“That’s a rhetorical question, but it’s an incredibly hard, physical, laborious thing to kill somebody. “Do you know how difficult it is to kill somebody?,” added Scott, in a conversational turn I definitely wasn’t expecting. Scott and I talked about this, and how having to constantly run, jump, climb and then fight someone to the death can’t really be fully conveyed just with a stamina bar going up and down. The idea being that the in-game efforts match real life as closely as possible. “Techland would then just show me the video, and we did these 90-second chunks of me just chasing the video, you know, as you would for a film. One of someone doing parkour, and the other of someone doing combat moves. To remedy this problem, Scott suggested Techland get two ten minutes videos sent in. “I didn’t feel that it was being effective,” says Scott, “and the dialogue editor was feeling the same way.” Scott told me that video game voice actors do this by reading a list of exertions and actions they are given on a spreadsheet, doing three slightly different takes for each.įor actions (also called “efforts”) like jumping, climbing, weapon swinging and getting hit there’ll end up being a few versions recorded of the noise the character makes. To live in the world of Dying Light 2, Aiden’s also had to adapt in other ways: running across rooftops and doing parkour that could put Mirror’s Edge to shame.Īs one might imagine, bringing parkour to life as a voice actor can be difficult. Unless he’s very much attached to the person of course, but this is just how this world works.” It’s just something where he’s got to say, you know, “I’ll take my 20 seconds and I gotta move on”. “He’s experienced remorse, and he’s good at watching people die. This is just how it is for him,” explained Scott. “Aiden can’t be all grimdark, because he’s lived in this world for 15 years. According to Scott this was done to make Aiden feel like he’s actually lived in this world, and adapted to it. Part of this ongoing creation process came down to balancing Aiden’s character as one who lives in a world that’s collapsed, and as someone who’s been surviving in it for years. He was able to work with Techland throughout to mold Aiden into the character he thought he should be, not just the one written on the page. The characterisation of Aiden thus came out less like a lighthearted Spider-Man and more like a gruff Nightwing, according to Scott. Whilst he does want to pay homage to those types of roles, Scott also wants to bring a “filmic grounded read” to the character, where “it feels almost like a little bit like a comic book, everything’s a little bit more saturated, everything’s a little bit turned up to like 11.” “Aiden is me,” Scott said with conviction, “I’ve been Aiden, since he was a, you know, twinkle in Techland’s eye.”įrom very early on in the creation process for Aiden, Scott said he didn’t want the character to just be the kind of “white bread, milquetoast protagonist” he’s played for many years, on the other side of both the microphone and controller. Credit: TechlandĪiden Caldwell is Scott’s fourth major video game role, and the first time he’s portrayed the main protagonist of a game. I had a few reads for some special scenarios that are directly inspired from the fun mimetic reads that Roger was able to give,” says Scott, jokingly reassuring me that he isn’t copying Smith, even if people tell him they sound a lot alike.ĭying Light 2 Stay Human. “I read a few lines in the similar style that you know, Roger would read as Crane. Experiencing it on his PS4, Scott became intimately aware of Roger Craig Smith’s performance of Kyle Crane – the first game’s protagonist – so he decided to bring some of that to his performance, as a little nod to fans. Scott’s dream began to take real shape when he moved to Los Angeles to start his voice acting career after getting a Bachelor of Fine Arts in musical theater, and as though it was fate, the first game he played when he arrived was the original Dying Light. That’s my dream, I’m so humbled and honoured.” When I finally go into Dying Light 2 the weights come off, it’s time for me to do this first-person action RPG protagonist. “That’s me going in the hyperbolic time chamber, training with the weights. “As I was in production for this game, I considered all of that anime my training arc,” says Scott, laughing at the absurdity of the sentence. As a voice actor for ten years, Scott has found success in both anime and video games, bringing the character of Legoshi in Netflix’s adaptation of Beastars to the screen, and now getting his first sole protagonist role in Dying Light 2.
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