David Hayter is on strike. What does this mean for the game?

A strike isn't *quite* on the doorstep; I think the final vote will be on October 5, according to the article. I hope they reach an accommodation before then.

Still, as much as I agree that performance matters, alas, I think the current conditions of the gaming industry are making it matter less and less. The only games which can afford to hire talent like Mr. Hayter's tend to be "triple-A" games, and those are losing ground to indie and mobile titles. And more modest games can make do with much worse voice acting; indeed it's arguably part of the charm. A lot of folks from the 90s and 00s have fond memories of the amusingly hammy or outrightly amateurish voice work you'd see in games like Robot Alchemic Drive. I mean, just listen to this and try not to laugh:



Now RAD wasn't a smash hit, but it certainly is a cult classic and has a devoted fanbase (I ought to play it one of these days myself). Similarly, today, for a lot of smaller games, you can get away with skimping on the VA. Obviously we will be losing something, though. Hayter's performance as Snake is undoubtedly iconic, and there have been a few other recent ones too; from what I've seen of the cutscenes I think Phil LaMarr's work as Ramza in the FFT PSP remake is absolutely stellar. So it's certainly sad to see such performances go by the wayside. For that reason (as well as a general support of unions), Hayter's initiative has my axe, though I can only hope it's more successful than I think the present conditions of the videogame industry would augur...

Well, Tim Burton's Student project called "Vincent" used the talent of the King of Horror Mr. Vincent Price himself. If It's only a few lines, it's not that big of a deal financially for the developer because it's less work for the actor compared to a whole season of an Anime. Robert Belgrade as Alucard only says 62 lines in Symphony of the Night. It sounds like a lot, but it's about one Anime episode worth of dialogue in a main character. (two tops)

Edit: I assumed Vincent was a student project, but it was funded by Disney. But, the budget was $60,000 USD. That was the price of Tim Burton, Vincent Price, Clay and a lot of Film (Film is expensive as hell, even Black & White) and the help of 8 other people.

Programming isn't the biggest part of the game. They use something called "middleware", that means somebody did most of the programming for them. Epic gets paid $1 for every $20 somebody makes in an unreal engine game, so they already get 5% of the profits. Artists make art assets and there's a lot of good artists out there and I think Igarashi is one of them. Usually, good game design is when you design the floor plan of the map and use placeholders of which could look like a crayon drawing and they say "We'll figure out the detailed artwork later, right now, we'll focus on the floorplan and which enemy goes where and then we can worry about the more detailed artwork". (Though, there is just enough concept art and story discussion involved ahead of time before designing the gameplay so there's no disharmony in the overall experience)

Story is still important in games, you just might not be big on the role playing aspects of RPGs. Games that are pure gameplay are mostly short attention span easy dopamine fixes like mobile games. You need more than just gameplay like graphics, sound effects, music, story and voice acting in a harmonious way or the overall experience falls apart. Using graphics as an example, lots of people say "Graphics over gameplay. I wish they spent more time and money on the graphics instead of the gameplay", but they don't talk about music over graphics when in reality, it doesn't work like that. there is no real resource priority, if you cheap out on one thing, the whole project will suffer. Try playing a game with music and sound effects turned off or watch this video .

It's one of those "It will cost what it costs and it's money well spent" things. Also, the art department is a different department from gameplay (usually) and like I said, they design the enemies, floorplan and spawn/loot locations before they work on detailed in-game art.

Same. IIRC, Japanese games usually don't begin recording until the script is completely done being translated and that usually happens at the end of the game's production. That should be a couple years away and by then, the strike will have either already happened or an agreement could reached before the strike occurs.

But if worst comes to worst and something happens that interferes with the union and Bloodstained, I hope David Hayter keeps is word and records lines for the game anyway. Union members usually don't use their real names on non-union projects, so maybe David could convince his "friend"  Sean Barker to come out of retirement and take the role...

Don't forget that it takes seventy-five percent approval from the Screen Actors Guild to start a strike. To put that in perspective, it takes sixty percent for the United States Senate to defeat a filibuster, and seventy-five percent of Congress in general to approve a constitutional amendment and send it to the states for ratification. Unless there is widespread support from film and TV actors, the strike isn't very likely to happen.

Yeah I'm going to have to strongly disagree with the bolded. You've got to be crazy if you think just because someone is using a bought engine that "most of the programming work" is done for them. That's so far from the truth its not even funny. It's a toolset - just like Photoshop doesn't do most of the work for a digital artist or R doesn't do most of the work for a statistician. There's a reason that engines like Unity and Unreal can churn out games that look and play so completely differently or why games can take years to make and its not because people can press a few buttons and check a few options and make a competent, high-quality game (I'm ignoring the asset dumps that disguise themselves as games you sometimes see on Steam because such minor, low-quality products aren't worth our time discussing).

On the second point, while I agree that games are a cohesive product made up of many moving parts to produce a solid whole and that stuff like graphics, art direction, sound direction, music, etc. are all very important to the experience, you can't discount gameplay. I don't think there is such a thing as a game that is "all gameplay" or "no gameplay" but there are certainly products that lean strongly on one side of the spectrum or the other. Certain genres are that way as well. You can get away with scaling back "gameplay" in games like those "walking simulators" (do they have an official genre name?) where the main selling point is atmosphere or lore (like Going to the Rapture, Journey, etc.) or stuff like click and point adventure games or visual novels but that isn't going to fly with any strongly multiplayer oriented genre (shooters, fighting games, etc.) or stuff like platformers (Mario- past and present) or action games (DMC, Bayonetta). Many excellent games today can and do succeed without things like a notable story or voice acting and many games (especially in certain genres) absolutely wither and die if the gameplay isn't put at the forefront, even at the detriment of other variables.

Stimpy: It may not have a large scale story, but it's very detailed yet cryptic.

Croc: I wasn't saying there's no programming involved. Your interpretation of what I said reminds me of early Pixar animators thinking the new computer animation would take their jerbs of which it kinda did take a lot of their jobs, but they still needed people to make models, rig and animate. I was saying compared to making an in-house engine, there isn't much to program, mostly UScript and Shaders work and less so C++ and C# work. They could literally have one or two guys scripting the whole thing. Ryan Gordon is one man and he ported Unreal Engine 3 to Linux all by himself.

I haven't got a response from anyone on this yet. I hope the negotiations go heavily in favor of the voice actors, even if it comes to a strike. Will the strike affect Bloodstained? I don't know. I'd like to know though, but with so much time on the game I think that we may be just fine.

Yeah, I sent an ask about the strike to David on Twitter too. I hope this works out...;-;