“The overarching antagonist of this story is money. Voice isn’t cheap.”
That was how Saint’s Row: The Third audio lead Ariel Gross opened a talk at GDC 2012 about how, exactly, he and the rest of the team at Volition wrangled all the dialogue in the game.
According to Gross, Volition spent roughly $1.2 million on getting about 82,000 lines of dialogue from about 125 voice actors.
In the course of implementing that audio in Saint’s Row: The Third, the studio built a lot of new tools and learned valuable lessons about the costly pitfalls of dialogue implementation in game development.
Now you can watch his talk completely free over on the Official GDC YouTube channel and learn those lessons too, potentially saving yourself some future headaches.
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