I miss the old days when the voice actors were (for the most part) just people from the studio unless you didn't have anyone who would fit the character. I have hated how the industry has married its self to hollywood. It has bloated budgets with little value in return imo.
The only actors you actually need these days (and i am being generous here) are motion capture performers.
I don't think hiring real actors is a bad practice in itself. You definitely want someone to deliver a competent performance for your game so why not hire a thespian who does this for a living?
But you don't need the biggest Pedowood names to give you a good performance. After all the drama they experienced with stars like Ray Liotta and Burt Reynolds whilst making GTA: Vice City, Rockstar made the right call in hiring relative unknown actors for the lead protagonists in their titles.
I mean shit, we didn't even know who these people were until after the games were released. That's because Rockstar made the smart decision to hype up the GAME rather than the actors playing the parts. That's why I feel a bit of sympathy for Tati Gabrielle. Cuckmann has set her up for mockery from the chud gamers he wanted to own by trying to hype her up.
I don't love the Hollywood dick sucking either. Sometimes an actor fits in well, but it mostly just feels like they're paying extra for the ability to advertise a big name. MGS5 was heavily butchered by not just having an unknown voice actor. Then they could have afforded to keep the main character's voice actor the studio for enough time to record more than 17 lines.
For real? Keifer Sutherland only had 17 lines as Snake? Ouch. For someone like Kojima who loves to insert multi page rants in his dialogue, that's unthinkable. Shit, I remember David Hayter having a ton of dialogue to read out in the original MGS, and that in itself was unusual because Solid Snake was supposed to be a stoic character who didn't say much.
I'm stunned at the complete lack of professionalism and apparently no NDAs regarding getting into publicized fights with potential customers. Obsidian, Bioware, and now Naughty Dog all need better PR and Legal because it seems whatever they have now is not good enough.
Or they don't care at all for potential customers and revenue. I would think shareholders would be infuriated.
In a saner world, people like Neil Cuckmann or Matt Handjob would have laid off immediately for their anti-consumer fuckery. Especially if they worked in a Japanese company, they don't fuck around.
Alas, we live in a Clown World where the companies are infected with DEI brainrot from the lowest up to the highest positions of upper management. These SJW cultists will protect their own so the only thing that's sure to happen is they'll happily ignore the backlash by going dark on social media for awhile.
