Thief studio Eidos Montreal has explained why original Garrett voice actor Stephen Russell is not returning to voice the character in the next-gen reboot.

Speaking in an interview on the studio’s community site, narrative director Steven Gallagher and audio director Jean-Christophe Verbert discussed the issue.

Gallagher explained, “Stephen was considered quite heavily. We actually had him in for some preliminary vocal recordings in fact.”

But Verbert added, “Yes, it was actually very early during development at that time that we had him involved, before we made the decision to record our actor’s voices and their movement at the same time using a full performance capture technique.

“Being able to capture the voice at the same time as the actors’ movements and facial expressions, all while the actors play off each other, delivers a much more convincing experience than traditional techniques of recording each characters’ dialogue separately and then animating everything by hand afterwards.”

The decision to use full performance capture meant that whoever voiced Garrett would also have to do all of their own stunts. The team also felt there was a disconnect between ‘new’-Garrett’s appearance and Russell’s voice. Simply pasting Russell’s lines over the character wouldn’t have felt natural they explained.

So there you have it, a new Garrett in more ways than one. Another iconic stealth character also lost his voice recently – Solid Snake. David Hayter recently issued a statement on not being asked to return to voice the character in Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. Read what he had to say here.

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Thanks Eurogamer.