Feedback on Clarissa

From my past posts, you know that I am a great fan of the audio in PoE, and have given detailed feedback elsewhere, including great praise.

Now I hope to offer some constructive criticism on something that has been bothering me the past 5 weeks: Clarissa. There are two issues.

1. First, the voice acting of Clarissa is not of the same quality or authenticity of any of the other NPCs. While the other NPCs do their lines quite credibly, the immersion is, for me, broken as soon as Clarissa opens her mouth. Her accent in town is markedly different than the persona she attempts to convey when just rescued; there, in the slums, she sounds ok, but in town, she has on what appears to be a southern British cockney accent, which she does, I am sorry to say, quite poorly. I wince when she greets me. Her accent is not believable, and she sounds like an actor trying to act. Do you think you might get the actress to redo the lines? Or consider redoing them with someone else?

2. Secondly, the lines Clarissa has been given in town are a very suboptimal choice, especially with the actor's delivery (see above). Clarissa has just lost her lover, tortured to death by thugs, yet she chirps her flippant, pleasant greetings as if she were just about to go on a walk through the tulips. If she could sound just 50% more like Nessa, it would be sufficient -- sparse, not quite bleak, serious. She can still be the "cool" cutthroat she apparantly should be, but she need not attempt to sound like a hawker of chewing gum. Less cheerful, more sober, or even sinister, would fit much better.

Thanks for listening, I have the greatest respect for the work you do and want to see everything up to the excellent quality it has been so far!

Thanks for the constructive feedback! We are already looking into this.

The actress who performs Clarissa is the same who performs the Gemling Queen and she is a great actress.

What is interesting here is that, for players who aren't aware of what goes into voice acting, you can see the importance of a good director (ahem...) and writer.

In other words, if there is a complaint about Clarissa, and there's no problem with the actress (which there isn't, in my opinion - the Gemling Queen seems to be a favourite character voice atm) then you may have to point the blame at the director and/or the choices made by the concepters, creators and designers and writers.

In this case, I personally think we made a less than ideal choice of background and accent (with all due respect to the others involved in this process). We also have difficulty with the fact that she has someone close to her die, then she has to continue giving you a bunch of info and dialogue.

We're going to address this soon, however, and I'd welcome your feedback when it's done! (by soon I mean when all the other priority voice stuff is done so... maybe in a while... ; )

Thank you for taking the time to reply in such detail. I'm sure you have much higher priorities now!!
Some actors, it seems, are not able to play all parts with equal ease, or are better fitted to certain roles. The actress may also have difficulty adjusting to that role?
I think you did marvelously with the brusk, grumpy style of Greust, so I look forward to hearing what gets done ... next year!

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onomastikon wrote:

Thank you for taking the time to reply in such detail. I'm sure you have much higher priorities now!!
Some actors, it seems, are not able to play all parts with equal ease, or are better fitted to certain roles. The actress may also have difficulty adjusting to that role?
I think you did marvelously with the brusk, grumpy style of Greust, so I look forward to hearing what gets done ... next year!

Definitely true, as far as some actors not being suited to certain roles.

In this case, in my opinion, none of us really clicked with the accent - and I personally wouldn't have been a fan if we'd had a completely native speaker in the role either. It just feels out of place to me - but I know that's a personal taste thing.

However, there seems to be a general consensus on this (I haven't heard one good comment about the role lol) so we're going to give it another go with a different accent/voice (resource and time-willing) - as you say, we're thinking something a little cooler, slightly more reserved, perhaps.

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Damien_GGG wrote:

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onomastikon wrote:

Thank you for taking the time to reply in such detail. I'm sure you have much higher priorities now!!
Some actors, it seems, are not able to play all parts with equal ease, or are better fitted to certain roles. The actress may also have difficulty adjusting to that role?
I think you did marvelously with the brusk, grumpy style of Greust, so I look forward to hearing what gets done ... next year!

Definitely true, as far as some actors not being suited to certain roles.

In this case, in my opinion, none of us really clicked with the accent - and I personally wouldn't have been a fan if we'd had a completely native speaker in the role either. It just feels out of place to me - but I know that's a personal taste thing.

However, there seems to be a general consensus on this (I haven't heard one good comment about the role lol) so we're going to give it another go with a different accent/voice (resource and time-willing) - as you say, we're thinking something a little cooler, slightly more reserved, perhaps.

I like Clarissa, don't touch her. Move her to a side area or something, don't brick her like you bricked Nessa.

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Damien_GGG wrote:

We also have difficulty with the fact that she has someone close to her die, then she has to continue giving you a bunch of info and dialogue.

I always thought she got a little too cheerful a little too fast after the death of Tolman (Welcome to Sarn! ^_^).

The NPC Atma from D2 is in a similar position, her voice acting was really well done/believable.

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Aelloon wrote:

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Damien_GGG wrote:

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onomastikon wrote:

Thank you for taking the time to reply in such detail. I'm sure you have much higher priorities now!!
Some actors, it seems, are not able to play all parts with equal ease, or are better fitted to certain roles. The actress may also have difficulty adjusting to that role?
I think you did marvelously with the brusk, grumpy style of Greust, so I look forward to hearing what gets done ... next year!

Definitely true, as far as some actors not being suited to certain roles.

In this case, in my opinion, none of us really clicked with the accent - and I personally wouldn't have been a fan if we'd had a completely native speaker in the role either. It just feels out of place to me - but I know that's a personal taste thing.

However, there seems to be a general consensus on this (I haven't heard one good comment about the role lol) so we're going to give it another go with a different accent/voice (resource and time-willing) - as you say, we're thinking something a little cooler, slightly more reserved, perhaps.

I like Clarissa, don't touch her. Move her to a side area or something, don't brick her like you bricked Nessa.

[Apologies for the wall of text - I figured if I put a detailed explanation here, I can direct people to this post if I need to.]

It's unfortunate you don't like the changes we're making to the voices, Aelloon. And thanks for speaking up - I really thought there was no one who liked that take! However, we aren't intending to "brick" anything - we consider the changes we make to be improvements.

I realise we aren't always right and we also can't please everyone so - to avoid paralysis by indecision and committee - we have to fall back on what I feel is the best direction for us to take: going with our original vision for the characters and the world in general.

Here's my thinking and approach, if it will help to explain anything: we formulate an approach to the character based on the art director's image and input; the writer's feel for the character and words contribute to the direction also. We will then cast with that general concept in mind.

Once we've recorded the dialogue the first feedback is obviously from the other GGG staff and from the Alpha testers. If we can't please the GGG staff and the alpha testers (who have been with us for a while, for the most part) then I'd consider that we have either misinterpreted the original vision or something has gone awry in the process. I don't think we've ever had a totally unanimous downvote, so far, though. So if there's at least some agreement on the voice then we consider that the playerbase will be similarly split, as in most things, and as long as the creative director is happy (which he usually is because he's present at the recordings) then we go ahead with release.

Case in point: Nessa. I was very happy with her dialogue (before I heard it ingame) and was surprised by the negative response from some on the team but there were enough 'yea's to go ahead with her take - myself, the creative director and the writer were happy with it, as well as a few others, from what I can recall. Things developed from there but I've told the rest of the Nessa story in another post.

If we put a voice out into the public game and the overwhelming response is negative - and I believe Clarissa falls into that category more than any other character so far - then I would go and discuss with the creative director, Erik, and the writer, Edwin, and see what they think. if they also agree with the feedback then I take that as a very good sign that we should change it. Erik has created the entire look of Wraeclast and has spent years developing the story along with Chris, Jonathan and Brian so if he agrees that a voice should be redone his opinion obviously carries a lot of weight.

Some might ask why we would record a character like Clarissa, then hear the feedback and change our minds. In many cases, it's simply resource constraints. Often (although this may be changing soon with new processes and systems), we don't always have all of the resources to hand to be able to fully understand the context of the character - they're being developed simultaneously by artists, modelers and the sound guy.

We spend a long time auditioning to find the right voice and if the actual session doesn't go quite as well as the audition suggested it would we don't always have the option to turn things around by that point. There's a lot of editing to do then, to maintain the integrity as much as possible but ultimately we have to release it into the wild and see how it goes.

In this case, the devs, alpha testers - and now, in general, it seems, the playerbase - were not enamoured of Clarissa, version one. We were extremely pushed for time on Act 3 by this point (it was, after all, the launch of Open Beta!) and needless to say, resources were tight.

(On another note we've had sessions where I felt they weren't quite as good as they could have been and the response has been very positive... there's just no way to predict this stuff.)

Once again it's regretful that changes cannot please everyone but I hope you can understand that the vision for Path of Exile is best maintained by the original creators to ensure it doesn't become too piecemeal and generic. This is no slight on your personal opinion or your assessment of voice acting in general - it's just a concession to the importance of a cohesive vision for any project - especially those that are open to the public voice as much as Path of Exile has always been. I believe this approach should, and does apply to all areas of the game.

Your feedback is welcome because it reminds me not to get too trigger happy with changes without having a good reason... Thanks for the comment.

Thanks for the insight Damien.

I really like Clarissa for the most part. I think her accent is great. It's only really her disturbingly upbeat mood after what happens to Tolman that needs to be changed, in my opinion.

Isn't it a problem of writing more so than dialogue?

I just checked her in game and her dialogue options do not even include Tolman (after I saved her)..

The authenticity of the voice might not be the best of all the NPCs, but I just can't get enough of her voice, it's so sexy!