TNM Status and Voice Acting Feature #2 news - The Nameless Mod for Deus Ex

As our projected release date grows ever closer, it's time for another general status update from your friendly neighborhood Deus Ex modders at The Nameless Mod. If nothing else, then just so you understand that we are not dead, and that we are never going to let our project die at this advanced state of development.

Lately, we've been neglecting our beta testing a little in favour of voice acting, but our testers are still awesome and we love them all. We seem to have hit a really good spread of testers in that some of them shot through the game in a matter of days while others are just now finishing their first playthrough. Such diversity is perfect in that the fast testers will generally spot more obvious continuity bugs because they can complete the entire storyline several times in quick succession, whereas the really slow testers will be reporting more esoteric bugs and glitches. For example, one tester has been deliberately breaking different parts of the game by using the Speed Enhancement augmentation to jump to places where he's really not supposed to be. Thanks to his efforts, TNM is now considerably more jump-proof.

Voice acting is still probably our greatest Achilles heel, in that there is so much to do and we are entirely at the mercy of a very large group of people. It's mildly frustrating to depend so heavily on the personal schedules of so many volunteers, but that's what we get for being completely overambitious. All things considered, it's going remarkably well, not least thanks to the continuing generous help of a couple of industry pros. Mac of NYC Sound Design is recording one of our major characters with an actor on Thursday, and Jeremiah of the ever excellent T-Recs Studios recently sent us the lines for Phasmatis, our last remaining 200+ line character recorded by Mat Nichols, and ZeroPresence (180 lines recorded by Keith Williams). I'm especially happy with Phas's lines because it's been ever so difficult to find an actor with an appropriate northern English accent.

Speaking of Jeremiah, you may recall that he personally recorded the 3500+ lines for our protagonist Trestkon in his studio in Hamburg under my direction. We think it's time to show you some of those lines, if nothing else then just so you'll actually believe that we're not gonna let the project just die overnight (I'm looking at you, DX3 forums!) Here's a video of the first conversation between Trestkon and the high priest of the Llama cult, Beefman. You may notice that Beefman has a rather... interesting idiolect which can make it difficult to take him seriously, but I assure you that getting on his bad side can have undesirable consequences (or highly desirable, if you're of a more violent inclination).

Another, more interesting video will hit the interwebs next month. As part of their mod interview series, Noesis Interactive conducted an interview with our producer Lawrence in mid-October. I was supposed to appear as well, but I chickened out at the last second and Larry did a solid job of covering all the important points so you won't really miss me. The interview will contain a fairly significant amount of gameplay footage, which will definitely tide you over until the release of TNM. Now that you know what you have to look forward to, I'll end my rambling here. Consider it a sort of cliff-hanger! See you next month for the Noesis interview.