Newman spent a year and a half thinking he was voicing a demo

Alec Newman told the podcast Friends Per Second that recording Kliff took about five years and felt like a roller coaster. For the first year and a half he thought it was a demo. Nearly two years in, he was told the real recording was only starting.

The hero’s name was MacDuff first, then Kliff. The story and the motive were rewritten. In early sessions the actors were shown cards of factions and regions of Pywel with almost no overall plot. The Greymanes as a family arrived several years later. Playing a restrained hero across that length was hard, and Newman added emotion when the script allowed. Those places, he says, were fewer than he wanted.

He ties the rewrites to the project starting as multiplayer and becoming a single-player adventure. Heo Jin-young had separately admitted the story could have been better. Players, in Newman’s account, praise the voice and the world more often than the plot.