Yesterday we got the big reveal of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Bethesda and MachineGames didn’t hold back, revealing quite a bit of first-person gameplay and other info about the game’s approach and story. That said, there were a few lingering questions after the presentation, such as, who’s playing Indy and what kind of tech is powering the game? Well, we now have answers on both.
Many watching the Indiana Jones and the Great Circle trailer noticed that our protagonist looked like Harrison Ford, but he didn’t quite sound like him. Close, but not quite. Well, that’s because Indy will be voiced by the ubiquitous Troy Baker. Of course, Baker’s already had some practice playing a character in a world-spanning, artifact-hunting adventure, as he was the voice of Sam Drake in the Uncharted series. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, MachineGames’ creative director Jerk Gustafsson says Baker was a natural fit for the role due to his own Indy fandom, and he’s even helped contribute to the game’s story…
“He really brings forward that charm and sense of humor in such a good way. He’s also a very big Indiana Jones fan, which is super cool. So he’s also very invested in the game. He’s not only a very good actor, he also contributes quite a lot to actually make the game better. When we go through with those [blocking sessions for motion capture] there’s a lot of adjustments and changes, not only to the script itself, but also to how we set up the scenes, how we set up the cameras. Troy is much more a part of the development team than we usually see just because he’s in those blocking sessions.”
Entertainment weekly also has some info on some of the other characters seen in the trailer, including the game’s big bad Emmerich Voss played by Marios Gavrilis. Voss is searching for the same secrets related to the Great Circle that indy is and promises to be a particularly obsessive antagonist.
Meanwhile, Indy’s female companion (there always has to be one) for this story is Gina Lombardi played by Alessandra Mastronardi, who you might recognize from the Netflix series Masters of None and the Nic Cage flick The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Gustafsson describes her as a “resistance journalist” who will have her own personal stake in the story separate from Indy’s.
For those wondering which engine is used in Indy – check out the taskbar. It’s id Tech. https://t.co/SPWrGermW8 pic.twitter.com/imFutNm2tu
— John Linneman @dark1x.bsky.social (@dark1x) January 18, 2024
Meanwhile, in other Indy news, the eagle-eyed folks at Digital Foundry noticed an icon for id Software on one of the MachineGames dev computers during the Xbox Direct, indicating the game will run on some version of the id Tech engine. Not a huge surprise, as that’s what MachineGames has used in the past, and the game has a rather id-Tech-ish look, but it’s good to have confirmation. Recent job ads indicated id Software has been working on the latest version of their engine, id Tech 8, so this may be our first look at it in action.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is coming to PC and Xbox Series X/S in 2024.
