Inside the Vault - Mark Lampert

[13pm]

Meet the Wolfman.
Today's "Inside the Vault" at BethBlog features Mark Lampert, Bethesda's sound engineer, whom we already know pretty well from "Meet the Devs" threads.<blockquote>What’s your job at Bethesda?

I’m the sound engineer, and I handle all aspects of the sound design for Bethesda Game Studios. In addition I do the voice casting, recording and editing, plus any post processing such as voice effects, and I share in directing, typically with the lead designer of a project. There’s also a little bit of music work in terms of mastering our chosen composer’s tracks for the game, and sometimes I end up writing little bits and pieces of things here and there as needed.

What other games have you worked on?

The first two games I worked on were at Ion Storm, which was my first gig. I was hired as a contractor to take care of voice recording and editing for ‘Deus Ex: Invisible War’, the sequel to ‘Deus Ex’. That job was originally slated to run about four or five months, but it was extended and then extended again as more material was being written and significant changes were still being made, so that worked out well for me. Eventually a year had gone by and there was still plenty of work to do, so I was hired on ‘officially’.</blockquote>He's a verbose guy, so be patient to read it all.

Link: Inside the Vault - Mark Lampert

 

[Brother None]

 

[ivpiter]

This really stood out for me:

There are over 37,000 lines of spoken dialogue in Oblivion. Discuss.

Yes, it would seem that our designers know no bounds when it comes to writing for our games. Also, consider this: at one point in development, there was almost twice that much! A figure was calculated and we knew that we could never fit that much into the game, so they all worked hard to hone it all down and still have it turn out so wonderfully.

So half the dialogue in Oblivion was cut because of *drumroll* space limitations due to full (mediocre quality) Voice Over.

The same thing happened in Fallout, actually. I sort of wandered into the military base by accident and managed to escape off on my own, and I didn’t realize that was possible. I just figured I was going to hear a big monologue by my captor and then be killed, but I made a break for it and had a lot of fun exploring the whole base and ultimately figuring out what it was I needed to do. That was a huge moment for me in that game when I realized the kind of choice I had.

He's played Fallout AND gets the idea of choice. Give that man a cigar.

I do find it a bit of an irony that the fellow who limits the amount of dialogue is so loquacious.

 

[Briosafreak]

blah blah blah

 

[13pm]

Russian militaries would say 'Служу отечеству!' which literally translates as 'I serve my Motherland!' and has the meaning of something combining 'Thank you sir', 'Glad to be helpful' and 'Trying my best'

 

[Brother None]

We're not in the Russian military, tho'

 

[13pm]

We're not in the Russian military, tho'

And we're surely lucky about that. Just a good phrase to express.

/offtopic

 

[fallout ranger]

How is it in Лэнынгpaд? Er, I mean St. Petersburg.


Hope this guy can do good sound, the sound in Fallout wil be hard to top.

 

[I_eat_supermutants]

Wow he does like to talk alot.
I do feel though out of all of the inside the vault bits, this one gives a little more than.

"What do you do?"
"I design this or that, it's a great job"
"Ever play Fallout?"
"No." Or "Sadly no" Or "I played for 5 minutes, it seems good"

Plus his idea for a game was kind of sort of already done. Silent Hill: The Room.

 

[Killzig]

Lampert should be running that place.

 

[Briosafreak]

Yeah, Lampert is good, I'm not worried about the sound design.

 

[quietfanatic]

Nice guy. Seems clever too. He might also enjoy Starship Titanic. What I'm more curious about is what the editors are like.