dusk and Dawn]
Refuse neither brother nor ghost. [from Book of Dusk and Dawn]
Consider your end, mortal! [from Book of Dusk and Dawn. late medieval or baroque poems have a lot of formulations here] 
Are your ghosts of relevance? [unfriendly]
Veloth guide us riverwards … [metaphor by MK, think “Waters of Oblivion” etc]
Follow the Prophet’s luminous soul! [again, partly from Pentannual]
May your bloodline never cease! [as a compliment …]
Do not shame your ancestors!
May Ancestors find you! [a simple yet wonderful formulation taken from Khevresuti’s “To the Heart there comes a stranger...”]
By Blood and Oath and Will!
Serve your Lords!
Solace is given to Spirit and Mortal. [friendly]

Just my two drakes since the Ordinators in Mourning are definitely among the coolest things TR ever has done.

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Based on the suggestions, some of the posts on the old forums, and some ideas of my own I’ve come up with a proposal.

There are 32 individual lines of dialogue in the proposal. The number may seem high, but I think it’s important that the voiced dialogue doesn’t become too repetitive.

Would this be ok?

AttachmentSizeDate
PDF icon Ordinator in Mourning Dialogue.pdf73.15 KB2016-09-04 00:37
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This has come up periodically ever since the idea was first brought up. Then as now, I would advise against going ahead with this anytime soon. We may want additional lines in future, in which case we’d want the voice acting of the newer lines to match up with the old ones, which even if we can get him to record the new lines with the same set-up possibly years later might still not work out, or we might change our minds on some of these current lines in future; I don’t think we’re at a stage where we can really put forward ‘final’ lines, and fear we’ll end up either putting ourselves in a corner unecessarily or compromise MorrowindShorts’ contributions.
I think voice acting is best done in one go once we have a comprehensive idea of all the lines we will need; I think it’s best done at or near the end of the production process, which as I understand it is how most game companies do it (and they tend to leave out a bunch of lines from the final game anyway).
As long as MorrowindShorts is fine with the possibility that we will redo the lines in future I’m not against the idea of recording some now, but I rather doubt he will like the idea.

Edit: in short, I very much like the idea of working with MorrowindShorts, but do not feel we are in a position or should force ourselves into one where we can be reliable to work with. I fear that in some way we will end up failing to follow through properly again.

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I wouldn’t say this is a huge issue, as we’re voice-acting for multiple NPCs instead of just a particular character. Different styles could be understood as simply different NPCs talking. (We don’t run much into the trouble Skyrim had, where the character would greet you in one voice and then give you the latest rumors in another.)

I like Rats’ compilation, though I would caution against how lengthy most of these are. Most of the scripts in the basegame were pretty short, except for a couple that would play when the NPC is idling. Examples:

“Mournhold, city of light, city of magic!”
“Why walk when you can ride?”
“Citizen!”
“Outlander, how are you?”
“Khajiit has no time for you.”
“<sniff> This scent is new.”
“This is the end of you, s’wit!”
“There is no escape!”
“Keep moving, scum.”

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There’s _plenty_ of longer lines in the vanilla game too, though. The battle cries are a bit shorter (and are meant to be recorded as quick shouts) because the longer monologues could still play after the player has killed the NPC, but otherwise I don’t see the length of voiced dialogue being an issue.

What do you think, btw, should the Ordinators of Mourning call the player a “citizen” (like the normal Ordinators) or a “pilgrim” on higher disposition levels. Necrom is a pilgrimage site rather than a proper city after all.

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They would assume you’re a pilgrim, so if they’re of higher disposition, I’d go for that.

Does: concepts, textures, youtube vids, admin stuff e.g. PR, handbook, assets, small website things. Activity level: wildly unpredictable. Still active. Find me on Discord.

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I'm going to make some edits and post another proposal shortly.

I'll be contacting MorrowindShorts and see if he's still willing to record with Gnomey's caveat.

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I suppose the acid test would be to see how annoying the longer ones get if played to you over and over while walking through Necrom. (I seem to remember doing a few musical rounds of “Mournhold, city of light…!” with the Ordinators in Tribunal. laugh...but because it was one of the only long ones they had, it amused me more than anything.)

I’d also go with pilgrim.

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...incidentally, I didn’t read the list, but is “Almalexia, city of light, city of magic” in it?

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A progress update. I've gotten most of the recorded lines from MorrowindShorts and I've been testing them in-game. I'm feeling pretty excited about them to be honest.

I will post a WIP test file once I've gotten all of the recordings.

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Rats

A progress update. I've gotten most of the recorded lines from MorrowindShorts and I've been testing them in-game. I'm feeling pretty excited about them to be honest.

I will post a WIP test file once I've gotten all of the recordings.

That's great news Rats, I'm also happy that a single person's opinion wasn't able to stop this from being done. I can't wait to check it out :)

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Wonderful!
Voices for Necrom’s mournings should be able to survive any later changes, the basic concept is solid

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Just in case someone’s missed it the voices for the Ordinators in Mourning of Necrom are finished and can be found in the Asset Browser [link].

This topic may be for discussing possible voice acting for other cities. This is not an urgent matter, I’d say.

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I don’t know about cities, but unikle for  Indoril guards will be logical and awesome :D

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I think that it'd be best to try and get the same thing done for the Dres Guards next as long as we've the possibility to work with MorrowindShorts. They'll be our long-term main attraction of TR and really won't work with vanilla voices.

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Also it be interesting to give to some npcs their voicing. Like in bloodmon where some npcs has unic phrases for every quest they give you.

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Yeah, the thing is that mixing new voices with vanilla voices so that they are used by the same NPC simply doesn't work. There are bound to be small differences which would make it sound odd. So any NPC that gets even a one new line needs to get a comprehensive "MorrowindShorts treatment".

Both Indoril and Dres guards sound okay to me. I also like Biboran's idea of having some quest-related unique dialogue. That would really catch players off guard.

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I don’t have a good microphone but here’s an example of my voice acting skills. I use a standard laptop microphone

I also did this