[2020] Voice Acting in Episode 3 of The Icebrood Saga – GuildWars2.com

Jim Cummings. One of my favorite voice actors! Also does Winnie the Pooh and Tigger! He uses the Minsc voice in the Star Wars shows Clone Wars and Rebels as a pirate, Hondo. I might have gone a bit crazy the first time I heard Minsc in Star Wars. ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Cummings

Wait, it is getting voiced, just later?

That's the plan.

Ultimately, actors can turn their room(s) into quasi-studios. But that can take time and resources they may not have, or have shortly. Then there's the organization of recording.

This was something we looked into. This is fine if you're only recording a couple of people and are prepared to eat the cost of buying equipment for each actor, getting engineers in to set up all the gear (while wearing protective gear), and spending an extra day (per actor) getting all the software and hardware configured. Plus you'd be recording at half-speed (since everyone is remote it takes longer to provide context, do multiple takes, etc.) and getting audio at a lower quality than if you were using a full studio with more expensive mics, better soundproofing, etc.

We typically use 15-20 actors per episode, so this isn't a scalable solution unless the actors were already were set up to do this. And since the sound quality would probably have been noticeably worse via home recording when compared to the audio in the rest of the game, we'd have to re-record it anyway, which means additional time and expense that we hadn't budgeted for.

It isn't ideal for anyone, but I think, on balance, they probably made the right call.

We hope so. In the end, people's safety is more important. But also we wanted to make sure that people who wanted/needed to escape into Tyria to connect with friends and take their minds off of everything going on lately could do so. I feel like it was the best compromise but it was certainly a tough decision for everyone involved.