NEW YORK CITY, N.Y. — “Oh my God,” Anjali Bhimani, the voice behind Overwatch’s Symmetra, said as she slumped over her chair with a dramatic groan when asked by The Daily Walkthrough how many takes it took to nail in-game death noises.
Sombra actor Carolina Ravassa burst out laughing to her right and Mercy actor Lucie Pohl shouted, “That’s so fun! I love that!”
“What are you talking about?” Anjali asked incredulously. Ravassa shook her head, “I don’t.”
The auditorium at Games for Change‘s second day devolved into a fit of giggles as each actor on the Overwatch panel described something they were told to try and recreate:
“OK, this is death by being crushed.”
“Now you’re falling off a cliff, but you hit something on the way down, so make that sound!”
“You’re burning, but then you freeze!”
“I will say,” Anjali said after the room calmed down enough to continue. “Thank God Andrea and the folks at the recording session are completely understanding of how difficult it is to go through and do all of those. You can be in other sessions where they have you screaming until you blow your chords out. Whereas they’re [Blizzard] very very specific.”
“You’ve got to know how to die a million different ways,” Blizzard senior casting and voice director Andrea Toyias explained. “I’ve had actors who once time told me, ‘I’ve died so many ways, I kinda wonder what my own death will sound like. I’ve been electrocuted, decapitated.'”
“It’s so fun,” Pohl insisted. “You get to die a million ways but you’re still alive!”
“It gets really sexy really fast,” Anjali said. “Being physical in the booth as much as you can without causing any excess noise behind is a huge thing, and that’s not just for the exertion lines, but it’s for everything. Finding the physicality to the point that you can in the booth is a really big thing in such an active game.”
“We do the last 20 minutes of the session and that’s when we do death sounds,” Ravassa said.
You can find the full panel discussion, titled “The Women of Overwatch: The Journey of Bringing Strong Female Characters to Life,” which was moderated by Entertainment Software Association director of federal government affairs Nika Nour, here. This portion starts at the 50-minute mark.
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