Destiny Voice Cast - What the hell?

Yeah count me in as somebody blown away by hiring all this fantastic talent and letting them run wild as....vendors. Claudia Black as the Special Orders kiosk just about murdered my brain. Good thing they had all these fantastic people around to create characters for the story! Oh.

For a game with like, fifteen pages of dialogue at most, that's an absolutely ridiculous list.

Reminds me a bit of Dishonored. That game featured:

• Susan Sarandon
• Lena Headey
• Carrie Fisher
• Brad Douriff
• John Slattery
• Michael Madsen
• Cloë Grace Moretz

Most were criminally under-used.

Little known fact: Bungie actually brought Tom Hanks in to voice one of Master Chief's death screams.

Bungie has denied that rumor. They've said it's "nowhere near 500 million dollars".

It's too bad. A bunch of those ppl are great voice actors in other things in addition to normal acting too. Wish there was a story worthy of their talents.

Do they maybe just have them under contract for three games at least? It'd make sense if they just got them in to do all the VO work for the games in one go, or got them much cheaper for a long term contract at least.

@dudeglove: No idea. They just said it was nowhere near that number in terms of pure development costs, and you'd have to ask Activision if marketing were taken into account with those numbers. A representative for Activision then stated that the number was still not close to 500 million, even with marketing.

@wampa1: Yeah that could be. Or at least for DLC. I have a feeling we'll get a lot more story content in updates and DLC. Or at least I hope so.

In the grand scale of the thing, I can't imagine that the cost of the voice actors would be more than $100 or $200k. They'd bring in the voice actors for a day or two, the prominent ones may get about $10k to $20k a day, maybe? It probably cost more to producing the voice work than the actual voice actors.

Ya, we knew about these actors before the game was released.

Most of them are not voice actors so they're terrible.

Screen acting does not translate to voice acting. They are different skills.

I still like Peter Dinklage, though. Although I would argue he was just miss cast. The casting Director is probably just a fan and wanted to get him since they had the budget. His voice doesn't really fit the concept they were going for, though.

The voice acting is decent, but holy hell, is it completely unnecessary and arbitrary.

Dear lord. At least when movies overpay for a big name cast they draw in people based on advertising that cast. There's some return in investment when you slap big names in your trailer and have them go on talk show circuits to talk up the game. What exactly is the point of hiring a ton of big names, completely misusing or underusing them, and then telling nobody about them?

@mooseymcman ok.

Bungie spent so much if their budget on voice talent that they could not actually afford to produce the scenes for them...so they just have them read over the load scree...err, sorry, "flying through space" scenes. I also think that might have impacted their budget for loot programing as well.

So, Bungie got big names for just a few lines. Therefore, they get the star power, but had to pay them for less VA work. Which sounds like an excellent business decision. Though I agree completely that an exclusive VA such as Grey Delisle or Troy Baker would have been a better choice for your ghost. That character is basically the game's narrator, and should have been handled by a voice-acting pro with more experience outside of film.

Also, as a big fan of voice acting in general, I picked up on those voices pretty quickly, and was excited to hear them. You won't get a Fillion line past me without recognition, at least. And the player characters had solid, dedicated VA talent like Matt Mercer.

In the end, the game is a shooter first, and a sci-fi epic second, mostly for setting. The development was clearly focused on gameplay, mechanics, and the net code. Though I certainly hope they explore the story more in the ensuing DLC.