Darktide 101: Voice Over Recording & Rules - Dev Blog

Heyo Everyone, Welcome to the next installation of our Darktide 101 dev blog series. We’re interviewing devs working on Darktide to share what it’s like to create the game.

For today’s blog, we’re talking about Voice Over Recording and VO Rules. Have you ever been surprised by a piece of dialogue you’ve never heard before? Have you ever wondered what it’s like in the booth when recording your favourite lines? Today, you’ll get to find out how it works.



Runtime Dialogue System and VO Rules Our first topic is written by our VO Design guru, Ola. Take it away, Ola!

Darktide's VO system was built off of the way VO worked in our two previous ‘Tide titles, with a lot of additional bells and whistles.

This VO system is a context-aware system, where we send queries to see if we can play something and it will return results based on what the current status of the game is.

We track many many different contexts for this purpose. Some examples include:

• How much health and ammo do the players have?
  
• Are there other players or enemies nearby? If so, how many?
  
• Is the combat intense?
  
• What previous dialogue has played and how long ago was it?
  
• What weapons do you have equipped at the moment?
  
• Which players are in the game?
  
• Which mission are you in?
  
• What trust level* do you have?

(* Trust level is based on the player level 1-30.)

Based on all of these contexts, we set up dialogue rules. These are buckets of VO lines, and when the system finds a match, it prioritizes it based on the amount of contexts it has hit. The more specific a line is, the higher priority it has to play.

We currently have around 90,000 voice lines in the game spread across a total of 6,000 rules. (For context, Vermintide 2 has approximately 39,000 voice lines.) Some of these rules are insanely rare. Part of this is by design. But part of it is that with such a large amount of rules requiring different combinations of contexts, some are bound to be very rare.

The idea is that even if you have played the game for a very long time, you should still feel that from time to time you come across lines you've never heard before. Our player character personalities also play a big part in this. Many lines vary from personality to personality. Therefore, some lines will only ever play when both of those personalities are present in a game together. And as we have 21 personalities, this creates many combinations that take time to discover.

Our most common VO rule is a rule that’s activated when Newly Infected assault players.
This rule has been played 70,000,000 times in the last 30 days (at the time of writing this).

It has the following requirements:

• For that specific enemy to not have played their assault rule* in the last 8 seconds.
  
• For all newly infected to not have played their assault rule* in the last 4 seconds.

(* Assault rule refers to a rule that plays a voice line when an enemy is attacking or running toward the player.)

Our most rare rule is a bonding conversation between the female Savant Psyker and the Ogryn Bodyguard, where the Savant complains that the Bodyguard tends to get in the way due to his size.

In comparison, this rule has only been played 19 times in the last 30 days.

It has the following requirements:

• Have at least one friend nearby;
  
• No enemies nearby;
  
• For the tension to be decaying (meaning combat has just taken place);
  
• To have the female Savant Psyker present in the game;
  
• To have the Ogryn Bodyguard in the game;
  
• For there not to have been a banter conversation within the last 140 seconds; and
  
• The Savant Psyker to have triggered the “friendly fire” VO on the Ogryn Bodyguard within the last 90 seconds.

Now rare rules are okay, but this is close to non-existent. In an effort to make this rule play somewhat more often, I have recently tweaked these requirements to:

• Have less than 3 enemies nearby (from 0);
  
• No banter in the last 100 seconds (from 140); and
  
• For the female Savant Psyker to have triggered the friendly fire VO on the Ogryn Bodyguard in the last 180 seconds (from 90).

From time to time, we do these kinds of tweaks to the dialogue to try to shift what will be heard, tune down the most common conversations and tune up the rarest. All to keep the dialogue feeling like an alive and dynamic experience for all of the players! (Note: I personally get a real kick out of seeing people posting rare conversations on reddit.)

We put together a video with a series of voice lines that can show the specificity with which these voice rules are created, as well as the pure talent from our voice actors. These lines include:

• Zealot hears a Horde coming
  
• Veteran bonding conversation when low on health
  
• Pskyer finds ammo when a Zealot is low on ammo
  
• Veteran sees an Ogryn on a killstreak
  
• Psyker sees someone hogging ammo
  
• Ogryn finds a health boost while a Veteran is low on health
  
• Ogryn responds to friendly fire from a Zealot.

https://youtu.be/n8Zbzw2DGug
Alright, that’s it for now! If you’re excited to hear more about this topic, we have plenty more to talk about like the sound design of Darktide, implementation and WIPs, collaboration with level design or other disciplines, etc. If you have any specific questions related to voice over rules, or you’d like to hear more on the topic, please let us know.

Recording Voices Our next topic is written by our Sound and VO team member, David. Go for it, David!

For Darktide, we want all of the voice-overs (VO) to sound natural, as if they belong in the world of the game and they come from the character that is speaking.

There are many things to keep in mind to achieve this goal. For example, when recording voices it's therefore important to be consistent when it comes to the mics and how they are positioned relative to the actor/actress. In both of the recording studios, OMUK and Molinare in London, we use the same type of DPA mic that sits on a person’s forehead. This gives the actor/actress the possibility to move and do gestures while talking.

For Darktide, most of our voice-over is either barking during combat, or talking while walking or even running. It's important to capture this sense of movement and effort. We have tried to achieve this by actually letting the actor/actress move during the recording or add pauses and breaths before/after or in between words. Imagine how you would talk while jogging with a friend. That’s what we’re going for during the session.

Before and during the recording session, my role as a game developer/voice designer is to give the voice director and the actor/actress as much context as possible about the game and the specific situations. For example, if the voice-over line is meant to be delivered while someone is being dragged up after being knocked down, it’s important for the actor/actress to convey this through effort and strain in the voice. If I had to pick, the most common comment from me to the voice director or actor/actress, it’d probably be: "Can we have a bit more effort and movement in the voice please?" It's not super fun when you see how sweaty the actors/actresses are, but it's necessary for world-building.

That’s all for the first peek into what it’s like to record voice lines for Darktide. Would you like to hear more on the topic, such as drafting the voice lines, or what lines are the most difficult to get right? Maybe a deeper dive on the enemy voice work? Do you have any questions for our voice actors? Let us know!



And so ends our second Darktide 101 dev blog. What topic would you like to hear about next time? Do you have any questions for the devs working on Voice Acting and VO for Darktide? Comment below
and we’ll try to get some more dev replies for you!

Until next time!