Players rarely notice them until they’re missing or wrong. A sword swing lands with a sharp, airy “hup,” a body takes a gut punch and releases a low, involuntary “ugh,” a character falls and lets out a short, cracked cry that dies in the throat. These non-verbal combat sounds—battle grunts, efforts, onos, or combat vocalizations—carry more weight than most dialogue. They sell impact, pain, and exhaustion in the split second between animations. Get them right and the fight feels physical. Get them clipped, repetitive, or strained and the whole sequence collapses into noise.
Voice actors who do this work know the cost. Prolonged shouting, forced exertions, and death screams are not ordinary performance. A 2025 survey of video-game voice actors published in the Journal of Voice found that more than 80 percent were required to yell, grunt, scream, use loud voice, or groan on projects. ACTRA Toronto’s earlier survey of members painted a similar picture: roughly three-quarters of sessions regularly included loud or extreme vocal work, nearly 40 percent of performers reported fatigue or stress during the session, and more than 40 percent needed two or more days for their voice to return to normal. Some described sessions heavy with fire screams and repeated impact lists that left them unable to audition or work the next day. Canadian performers have been especially vocal about the gap between the physical demands and the inconsistent safety practices still found in many studios.
The technical problems compound the human ones. Recording too hot into the microphone produces distortion that no amount of post can fully erase. Game audio pipelines often aim for perceived loudness in the –18 to –23 LUFS range for consistency across platforms, yet raw combat material captured without headroom or careful mic distance leaves almost no dynamic range for mixing or variation pools. The result is the same clipped shout looping every time a character takes a hit—something players notice immediately.
Experienced directors and performers have settled on practices that protect the instrument while still delivering usable, varied material. Preparation starts before the booth. Actors who treat the work like physical stunt performance warm up with lip trills, gentle sirens, and light movement—push-ups or jogging in place—to engage breath support and body tension. Diaphragmatic breathing keeps the power coming from the core rather than the throat. Open vowel shapes (“ah,” “oh,” “uh”) and specific visualization of the impact—gut punch versus face strike versus falling—produce more natural variation without slamming the vocal folds together. J.B. Blanc, known for roles such as Rost in Horizon Zero Dawn, has described how effort lists are often scripted in detail: fifteen punches to the face, ten kicks to the ribs, five screams as if on fire. Doing the heaviest material at the end of the booking keeps the voice fresher for dialogue and lighter efforts.
Session structure matters as much as technique. Short blocks with real breaks—ten minutes of vocal rest per hour of heavy work is a common recommendation from ACTRA guidance—allow recovery. Hydration is non-negotiable; room-temperature water, non-menthol lozenges, and throat-coat tea are standard in careful studios. Some directors now separate pure effort work from dialogue sessions entirely so the actor is not trying to deliver story lines on a voice already fatigued by combat. Microphone technique is straightforward but often overlooked: maintain distance and angle to avoid plosives and clipping, and record at healthy levels rather than screaming directly into the capsule. Post-processing can add grit or scale, but it cannot repair a take that was already distorted at the source.
Vocal Combat Technique, developed by D’Arcy Smith, has shown measurable benefits in small pilot studies. Actors who received targeted training in breath support, resonance, and healthy production of yells and screams reported lower self-rated vocal handicap and improved acoustic measures of perturbation after intensive sessions. The takeaway is not that extreme sounds are optional—games still need them—but that they can be produced more sustainably when technique, scheduling, and recovery are treated as part of the craft rather than afterthoughts.
Standardization does not mean every grunt sounds the same. It means clearer briefs, reference libraries of approved efforts, consistent loudness targets, and post-session vocal care for talent. When those pieces are in place, the audio stays clean, the performances stay varied, and the actors can keep working.
For studios and developers working across multiple languages and markets, the same care applies to localization. Battle grunts and effort sounds must travel with the rest of the voice content, matching cultural expectations of intensity and character while remaining technically consistent. Artlangs Translation has spent more than twenty years supporting exactly this kind of specialized work. With proficiency in over 230 languages and a network of more than 20,000 professional translators and voice talent, the company handles game localization, multilingual dubbing for short dramas and audiobooks, video localization, short-drama subtitle localization, and multilingual data annotation and transcription. Its track record includes numerous high-volume projects that demand both linguistic precision and audio fidelity, ensuring that combat vocalizations retain their impact no matter which market the title reaches.
