THE ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE ESO Developer Deep DiveGiving Tamriels Characters Their Voice

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THE ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE ESO Developer Deep DiveGiving Tamriels Characters Their Voice
Published by 19 May, 2023 0 likes

Learn about how all of Tamriel’s characters get their voices with this deep dive chat with ZeniMax Online Studio’s own VO Lead, Becky Ichnoski!

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We are excited to chat with The Elder Scrolls Online’s own Voice-Over (VO) Lead, Becky Ichnoski, who takes us through the months-long process for preparing, recording, and adding voice to ESO’s many characters.

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There are approximately 300, 000 lines of VO in English alone, and all of that is planned, recorded, and implemented by Becky and her team! Hey Becky!

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Could you introduce yourself to us and tell us about your role at ZOS? Sure, my name is Becky Ichnoski.

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I'm The Elder Scrolls Online’s Voice-Over Lead, and I have been working on the game since 2012.

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Basically, I lead the VO team, which includes our two VO supervisors, Jessica Crowe and DB Cooper, plus me. Let’s jump right into it!

Broadly, what is the process for adding VO to our game? I always have to narrow down the VO process into three separate chunks.

There's pre-recording, which is basically casting, actor assignment, creating scripts, and preparing recording sessions.

Then there's recording, which is done either in the studio or, more often these days, remotely. That’s when we record the actual voice-over.

Finally, there’s a third stage, post-recording. That’s when we get all the VO that we recorded back, integrate it into the game, and polish everything.

What do you do during the pre-recording phase? So, to begin, we jump into the game and play through the content.

Things are a work in progress, but we want to get a feel for the quests and meet the characters ourselves.

We also work with writers to get an idea of who the major characters are and who we want special casting consideration for.

For those characters, we’ll create sides (audition information with art, descriptions, and some lines) and send them out to agencies. We work with a lot of different agencies.

And within a few days, we’ll get a whole bunch of auditions back. In some cases, a writer has written a character with a specific actor in mind, so we’ll also request a read from that actor.

Do you have a recent example of a time when a writer wanted a specific actor? Yeah!

Dhulef from the High Isle Chapter, whom we got Phil LaMarr to play. The writer had LaMarr in mind, and it all worked out really well.

Dhulef of the Mages Guild, voiced by Phil LaMarr What happens after auditions come in? We listen to them all!

We often take turns, pulling out our top three favorites and then passing them to each other to compare favorites.

We’ll also reach out to writers and other developers to weigh in before picking an actor. We’ll do that for the major characters first.

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