Made by German studio Keen, Enshrouded has become quite a popular voxel-based survival sandbox RPG video game. It recently exceeded an impressive 2 million players! Despite some “body type” woke pandering in the character creation screen, overall the game looks pretty good.
One thing that has bothered me is the voice in the narration of the intro cinematic. I have no idea who the game character is supposed to be that is relaying the history of the world of Enshrouded to the player. But, I have to be honest: it’s offputting and sounds like a female version of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. The cinematic has a low-budget feel to it as well.
A great game deserves a great voice to narrate it. Therefore, I decided to try my hand at improving the intro by making my version. Who would I use as the voice? It didn’t take me long to choose the venerable accomplished actor Sir Christopher Lee. Mr. Lee passed away in 2015 after a long and storied career with roles too numerous to mention.
One narration that Lee voiced has always stuck with me. It is a griping and terrifying version of the ring poem from The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. Here it is in all its glory:
As it’s impossible to get the real Chris Lee to do any narration work, I decided to make an AI version of his voice. I used ElevenLabs to recreate the voice. I used Capcut Pro to add some subtle effects and make the video. I think it turned out pretty good.
But first, here’s the original version:
Now here’s the Christopher Lee version:
Soon because of its unbelievable authenticity, I believe that AI will be used to recreate and preserve the voices of actors who have passed away.
Christopher Lee’s voice has gravitas in spades. I hope they revamp the cinematic and find a more suitable voice.
–Wolfshead
It’s only the “body type” thing that disappoints me in this game, it’s the “survival” aspect of it… or more specifically – it being the main focus. A game being “survival” is an excuse to release a game with no content, just crafting and leave the players to try and find something to do.
One counterargument is “if you don’t have any imagination, you can’t play or enjoy the game”, my argument to that is “if a game has only one feature when previous games did offer more features, you know, quests, main story, triggered events, then it’s suffering from a poor game design”.
Therefore I have little sympathy for such games – to me they are just crafting simulators. Just by opening one screenshot from Steam – https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3168067392 all I see if a game that’s a copy of a copy of a copy.
It’s no wonder the voice acting used is so weak – the whole game is just mediocre at best. I honestly can’t praise it for a single thing that does better than the rest. A good RPG game should have a good balance between scripted content and player freedom.
The voice acting definitely sounds better with Christopher Lee’s voice, but then again, his voice sounds too much like something related to Middle Earth so while amazing, it’s too iconic to be used for this game. Michael Gough, who voiced Deckard Cain is also a good choice for a voice, but also too iconic for anything not Diablo 1-2.
I agree. I’ve played a few hours in a solo campaign and it feels a lot like Minecraft solo. All you do is craft and progress your character. The gathering and crafting is fun but other than and some progression there is little point.
It just doesn’t feel dangerous to me in the slightest. There are also no bodies of water: no lakes, no rivers, etc. Very strange.
Yeah, Chris Lee’s voice is too iconic and it would be distracting. But I want to show how great the intro could have been if they had hired a serious middle-aged or older male actor with some gravitas.
Maybe it doesn’t have water because they don’t have swimming and water mechanics, probably if you enter water, you don’t float, you walk on the bottom.
I think you are spot on, the makers probably thought of the LOTR movie prologue/intro spoken by Galadriel. But neither the English nor the German LOTR Galadriel sounds as grating as the young female narrating the Enshrouded intro.
How is Enshrouded? Not asking for a review, but you seem to have played both it and Valheim. Graphics seem to be a bit more sophisticated and demanding some more hardware than Valheim, the low hardware reqs but nice style (OK, I still wish it would look a bit better) nevertheless worked very well in its favor.
I also have Conan Exiles, so many survival/builder games out by now, I am holding back with Early Access for now. But it seems to be interesting!
AI is fascinating and scary. Or well, at least what we call AI right now. It’s not yet sentient, but extremely capable. Sure, a living Christopher Lee might have pronounced some words for emphasis differently, but it is scary and fascinating, with a few tweaks his voice could be used forever. Same for Darth Vader, Disney bought the rights to use the voice of James Earl Jones, no idea if just for Darth Vader or for general use, should have read that news more closely.
Back to Enshrouded, there are so many wonderful female voices, some could read me a baking recipe and I would melt away, but nooo, they picked one that frays my nerves and puts me on the edge. The death of Christopher Lee and other great actors and creatives will be felt. The current crop of creators are weak men who are just pale shadows of people who live in hard and interesting times, who did and experienced things themselves. Just think of Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci or J.J. Abrams. They worked together and now hold the future of Star Trek and Star Wars in their incapable hands. I do not only think they were always overrated, the results of the latest Star Wars movies and the overall misguided direction of Star Trek (despite popular acclaim I didn’t like the new Star Trek movies much, and the series are just awful. Strange New Worlds didn’t drive me away right away, this counts already as a success these days…) just show that they are epigoni, aping the creations of greater men, trying to give them their own twist and rival them.
I wonder if the intro sounds better in German. Or if the same young woman spoke it. BTW, Star Trek Klingons sound pretty awesome in German, harder consonants and lots of K-sounds, works out perfectly.
I agree, they were going for the Galadriel effect that Peter Jackson used in the opening of The Fellowship of the Ring film. However, as you noted, the voice of the female they used is far too grating and annoying.
Enshrouded seems okay once you get past the awful cinematic and woke character creation screen.
The problem is this German studio is trying to be woke by offering real-world race choices to players. This is based on a flawed assumption: that every player wants to play himself. This is just not true.
I think players will get bored of Enshrouded soon enough.
This is the problem with studios such as this one – they go out of their way to make their game more woke and to give the impression to players that they are also woke. It’s a waste of resources, money and development time which could have gone into making a more fun game with more replay value.
But since games are no longer works of art but political statements that are also expected to be making money in return, next to no developers are still being truthful to themselves when making games anymore.