Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
100 M PS E . O R G the gameplay to the player. What we ended up with were lines like, "Hunting season was a bust!" which needed to convey the emotion of "I'm looking for you," or "I'm just about to attack you." Initially, we had a complex matrix of different emotions, but through testing and collaboration with the game design team, we narrowed it down to three main categories: ambient, hunting, and engaged. Personally, I enjoy working with bark dialogue because its emphasis is different from main story dialogue. With barks, quantity and variation are more important than achieving the perfect take, allowing for greater experimentation for the director and the actor. What made this even more interesting is that the enemies/actors were a mix of genders and ages, and everyone brought something unique to the table. Between Taneli and myself, we spent about 80 hours directing. If I remember correctly, there were 26 actors voicing the Taken. Since Taneli was primarily driving this effort, I also asked him to share some thoughts on the process. TS: The Taken were an enemy type from the original game that we wanted to modernize for Alan Wake 2. Their barks are written in a unique way, as the Taken are kind of reciting manuscript pages written by Alan Wake. In the original game, the enemies didn't really have that much of a physical connection to their barks, so in this sequel, I wanted to knit them together more tightly. We also had an ambitious plan of a matrix system between dozens of hubs, enemy types, states, and character models which in original estimates would have required hundreds of actors! Thankfully, we managed to cut that down in a very creative and efficient way without hurting the core experience. We started working on the Taken with some of our trusted voice actors like Derek Hagan on the first pass of the barks. The enemies are in three different states (ambient, hunting, and engaged) but they keep repeating the same absurd lines—such as "Top 100 American Small Towns" and "Espresso"— while hunting you down or bashing your head. So, to get that different intent into the performance while it's textually the same in every state was another real curveball. A lot of actors called these sessions the funniest and weirdest stuff that they have ever done but loved every second of it just as we did. I'm so grateful for every single voice actor that we had throwing themselves really into this. Even with all the cool and unique processing that we did to complement these, in the end, it really comes down to the performance which elevates the barks to a whole new level. Likenesses of audio director Richard Lapington appear in most Remedy titles, usually on the face of an enemy. Barks from the "Taken" enemy type are sometimes absurd and always unsettling.