The voice actor behind Saint-14 has explained how a fan favourite line from Saint-14 nearly didn’t make it into Destiny 2. The story comes from Kareem’s recent Twitter thread, and provides an insight into the work that goes on at Bungie. First, check out this post that has the very famous line in.
Before getting into all the details, Kareem explains a little about the work at Bungie. Within the dialogue system there are filters, and those filters will allow for certain lines to be spoken if a character meets a set of requirements. For example, characters might react differently according to your Guardian’s race or class, like how the Awoken in The Dreaming City call other Awoken cousins.
A lot of the work here comes from the investment team because they have all the data on player population, how many of them are Exo, Human, or Awoken, and what classes they are.
Now into the actual story of this line. After one of the narrative designers did a pass of the script, they explained that this particular line would need a filter. After the line was recorded and processed, the team realised that they needed to do some more work on the dialogue to bring it in line with what the team needs for vendors.
Saint-14’s audio was re-recorded, but this line in particular was marked to be cut from the dialogue tree. The reason was that it would take a lot of work to implement, and it was late in the day for development. However, Kareem decided he was going to work extra hard to get this line in the game because he loved it.
At this point Kareem asked some mates at lunch what he could do to get this line in, and a programmer chimed in with the filter looking for Guardian’s having Saint-14’s Helmet equipped. After this Kareem wrote a bug report for the ‘issue’ and it was fixed within an hour. He then added the filter and dialogue to the list to be added for Season of Dawn.
However, when one of the game’s testers was asked to test whether Saint-14 would say the line, they didn’t hear it under the correct circumstances. After some investigation, Kareem saw that the filter only added the line to the possibility of 30 others for Saint-14 to say, not force it.
Kareem fixed the issue to make this the line that the game pushed for under the right parameters, and it worked under the next test run. The person who asked for the line to be cut was surprised about it being in the game, but I think the Guardian community’s reaction to it has made it worth the extra effort.
Stories like this are why I love Destiny 2. Let us know what you think of it in the comments.
Image Source: DestinyWiki
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