Cissy Jones was to be the female lead voice in Starfield, but Bethesda made a crucial design change

Several of the biggest releases of 2023 feature some pretty recognisable video game voice acting and dubbing stars. Matt Mercer is one of them, but you'd also recognise the serene voice of Cissy Jones, Joyce Price in Life is Strange, Delilah in Firewatch, and also recently Adreja, a member of Constellation and one of the most popular and backstory-driven companions in Starfield.

The film, TV and especially video game voice actress was one of the main speakers at the recent BIG Conference, and was kind enough to give us an interview which you can watch subtitled below.

While in the interview Jones talked about her work as a character voiceover artist and the future of her profession now that AI is entering the industry more forcefully, she also revealed some rather interesting details about the development of Starfield and what it was like to play Andreja in Bethesda's behemoth space epic.

For starters, Cissy Jones was originally hired to record the voice lines for the lead character in Starfield, a decision that was later changed by Bethesda to opt for a silent protagonist. "Well, I first auditioned for that character in 2016 and I was hired in 2018. And then I initially recorded to be the main character, not Andreja. We recorded like 30 or 40 hours of voiceover protagonist and they decided that having a voice protagonist wasn't the way to go."

"So they cut all that out and said, we'd like to give you the partner character, which doesn't usually happen in video games. Normally, if you lose the role that's out, you're out, goodbye, good luck. But Bethesda has been so nice to work with and they, both the male lead and myself, they gave us main companion roles."

Cissy Jones also comments that she spent five years recording lines of dialogue for her character, and has come to know her as a part of herself, which she has also experienced in a somewhat strange way when recording Andreja's romantic and sex scenes.

"It's a little awkward. Those sessions were real weird. But it's, you know, I love that that games are now continuing that level of realism to have that much immersion into a story, you know, because if you do spend that much time with somebody, there's usually a likelihood of a romantic connection. So why not see where that goes in games?"