Game Informer reports that Bungie plans to purge the voice work of Peter Dinklage from its popular shooter Destiny in a future update to the game. The Game Of Thrones star originally provided dialogue for Ghost, a hovering origami fortune teller who peppers the player with supposedly helpful lines of exposition. But now Nolan North—the bland voice behind Uncharted’s Nathan Drake, Assassin’s Creed’s Desmond Miles, and pretty much every male video game character of the last 15 years—will take over the role for upcoming Destiny expansions. And Bungie is going even further by having North re-record Dinklage’s original lines (using the same script) so they can be replaced, thus ensuring that our descendants will forever view North as the only Ghost that ever was, is, or will be. At least until Bungie replaces him with some other dude.
The switch to North is almost certainly a cost-cutting move—at the peak of his fame, Dinklage doesn’t come cheap—but the developers probably didn’t mind having a second crack at Ghost in any case. Dinklage’s performance became infamous as soon as Bungie launched a playable “alpha” of Destiny last year. It didn’t take long for players to notice that Dinklage sounded quite bored, like he was reading his kid a bedtime story while checking scores on his phone. The actor wasn’t helped by Destiny’s script, either, which featured countless inane turns of phrase such as “That wizard came from the moon”—a line so widely mocked that Bungie’s marketing folks, being good sports, made it into a T-shirt.
By the time Destiny reached the public beta stage, Bungie technicians reworked Dinklage’s dialogue, burying it beneath every robot-sounding audio filter they could find. This clumsy enhancement did not “fix” the performance, per se, but it did give the studio plausible deniability: Maybe Peter Dinklage is supposed to sound flat, because he’s a machine! And not because he was questioning every life decision he ever made when he found himself in a voiceover booth reciting lines like, “The wizard’s here. You have to kill it.”