Interviews with Blizzard Sound and Voice Actors

You said in the Behind-the-Scenes video that Diablo III was Blizzard’s largest voice-over undertaking. What made this the case? Was it purely the scope and length of the game, or was there a more intricate story element that required more dialogue?

Andrea Toyias: Diablo III was by far Blizzard’s largest VO undertaking for two main reasons. First, there was the sheer expanse of lines. We introduced 10 new hero characters — five classes with male and female versions of each — who all had myriad of comments as they reacted to the world and the characters that surrounded them. To give you an idea what that means, the StarCraft chapters tend to have around 3,000 lines. Each World of Warcraft expansion has approximately 6,000 to 8,000 lines. For Diablo III, we were upwards of the 18,000 mark — so it was quite an experience.

The second reason for the extensive line count is that the writers spent a great amount of time thinking about how each hero would interact with the environment and the story. With such detailed individualism for our heroes comes a lot of in-depth commentary and reactions from each one of them. With a smaller or more limited line count, it would have been much harder to really explore why, for example, the Demon Hunters are so determined to eradicate evil or why the Witch Doctors had a more holistic response to the same evil. Thorough character development means more time needs to be spent investigating and playing with our heroes personalities. Recording over 18,000 lines was intense . . . but it was an amazing journey.