So I’ve been sitting on this post for a few days, trying to decide if I wanted to risk opening a can of worms by making it. (I think I was sort of hoping someone else would raise these objections first, TBH
) But I’d feel like crap if I didn’t speak up, so… I think I kind of have some problems with this project. Bear with me for this super long post, please.
First, the technical difficulties. Voice acting isn't the easiest thing in the world, and voice acting with a fake accent is actually very challenging. Bad accents can add some awesome unintentional humor to media (see: Dick Van Dyke in
Mary Poppins) but I'm not sure so-bad-it's-good is PS’s intended motif. Also, I'm a little worried about the quality of the sound, since I doubt most PS users have access to professional sound recording tools. Also also, since players come and go, there's no assurance that a player who records a particular NPC's voice will be here next year… and what if a new quest is implemented using that NPC? Does the character's whole dialogue have to be rerecorded with someone new for consistency? Bad voice acting is infinitely worse than none at all.
Secondly, the settings problems. Why do all the races have their own accents – and such an array from different linguistic groups, at that? Don't many of the races intermarry frequently? Don't they regularly live in mixed communities? (And why on earth would Ynwwn have a completely different accent from their elven parents?) I wouldn't have an issue with having a specific accent for Nolthrir from the Lake region, or Enkidukai from Ojaveda – that's plausible enough, those are areas with racial majorities where ancestral accents would linger – but that's pretty different from saying “Nolthrir sound Spanish” and “Enkidukai sound Arab”.
Thirdly… okay, let me preface this by saying this third qualm is the reason I've been debating back and forth about whether I wanted to speak up at all, because I genuinely don’t think anyone on the Dev team had any malicious intent here, and I'm afraid someone might take what I'm about to say that way. I'm dead certain the accents chosen were chosen because they had the right sound, not for their RL associations, but...
Players don't come into PS as blank slates. All those accents have various stereotypes associated with them, and if a new player is talking to Neave in the tutorial and hearing her Scottish accent, that'll influence their interpretation of what dwarves are supposed to be like. I’m… not sure that's such a great thing.
To be honest the one that bothers me most (because it's personal, not because I think it's inherently the worst) is the use of the Arabic accent for Enkidukai, even though I'm guessing it was picked for the perfectly innocuous reason that Arabic speakers use some very Enki-appropriate sounds. I'm probably a little sensitized to this because I'm Arab-American, but it's awkward to think of my mother’s accent being associated with the game's resident Proud Warrior Race Cat People. I hope that makes sense? I guess I'm kinda wary, based on prior experience with how Arabs are portrayed in Western media, that using an Arab accent for Enkis will influence players to draw on cartoonish ideas about Arab culture while playing their characters.
If we have to have voice acting in the game (personally I think it's a bad idea, but that’s not my call) I think it would be better to assign accents to specific areas of Yliakum, not races, and be VERY selective when a voice acting clip features someone imitating an accent not their own. I also think it would be better to have them be accents without a lot of prominent stereotypes attached, although I acknowledge that might be hard to pull off. I guess in general I feel like this plan needs to be thought out a little more before it’s put into action, especially re: the settings implications.
Edited for: a few grammatical glitches.
