{"id":50347,"date":"2026-04-21T00:40:59","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T00:40:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/kids-in-cyberpunk-and-valhalla-should-be-seen-and-heard\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T00:40:59","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T00:40:59","slug":"kids-in-cyberpunk-and-valhalla-should-be-seen-and-heard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/kids-in-cyberpunk-and-valhalla-should-be-seen-and-heard\/","title":{"rendered":"Kids In Cyberpunk And Valhalla Should Be Seen And Heard"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"\" <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been bouncing between Assassin\u2019s Creed Valhalla and Cyberpunk 2077 recently, and something has stood out during that time: These two games have broken from genre tradition by introducing children<\/a> into their open worlds. I\u2019m so used to seeing entire cities devoid of young people that the first time I saw one walking around the streets of Night City it stopped me dead in my tracks. What the heck\u00a0are you doing here, anyway? And then I made the mistake of talking to the kid. Yuck.<\/p>\n

While their appearance was a surprise, their voice acting wasn\u2019t. Like just about all games before it, Cyberpunk 2077\u2019s kids speak with what I can only call a very specific voice quality. Almost without exception, young people sound like a voice actor scrunching up her pipes and doing her best to carve a few decades off her age. And I can\u2019t think of a time where it wasn\u2019t awful to listen to.<\/p>\n

I understand that it\u2019s probably impossible to cast and record young people for extensive roles \u2013 and that employment law probably makes the process a logistical nightmare. Young characters who have gotten a lot of screen time in games, such as The Walking Dead\u2019s Clementine and Sarah and Ellie from The Last of Us, were voiced by actors who were older than their characters, and they did phenomenal work. But those aren\u2019t the types of characters I\u2019m talking about.<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/article>\n

No. I\u2019m talking about the incidental li\u2019l NPCs who populate Night City and Valhalla\u2019s vision of Europe. These characters only say one or two lines, at best, and every time I make the mistake of listening to them speak it makes my skin crawl. I watched one tyke splat face-down on the ground while playing hopscotch in a neon-lit alleyway, and I walked over to her to see if she was all right. \u201cDid you know I like you?\u201d she scratched out before standing up. Maybe the \u201ctalk\u201d prompt in Cyberpunk should be replaced with \u201cpull string.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the concern is that actual kids couldn\u2019t effectively deliver these lines, I hate to break it to you \u2013 \u00a0they\u2019re not doing it now. Perhaps Ubisoft, CD Projekt Red, and everywhere else could set up office tours for their families (when the world returns to normal) and have a quick detour in the recording booth. I know that developers multiply like rabbits \u2013 watch the credits for “production babies” if you don\u2019t believe me \u2013 and it would be a great way to capitalize on take your daughter to work day. I’m kidding. Kind of.<\/p>\n

I know this is super nit-picky, and I don\u2019t want to pile onto studios who take the time and effort to bring virtual kids into their games. Take Watch Dogs: Legion as a counterexample. London must have one heck of a curfew going on; there\u2019s not a young person in the whole freaking city! I totally get that putting kids into games creates all kinds of potential issues (especially in open-world games that encourage mayhem and destruction), but flubbing the spoken dialog takes away from all the hard work that went into implementing them in the first place. If you\u2019ve got a character who\u2019s going to be sticking around for a long time, by all means hire actors whose voices aren\u2019t going to change in a year. After all, nobody wants a rotating door of voice actors like the old Charlie Brown cartoons. But these one-off characters? Hire some freaking young people!<\/p>\n

Ultimately, I understand that this doesn\u2019t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. It\u2019s just a (terribly voiced) series of single sentences or two in games filled with hours of spoken dialog. But if I\u2019m not complaining about something, what else am I supposed to be doing here? I already whined<\/a> about having to chase after paper in Valhalla. I guess I could be griping about how Eivor can\u2019t command their bird to crap on enemies. Or maybe how Animal Crossing: New Horizons has a vastly better cell-phone interface than Cyberpunk\u2019s. Now that I think about it, that probably would have been a better use of my time here.<\/p>\n

Oh well.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been bouncing between Assassin\u2019s Creed Valhalla and Cyberpunk 2077 recently, and something has stood out during that time: These two games have broken from genre tradition by introducing children into their open worlds. I\u2019m so used to seeing entire cities devoid of young people that the first time I saw one walking around the streets of Night City it stopped me dead in my tracks. What the heck\u00a0are you doing here, anyway? And then I made the mistake of talking to the kid. Yuck. While their appearance was a surprise, their voice acting wasn\u2019t. Like just about all games before it, Cyberpunk 2077\u2019s kids speak with what I can only call a very specific voice quality. Almost without exception, young people sound like a…<\/p>\n

Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50348,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-informer"],"yoast_head":"\nKids In Cyberpunk And Valhalla Should Be Seen And Heard | Arcader News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I\u2019ve been bouncing between Assassin\u2019s Creed Valhalla and Cyberpunk 2077 recently, and something has stood out during that time: These two games have\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/kids-in-cyberpunk-and-valhalla-should-be-seen-and-heard\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" 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