Video game acting is unlike any other kind, as Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 actors Tom McKay and Luke Dale explain.
McKay plays the role of protagonist Henry, and in an interview with the BBC he says working on the Kingdom Come games was "one of the most amazing and unusual acting challenges."
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a sprawling RPG with many choices available to you. It's believed to have the biggest video game script ever, meaning McKay was in the sound booth for "over 500 hours."
"You would kind of go down one channel of a decision and then come halfway back up and go down another one and then maybe all the way back up to the beginning and back down," he says. "And that's not an acting challenge that you ever would have in TV or film."
You can play as a good person, an unlucky thief, or just murder anyone unlucky enough to cross paths with you. So, Henry needs to be able to deliver his lines in many different ways.
Dale, who plays Hans Capon, adds: "So you do the scene and you've got three four different people coming over to you, 'Can you do that? Can you just be aware of this?' Me and Tom are like: 'OK, can we distill this down?'"
Spending so much time together, the co-stars all became quite friendly with each other. "It is like putting on a really comfortable pair of clothes. Which is ironic because in the motion capture studio you're literally wearing head-to-toe lycra."
But while the actors can make friends on set, they had to keep the work they were doing for the better part of nine years incredibly secret. "It was almost like working for GCHQ or something," says McKay. "You couldn't talk to anyone about it and people in the studio couldn't even talk to their partners in some cases about what they were doing."
Movies and TV shows often share behind-the-scenes pictures and have actors, showrunners, and directors letting fans know what to expect for months or even years in advance, but video games are often far more secretive. When fans of the original game spotted McKay in Warhorse Studios' native Prague, he had to think fast to throw them off the scent of a sequel. "I'd be like: 'I just love Prague. And I come here very often for lots of holidays,'" he says.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 has been a huge success, selling over one million copies in just 24 hours and already shattering its predecessor's peak concurrent player record and making it into Steam's top 50 most-played games.
If you're a fan of Kingdom Come, check out some of the other best RPGs you can play.
