Are you a fan of Warhammer 40K: Gladius – Relics of War? If so, are you aware of the amazing Gladius+ mod and the fantastic “Too Many Voices” mod for this wonderful game?
If not, here’s an example of the amazing voice work that’s been added with the “Too Many Voices” mod:
Naturally, after seeing the amazing amount of talent on display here, and enjoying the mod to a degree that made us giddy, we wanted to pick the brains behind “Too Many Voices”, Lewis and George. Lewis is the mod’s programming guru, while George is the talent behind many of the voice-over lines.
Here’s what they had to say:
1) Who are you and what is your history with modding?
(Lewis) – Gladius is the first game I’ve modded seriously, although I have briefly touched other games such as Skyrim, Too Many Voices is my first large-scale project.
(George) – I actually work primarily as a professional freelance voice actor, but my personal history with modding is that it’s where I started performing voiceovers in the first place. Way back nearly a decade ago in the early 2010s, I began to take an interest in performing voiceovers for what were British units in a mod called “Rise of the Reds” for Command & Conquer Generals. It’s been one heck of a journey I’ve been on from there to here, but it’s a great feeling to do what I enjoy doing and be able to call it my job.
As for mod creation, I’ve never actually made one myself in the traditional sense, but I have been part of many teams assisting where I could on the audio side of things, whether that be simple cleaning of audio files, vocal processing, and manipulations or diving into a recording session in the booth.
2) Why did you decide to do the “Too Many Voices” mod?
(Lewis) – Gladius is a great game, one of my favourites, but it fell short of Dawn of War for me. I decided the main reason for that was a lack of atmosphere that DoW really nailed with its music and voice work. I’ve worked on both the HD textures in Gladius+ and the voice mod to fix those problems.
3) We can imagine it’s been expensive to hire professional voice actors. Why spend so much money on this project?
(Lewis) – I’ve had a huge amount of community moral support ever since the beginning of the project and recently some highly appreciated financial support on Patreon. I suppose I’ve felt driven to finish the project because of my desire to make the game better for the brilliant community and to pay everyone back for the support.
4) Do you intend to finish unit voices and narration for each race?
(Lewis) – Absolutely, that’s the intention unless anything major crops up that would prevent it. At the moment we’ve got the Orks and Chaos Space Marines completely voiced and narrated. The Tau units are the most recent faction to receive new VO having all of their faction units fully voiced, with just the narration and research announcer to be done. But after that, the next on the list is to revisit older factions that were done very early in the mod’s development, the Space Marines and Astra Militarum, and bring them up to the same sort of standard.
(George) – So no doubt I’ll be spending quite a lot of time in the booth for those two!
5) If more races are added, do you intend to keep this mod going?
(Lewis) – Absolutely. I see no reason not to finish things at this point, and providing updates for new factions is nothing in comparison to the work we have already done.
(George) – Unless I myself have any intervening commitments, I’m more than happy to help see the project through to completion. It does depend on what races get added to the game as to how easy or difficult it makes it to create the scripts, find the right actors, etc. For example, two factions that are on most people’s minds are the Adeptus Mechanicus, which would be a great one for myself as I find them pretty fascinating.
Or the Sisters of Battle, which are equally as interesting in my opinion but also would prove slightly more of a challenge to complete as we’d have to scout for additional female voice talent to cover their units, narration and announcements. Hardly an impossible task of course and to be fair, it’d be a pretty cool faction to include against the existing ones already in-game.”
6) How can fans of the mod help support this endeavor?
(Lewis) – Primarily though our Patreon page. Funding will go towards hiring professional actors such as George, as well as towards any other updates and improvements such as new models, textures and animations for other things we have in the pipeline.
https://www.patreon.com/toomanymods
7) Is there anything you’d like the Gladius and eXplorminate communities to know?
(Lewis) – Gladius is a hidden gem with the potential to rival Dawn of War in its variety of factions, something I don’t believe any other decent 40k game has achieved. It’s rough around the edges though, and that’s what we’re working hard to fix.
(George) – I’d personally just like to think that our efforts are helping to enrich the game and maybe smooth out those edges a bit, maybe help bring new players on board, and to prompt them to check out Gladius for themselves; just to generate a little more interest, and sales for Proxy perhaps or even create their own mods. As for myself as primarily a character actor, this kind of voice work is a staple part of my career, so I’m just pretty happy to be a part of a Warhammer development in some way and have some great new material to put into my own resume and showcases. Earning a little coin while doing so is a nice little cherry on the cake =)
We sincerely appreciate the time that Lewis and George took to answer our questions. As is likely obvious to our readers, this mod, along with Gladius+, really adds a great deal of polish and immersion to Warhammer 40K: Gladius – Relics of War, and if you haven’t already tried it, you owe it to yourself and to these great content producers to subscribe to those great mods and enhance your playing experience.
Do you know of any mods that deserve a highlight? Let us know in the comments below!
