Mother of Stars: What Happened To Dagda's Voice?

[mandala.8507]

I was replaying this SotO story instance just for fun, but apparently a new filter was put over top of Dagda's vocal performance that I'm really not a fan of. I restarted the instance to make sure it wasn't a glitch, but it seems like someone messed with that vocal performance and now it's super muffled and not nearly as impactful or crisp as it was before.

Is anyone else able to confirm this change?

Edited June 10 by mandala.8507

[Kalavier.1097]

Could be to indicate she's possessed?

[Bobby Stein.3612]

On 6/10/2024 at 12:13 PM, mandala.8507 said:

I was replaying this SotO story instance just for fun, but apparently a new filter was put over top of Dagda's vocal performance that I'm really not a fan of. I restarted the instance to make sure it wasn't a glitch, but it seems like someone messed with that vocal performance and now it's super muffled and not nearly as impactful or crisp as it was before.

Is anyone else able to confirm this change?

Can you provide more context? I asked one of our audio folks who went into our dev tools, and he said that Dagda has the regular jotun VO processing applied to her bank of lines. Her appearance in a cinematic has a special conditional process applied to it, but that everything appears normal/intentional from what he's checked across a variety of voiced lines.

Do you have any specific lines that stood out? If so, posting the text here would help us investigate further if you feel it's still an issue. Thanks!

Edited June 13 by Bobby Stein.3612

[Randulf.7614]

I played it through the other day and heard no change from my original playthrough

[Randulf.7614]

14 minutes ago, Bobby Stein.3612 said:

has the regular jotun VO processing applied to her bank of lines.

Not wanting to side rail this, but can you give any further details on this? I always assumed the VA's just acted their lines specific to each race, but is there a lot more involved in the post-production to adjust for consistency between each race's unique verbal characteristics?

Just interested really

[mandala.8507]

1 hour ago, Bobby Stein.3612 said:

Can you provide more context? I asked one of our audio folks who went into our dev tools, and he said that Dagda has the regular jotun VO processing applied to her bank of lines. Her appearance in a cinematic has a special conditional process applied to it, but that everything appears normal/intentional from what he's checked across a variety of voiced lines.

Do you have any specific lines that stood out? If so, posting the text here would help us investigate further if you feel it's still an issue. Thanks!

Here's the moment I mean from the Dagda fight. I recorded this just now.

At some point in the back and forth with Zojja, the new voice alteration flips on. This hasn't been there any of the other times I've replayed the story instance over the past year, and you can probably find 20+ videos from launch SotO to compare to what it sounds like usually.

It could just be a me thing, but it's been consistent on my end since I noticed it.

I come into this instance frequently because I think this is probably the best golden path combat sequence for SotO and I think Dagda's VA delivered such a quality vocal performance that I'm just drawn back to it for testing builds etc.

It's one of the few times where I'm forced to feel something for a character simply because of the emotion present in their vocal delivery, similar to when we met Zafirah in living world season 4. Voice acting so stellar you don't even need to know the character to be moved.

And this filter gets in the way of that, imo.

Edited June 13 by mandala.8507

[Trejgon.9367]

That sounds exactly like she did sound the first time around for me, and the modulation is in-line with other possessed wizards, the modulation kicks in exactly in the moment when dagda looses control, and disappears as soon as the possession is undone.

[mandala.8507]

3 minutes ago, Trejgon.9367 said:

That sounds exactly like she did sound the first time around for me, and the modulation is in-line with other possessed wizards, the modulation kicks in exactly in the moment when dagda looses control, and disappears as soon as the possession is undone.

For reference, this is what it used to sound like:

Just Dagda's normal voice filter the whole time.

And I think it works better this way thematically. This is a very vulnerable moment for Dagda, and so it still being her true voice is important for the scene.

[Randulf.7614]

That's very odd indeed

[Trejgon.9367]

19 minutes ago, mandala.8507 said:

For reference, this is what it used to sound like:

Just Dagda's normal voice filter the whole time.

And I think it works better this way thematically. This is a very vulnerable moment for Dagda, and so it still being her true voice is important for the scene.

that is super weird because I remember the other version from my first playthrough, which happened before WP got there.....

[Randulf.7614]

7 minutes ago, Trejgon.9367 said:

that is super weird because I remember the other version from my first playthrough, which happened before WP got there.....

Same. Maybe I am experiencing the "mandela effect" (oh the irony here..)

[HotDelirium.7984]

1 hour ago, mandala.8507 said:

Here's the moment I mean from the Dagda fight. I recorded this just now.

At some point in the back and forth with Zojja, the new voice alteration flips on. This hasn't been there any of the other times I've replayed the story instance over the past year, and you can probably find 20+ videos from launch SotO to compare to what it sounds like usually.

It could just be a me thing, but it's been consistent on my end since I noticed it.

I come into this instance frequently because I think this is probably the best golden path combat sequence for SotO and I think Dagda's VA delivered such a quality vocal performance that I'm just drawn back to it for testing builds etc.

It's one of the few times where I'm forced to feel something for a character simply because of the emotion present in their vocal delivery, similar to when we met Zafirah in living world season 4. Voice acting so stellar you don't even need to know the character to be moved.

And this filter gets in the way of that, imo.

I noticed this in the last meta I think too her line about where you want us, allegedly. xD

Could be a bug even though they checked it on their part.

Edited June 13 by HotDelirium.7984

[HotDelirium.7984]

3 hours ago, Bobby Stein.3612 said:

Can you provide more context? I asked one of our audio folks who went into our dev tools, and he said that Dagda has the regular jotun VO processing applied to her bank of lines. Her appearance in a cinematic has a special conditional process applied to it, but that everything appears normal/intentional from what he's checked across a variety of voiced lines.

Do you have any specific lines that stood out? If so, posting the text here would help us investigate further if you feel it's still an issue. Thanks!

Bobby, respectfully....are you guys going to keep Isgarren's arms folded forever with him stabbing himself in the shoulder with his staff? lol it's really distracting and odd.

[Kilty.4906]

2 hours ago, mandala.8507 said:

Here's the moment I mean from the Dagda fight. I recorded this just now.

Whaat? I find this much cooler, I wish when I played this was there! Indeed I don't remember this back then but this voice makes it much more sinister, it shows that who is influencing her talking is the possession!

[Bobby Stein.3612]

19 hours ago, mandala.8507 said:

Here's the moment I mean from the Dagda fight. I recorded this just now.

At some point in the back and forth with Zojja, the new voice alteration flips on.

My gut says this was likely a line that was marked for "possession" conditional processing to show her on the edge of being totally controlled for the last line of that scene and that it was missed in a batch process for launch but was caught later and then processed and imported. That stated, I don't know for sure but will ask a few folks to look into it. Thanks for the heads up.

Edited June 14 by Bobby Stein.3612

[Bobby Stein.3612]

21 hours ago, Randulf.7614 said:

Not wanting to side rail this, but can you give any further details on this? I always assumed the VA's just acted their lines specific to each race, but is there a lot more involved in the post-production to adjust for consistency between each race's unique verbal characteristics?

Just interested really

When someone in our cast is voicing a non-human character, we supply them with a few things in the recording booth:

• Character bio/description
• High level info about their species
• If available, we show them some reference art to give them a visual representation of who they are voicing
• If they've voiced this character in the past (or if others have done so) we'll play them voice reference to get them into character and vocal range

As for audio postprocessing, that's the domain of the Audio Team who are the real experts here. But to my knowledge, some amount of voice processing is applied to all VO lines (normalization for levels) but many non-human species get additional processes applied (e.g. pitch shift, gutturals added, distortion, echo, etc.) depending on what sort of voice print Audio envisions for that species. And on top of that, if there are special conditions for a situation (e.g. character is a ghost, echo of the past, possessed, etc.) we can layer another process on top.

Again, I want to stress that I'm not the expert on VO postprocessing--our Audio Designers are. But that's how I understand some of the basics of what they do to voiceover lines. The reason I'm commenting here is that quite often a writer/narrative designer will mark a particular character or lines within a scene for conditional voice processing, so Narrative is involved in the process but only at the front end of identifying lines for story or gameplay purposes. After that, the Audio folks take over and make the magic happen.

Edited June 14 by Bobby Stein.3612

[Randulf.7614]

5 minutes ago, Bobby Stein.3612 said:

When someone in our cast is voicing a non-human character, we supply them with a few things in the recording booth:

• Character bio/description
• High level info about their species
• If available, we show them some reference art to give them a visual representation of who they are voicing
• If they've voiced this character in the past (or if others have done so) we'll play them voice reference to get them into character and vocal range

As for audio postprocessing, that's the domain of the Audio Team who are the real experts here. But to my knowledge, some amount of voice processing is applied to all VO lines (normalization for levels) but many non-human species get additional processes applied (e.g. pitch shift, gutturals added, distortion, echo, etc.) depending on what sort of voice print Audio envisions for that species. And on top of that, if there are special conditions for a situation (e.g. character is a ghost, echo of the past, possessed, etc.) we can layer another process on top.

Again, I want to stress that I'm not the expert on VO postprocessing--our Audio Designers are. But that's how I understand some of the basics of what they do to voiceover lines. The reason I'm commenting here is that quite often a writer/narrative designer will mark a particular character or lines within a scene for conditional voice processing, so Narrative is involved in the process but only at the front end of identifying lines for story or gameplay purposes. After that, the Audio folks take over and make the magic happen.

Thanks Bobby. Always interesting to peek behind the curtain sometimes

[Bobby Stein.3612]

On 6/10/2024 at 12:13 PM, mandala.8507 said:

Is anyone else able to confirm this change?

I asked folks to specifically check these scenes to determine if this was intentional. It was. The processing was applied on certain lines to indicate her shifting back and forth between total possession. If it wasn't this way at launch, it was most likely a case of files not getting caught up in a batch process and fixed in a later patch.

Thanks for bringing it to our attention regardless. Always helps to see how folks feel about particular details of the experience. 🙂

[Bobby Stein.3612]

19 hours ago, HotDelirium.7984 said:

Bobby, respectfully....are you guys going to keep Isgarren's arms folded forever with him stabbing himself in the shoulder with his staff? lol it's really distracting and odd.

Isgarren's a masochist so it's totally in character. 😆