No Greek voice acting in options ?

[GoulactiX]

I know it seems like not so important kind of thing but i would really like If i could get to hear greek while playing a game that is influenced by Greek mythology ....at least for immersion . disappointed there is not . The anime style for the characters doesn't help personally either

[The Sojourner]

Not even Greek subtitles for immersion's sake. Oh well. Supergiant's probably moved on even from that, so... to be modded in I guess?

[C4RNIVOR3]

There's only english voice over for all languages. Much of the game's voiceovers were done in studio, up until the pandemic forced remote work and they had to accommodate to finish the game.

[GoulactiX]

Originally posted by C4RNIVOR3:

There's only english voice over for all languages. Much of the game's voiceovers were done in studio, up until the pandemic forced remote work and they had to accommodate to finish the game.

So....the different language voice acting was a thing until the Pandemic hit and forced the studio to scrap them ? If so I'm totally fine with that reason

[Psyringe]

While the pandemic made production (including that of the voice-overs) more difficult, I strongly doubt that it had anything to do with not having non-English voices. IIRC a dev said at some point in the development process that non-English VO was "not planned".

Hades is a game that was developed by a fairly small team of people, but which has a _huge_ amount of voice acting for an indie title. The only way they could pull this off even in English, is that a) some characters are voiced by studio members or close associates, and b) they were able to leverage personal contacts to hire competent but fairly unknown (and hence probably not very expensive) voice actors. IIRC, all the post-processing was done by a single person (Darren Korb), who was also the game's music composer and even voiced the main character (Zagreus), as well as Skelly and Orpheus' singing voice.

It would be absolutely impossible to do voice acting in the same way for any other language, especially for one that has less than 15m native speakers. The devs probably don't speak Greek, voice actors would be much harder to find, Darren Korb may not have the capacity to handle post-processing for other languages on top of his other work, and quality assurance (something that the devs regard as extremely important for their success) would be difficult for voice acting in a language that no one at the studio understands.

Now, Hades turned out to be a very successful game. So even though voice acting in other languages was not part of the original design, arguably Supergiant _could_ hire a professional voice acting company to do that work for them. But I think that this is highly unlikely for two reasons:

One, even though voice-overs in Greek would add to the immersion for a subgroup of players (though it's actually debatable how good of a fit modern Greek would be for ancient Greek characters), the number of people who would appreciate or even use that feature is far too small to justify the high cost of professional third-party voice acting (again, the devs wouldn't be able to leverage personal relations in the way they did for the English VO, and they would want high-quality work, which is costly).

And two, Supergiant's strategy has always been to keep the development small and personal. They tend to pick the people who work with them very very carefully - they want high talent and a dedication to high-quality work. They have created a work environment where the people involved in the game actually know each other and can talk to each other on a daily basis. Looking at their track record, this approach has served them very well, so I don't expect them to change it.

[GoulactiX]

Originally posted by Psyringe:

While the pandemic made production (including that of the voice-overs) more difficult, I strongly doubt that it had anything to do with not having non-English voices. IIRC a dev said at some point in the development process that non-English VO was "not planned".

Hades is a game that was developed by a fairly small team of people, but which has a _huge_ amount of voice acting for an indie title. The only way they could pull this off even in English, is that a) some characters are voiced by studio members or close associates, and b) they were able to leverage personal contacts to hire competent but fairly unknown (and hence probably not very expensive) voice actors. IIRC, all the post-processing was done by a single person (Darren Korb), who was also the game's music composer and even voiced the main character (Zagreus), as well as Skelly and Orpheus' singing voice.

It would be absolutely impossible to do voice acting in the same way for any other language, especially for one that has less than 15m native speakers. The devs probably don't speak Greek, voice actors would be much harder to find, Darren Korb may not have the capacity to handle post-processing for other languages on top of his other work, and quality assurance (something that the devs regard as extremely important for their success) would be difficult for voice acting in a language that no one at the studio understands.

Now, Hades turned out to be a very successful game. So even though voice acting in other languages was not part of the original design, arguably Supergiant _could_ hire a professional voice acting company to do that work for them. But I think that this is highly unlikely for two reasons:

One, even though voice-overs in Greek would add to the immersion for a subgroup of players (though it's actually debatable how good of a fit modern Greek would be for ancient Greek characters), the number of people who would appreciate or even use that feature is far too small to justify the high cost of professional third-party voice acting (again, the devs wouldn't be able to leverage personal relations in the way they did for the English VO, and they would want high-quality work, which is costly).

And two, Supergiant's strategy has always been to keep the development small and personal. They tend to pick the people who work with them very very carefully - they want high talent and a dedication to high-quality work. They have created a work environment where the people involved in the game actually know each other and can talk to each other on a daily basis. Looking at their track record, this approach has served them very well, so I don't expect them to change it.

All of this sounds very fair and reasonable . What indie games\developers lack in budget or manpower they excel in the passion and care of their product . Something huge AAA developers and publishers should take notes from ...thanks for the lengthy comment

[EarthwormJim]

I just played the game for the first time and got myself the same reflexion, there is chinese, and korean in the voices options so why not push it through and offer the true original version with greek voice actings?

[Redrick]

Originally posted by earthwormjim357:

I just played the game for the first time and got myself the same reflexion, there is chinese, and korean in the voices options so why not push it through and offer the true original version with greek voice actings?

They are not voice options, they are "Language" options. Subtle but significant difference. They are subtitles only, voice is still English.

[madkons]

Originally posted by Psyringe:

One, even though voice-overs in Greek would add to the immersion for a subgroup of players (though it's actually debatable how good of a fit modern Greek would be for ancient Greek characters), the number of people who would appreciate or even use that feature is far too small to justify ...

Is that why people enjoy watching anime and playing games in Japanese + subs? Or why a ton of historical Japanese and Chinese games use anachronistic modern language instead of using older/ancient versions of the language?

And then there is this bit of ignorant accidental comedy: "it's actually debatable how good of a fit modern Greek would be for ancient Greek characters". Because English, a Germanic language, would totally make more sense for characters that are supposed to be Hellenic speakers... Do you have any idea how little Greek has changed in comparison to English the past 2000 years?

I see prejudice in this part of your reply. Besides all the eagerness to dismiss the idea.

[CHRIS MAMBA]

Originally posted by madkons:

Originally posted by Psyringe:

One, even though voice-overs in Greek would add to the immersion for a subgroup of players (though it's actually debatable how good of a fit modern Greek would be for ancient Greek characters), the number of people who would appreciate or even use that feature is far too small to justify ...

Is that why people enjoy watching anime and playing games in Japanese + subs? Or why a ton of historical Japanese and Chinese games use anachronistic modern language instead of using older/ancient versions of the language?

And then there is this bit of ignorant accidental comedy: "it's actually debatable how good of a fit modern Greek would be for ancient Greek characters". Because English, a Germanic language, would totally make more sense for characters that are supposed to be Hellenic speakers... Do you have any idea how little Greek has changed in comparison to English the past 2000 years?

I see prejudice in this part of your reply. Besides all the eagerness to dismiss the idea.

he's not wrong though, Greek has indeed changed quite a bit from the current language - that's why there are specific scholars for ancient Greek and the average modern Greek can't read or speak it fluently. English also for what it's worth might have started as a Germanic language, but it's disingenuous at best to ignore the especially rampant Latin and French introduced to the language thanks to 1066

also, bizarre to necro a thread and ignore the actual explanation that is perfectly reasonable and also highlighted. are you sure you're not just being a little nationalist for no real reason?