According to Ashly herself, the voice actor's strike is stopping her from voicing Chloe again.

I don't know how to embed on mobile but this seemed important enough to make a topic anyway. MOD EDIT: I got you

As someone who had almost zero interest in the prequel, this entirely erases any chance of me picking this up. Ashly Burch brought an almost impossibly strong personality to that voice and giving the role to someone else, no matter how good they may be, feels cheap for such a character - heavy game.

@the_nubster: Waypoint said she was writing for it though so... that's weird.

That's a shame. She killed it.

@sparky_buzzsaw: Pun potential is high.

This'll be really weird but I probably won't play it for like a year or two so maybe I'll forget about it by then and it won't bother me.

Welp....kinda just lost all interest

IF she's supposed to be a younger much less 'tude Chloe then it could make sense to have her voice a bit different.

Just get the non-union doppelganger from Andromeda.

Man this sucks, also why didn't they do something new? I assume this won't have a supernatural hook then? It's also only 3 episodes? Man, I loved the first game, all this news is so disappointing.

kinda sad that strikes only seem to really hurt games of this size. The huge AAA stuff I doubt even cares.

Hmm, this might be a bit of a deal breaker, she sold Chloe very well, but I'm wiling to give another VA a shot.

I won't say this completely negates my interest, but this game is already on shaky ground on whether it will be good and this sure does not help. If they don't get the right replacement then any of the other flaws will just stand out more.

But Ashly Burch was already the non-union doppelganger for Laura Bailey.

Well it's an actor's strike not a writer's strike...

If they get the right replacement, it could work out. Burch herself was the stand-in (for lack of a better term) for Laura Bailey as Rise in Persona 4: Dancing All Night, and that stopped bothering me pretty soon into the game.

Definitely a blow though - her performance in the original LiS was very good.

They are doing something new. DONTNOD is making a sequel with new characters. This is a prequel by a different dev team.

@kingbonesaw: Unfortunately Chloe now only has 1 line.

That's hella sad...

Unnecessary prequel loses original voice actor. Yeah, I'm just not interested in this at all.

@stordoff: No kidding. She made the entire game for me. Rachel's character always rubbed me the wrong way so my emotional pull was both caring for Chloe, and caring about how Rachel's disappearance affected Chloe. I had no attachment to Rachel as anything other than a plot device but it tore me apart to see how it brought Chloe down, and Burch absolutely nailed it. Especially when Chloe finds Rachels' body... Shit. I'm getting misty-eyed just thinking about it.

P.S. thank you, you beautiful mod you

This might still be ok(?)

If this is set three years earlier and they have someone who sounds like her, I could mentally think "This is young Chloe, so of course she would sound different". That's not to say that this is good news. Ashly killed it in the first game and it would have been great if she was back.

They're still on strike?

I liked her performance insomuch as it made an annoying character appropriately annoying. She definitely rekindled a lot of old memories of girls I came across in high school and tried to avoid as much as possible due to their shit outlook on life (being a stoner who disliked most stoner hobbies, styles and products was a real tough road to navigate in 2005) and I give her a lot of credit for that. But to be honest I don't care if this younger Chloe sounds different, I'm really only likely to buy the game if GB does another full stream and it seems as stupid and preposterous as the last game was.

My girlfriend and I really enjoyed scoffing at most of the original game's ridiculous interpretation of American teenage dialogue (she's a high school teacher herself) and fun, clever uses of the time travel mechanic. Plus I'll admit I didn't see most of the twists coming, so it was actually a fun universe to explore and it was definitely very confident in its vision of that town. If there's more of that crazy French-American dialogue and confident world building, I'll still be in. It's why I buy David Cage games knowing full well I'll hate them, and partly what impressed me so much about Life Is Strange - it was all the best parts of David Cage games, featuring characters who were annoying in a believably self-aware way rather than a simply batshit insane understanding of human beings. It was like a perfect blend of Walking Dead Season 1 and Heavy Rain, equal parts empathetic and absurd.

"Do it."?

Ah, this sucks. Part of what made LiS such a well-done game was how it handled Chloe, who could so easily have been a completely unlikable character. She's kind of an self-absorbed, angsty idiot, and the game knows it. Burch's stellar performance and Max's hyper self-awareness helped make her endearing, rather than obnoxious. Without either of these factors (and with a new dev at the helm), I'm pretty skeptical the prequel will be able to nail the tone it needs to make Chloe tolerable.

Don't play games by scabs.

Eh, I can live with it. I'll headcanon it as timeline weirdness.

Oh ok thank you for letting me know!

I play videogames, not people.

I'll be fine. I really liked the first one, and I'm damn looking forward to this one.

As long as it sounds similar enough that I don't notice. Like Joker in Batman Arkham Origins