It increasingly sounds like Pearl Abyss’ game shifted in a lot of ways as development went on.
Alec Newman is an actor with more than a decade of experience in games, though his time playing Kliff in Crimson Desert seems to have been the strangest work experience of his career so far. Speaking on the Friends Per Second podcast, Newman went into detail about how dramatically the story changed across the five years he spent recording Kliff’s voice, comparing the whole thing to a roller coaster. He said his time on Crimson Desert was nothing like his most recent game project, Still Wakes the Deep – the performance that earned him a BAFTA last year – and described how the recording process for Kliff swung between long quiet stretches and bursts of intense activity over that five-year period. He also said that, at the beginning, he had not even been fully informed about the scale of the project.
In the games industry, it is fairly common to keep actors in the dark during auditions in order to prevent leaks, especially because audition calls can give away more than they should. In most cases, performers are never directly told what project they are actually tied to, but it still sounds unusually extreme for an actor to spend two years – within a total recording period of five years – without really knowing where the story was headed. Newman suggested that, in recording terms, it was a job that kept on giving, perhaps because it ended up being such a long-running assignment. He also confirmed that Kliff was originally called MacDuff, and described what the story seemed to be aiming for during at least one phase of development before it changed direction.
“For the first year and a half or so, as far as I knew, it was only a demo. Nearly two years into the recording process, they said, ‘Well, now we’re going to start recording seriously,’ and I was like, ‘What the hell do you mean by that?’ Being involved in Crimson Desert has been a roller coaster. Writing is the key. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s games, TV, films, theatre, songs – anything. If the script is there, then you can really run with it. This project was interesting because – I don’t want to say they were constantly moving the goalposts – but we started with cards describing different parts of Pywel. You know, different characters, ‘he’s from this faction’ and ‘he’s from that faction’, and I just kept saying, ‘Yeah, but what’s actually happening?’
Once Kliff stopped being MacDuff – and that happened pretty far into the recording process, because he really was originally called MacDuff – after they finally settled on the name Kliff, I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing on the story and the character as much as I could. And honestly, I felt the pressure of a certain type of developer and a certain type of game. I’m glad I fought for those things. Because you can see it if you read the reviews that have come out, and you can see it when you talk to people – I was speaking to some players today who love it. And while they love the voice acting and the characterization, the game’s clearest attraction is the scale of the open world and the fact that you can pick up a cat. To me, that comes down to the changing preferences of the developers and the scriptwriters involved. At different stages, it felt very much like making a TV series where they kept shifting the focus.
After a while, you can only go so long with someone who isn’t exactly dull, more just stoic… it’s very, very hard to spend 150 hours with a character who never reveals anything about himself. What has been rewarding is that once players got past 100 hours, they started finding little details in Kliff that suggest something more emotional under the surface. The whole Greymane thing – after about two and a half years, they decided they really wanted that to resonate. It’s about family and about trying to put something back together. I think that’s the main story thread of the game, or the only real one when you begin. So that was the turning point.
I don’t want to say they panicked, but they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we really want this. We really want Kliff to care about his companion.’ And I said, ‘Well, he does, but you haven’t written that monologue yet.’ So we gradually built it in, and wherever we could, we paid attention to that. Whenever we found something slightly humorous, we tried to lean into it. But honestly, there were fewer of those moments than there could have been.” – Newman said.
Newman added that it is no secret the game went through several major changes during development, hinting at the fact that it originally began life as a different multiplayer project before becoming a single-player adventure. His remarks came after Pearl Abyss CEO Heo Jin-young admitted that, in his view, the game’s story would have benefited from being fleshed out more thoroughly.
Source: WCCFTech
