One of the more minor (yet still notable) features that will be included in For Honor’s upcoming Marching Fire expansion will be a series of new voiceover dialogue lines for both the expansion’s new Wu Lin faction and all of the game’s existing characters. However, a bit of a kerfuffle has been brewing over on the official For Honor subreddit as of late, a kerfuffle which has to do with the quality of the new VO.
It all started a few days ago when players got their first real taste of the Marching Fire expansion’s new VO-based dialogue intros, what Ubisoft is calling the “Responsive Dialogue System.” Not only was the system featured in last weekend’s Marching Fire open test, but it also got its own dedicated segment during the most recent Warrior’s Den livestream (Warrior’s Den is a For Honor-focused livestream series hosted by the game’s community development team).
The initial reception of the Responsive Dialogue System wasn’t great with players bemoaning the seemingly low quality of many of the new VO lines and the fact that the voice actors for several existing heroes had apparently been recast. The backlash got so bad that it quickly prompted a response from For Honor’s senior community developer Eric Pope. In his post, Pope explained that, due to the limited nature of the game’s existing bank of VO, new voice lines had to be recorded and in some cases getting the original voice actors from For Honor’s initial 2016 release wasn’t possible.
Sadly, rather than dampen the flames of fan rage as he intended, Pope apparently just threw a lit match onto a powder keg. Members of the For Honor Reddit community were quick to pounce on Pope’s claim that the original voice actors weren’t available, leading to discoveries such as how some of the original voice actors were indeed back but were only doing voice work for Marching Fire’s new Breach mode, or how one of the original actors even expressed his interest in returning via Twitter.
One purveying theory which seems to hold more water than most ties into the fact that the original voice actors are all members of the Screen Actor’s Guild whereas the new actors aren’t. The Screen Actor’s Guild is a worker’s union which recently won a settlement in which actors under their banner would be more adequately paid for the work they put in (many video game voice actors were part of the worker’s strike that led to the new agreement). As the theory goes, Ubisoft simply doesn’t want to pay the higher prices that the original voice actors are no-doubt asking for.
Whatever the case, this is hardly the first time that Ubisoft has found itself in hot water with the For Honor fanbase. Still, it’s clear that some fans are taking their ire a bit too far (as more trigger-happy internet users are prone to do), so it’s a little hard to see any true good guys in the whole mess.
For Honor’s Marching Fire expansion is scheduled to launch in full on October 16. Hopefully this whole VO mess will be sorted out before then.