Text, text, text text textty text

Lucius-Darcia

Lucius-Darcia
Kizbot said:
Im going to open with the main point in this thread, this game has too much text and not enough audible voice.

You get some background noise when you are inside stations about speeding, avoiding collisions and such'n'such but its not directed at the player so doesn't count.
There are only two things in this game that speak to the player to form meaningful interaction. The ships computer (what's her name?) and the traffic controller that gives me docking permission.

Everything else in this game is text. I feel that the balance is not right and it could really do with less text and more voice. I have always found the audio in this game is fantastic, some of the best I have enjoyed from any game and yet it feels like there are a lot of wasted opportunities. With each new update, I notice that the sound for this ship has changed (and I actually prefer the old sound) and the sound for that menu click is a different but I find myself wondering why their sound team are spending their time changing existing audio and not spending it creating NEW audio.

The reason I raise this is becuase voice is a fairly cheap way of adding 'living people' to the game. The computational cost of rendering the polygons, materials, textures and animations for life like characters on screen is very high and this is the reason it is avoided in most games as the better it gets the more it suffers from 'uncanny valley'. Audio however, doesnt suffer from the uncanny valley problem when done right and is very cheap to compute.

There are these very brief moments in game, after I have just requested docking, and the controller responds to my action and directs me in that I feel like I just interacted with a character that actually lives in the Elite world and actually has a personality. The shame is that its so brief and it really contrasts with the whole rest of the game that lacks that personal connection with in game characters.

Npcs have the same scripted messages.. "all that tasty cargo..." "I'm gonna boil you up!".. blah blah but where's the audio? I mean how many games have you played in the last 10 years where the enemies literally made no noise and only sent a brief piece of text. This mechanism is out dated and cheap, I dont think it stands up well against what has been offered by most AAA games in the last 10 years. Even Morrowind had voiced recording for much of the dialogue and that game was released in 2002! It's such a wasted opportunity to give those pirates, wedding barges, police and convoys some actual 'living' personality.

Is addressing this even in the plan or is the current situation how it is 'gud-enuff'? I don't feel it will allow the game to hold up well in 3-4 years time when we are getting through the road map of development if compared to other modern games and the competition. Shouldn't they be focusing a little harder on this now?
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Talking npc's would be wasted for me. I would mute them immediatly :D
I don't need pirates spamming my ears with their phrases, it's enough when i get text massage but i don't read em anymore since i knew them all.
 
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gravedodger

gravedodger
Thanks mate ... it's refreshing to come to a thread and it be exactly as described, I was expecting text and that's what I got ...

Thread delivers ... reader happy = :D

Please continue.
 

Siranui

S
Lucius-Darcia said:
Talking npc's would be wasted for me. I would mute them immediatly :D
I don't need pirates spamming my ears with their phrases, it's enough when i get text massage but i don't read em anymore since i knew them all.
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Same.

I like the station chatter, but combat chatter would be annoying.
 

Artemis Zodiac

Banned
A
there was a mod around here called echo.....it used txt to speech to read back the galnet news.....
pretty cool bit of immersion....if im bored and cruising ill say"open galnet" then it all gets read to me...and the txt displayed on screen.

I can tell it to skip and stop reading ect....very cool
 

DrakeAurum

DrakeAurum
ElGuappo said:
Could always get the community to send in voice recordings of set phrases, maybe even in multiple languages. Could set out a brief 'how to' guide that outlines the program to use, quality to record in and other such details so everything's pretty much the same. Actual recorded quality (like the mic used etc) won't matter. Shouldn't be too hard to find a few community members who can be trusted to listen to the submissions and weed out the inevitable hilarity. Could even make it a 'get your voice in ED and be part of the universe!' type deal in the shop. Shouldn't be too hard to add into the game and use, for instance, during routine interdictions, docking dialogue, generic 'Imma gonna pew-pew you for your juicy loot' type NPC things.

Just a thought, probably not a new one.
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I made such a suggestion several months ago. My suggested solution to the issue of recording standards was for submission to be via a web based recording app. You'd still get a lot of variation in quality, but in some respects that's a bonus - there should be variation in the quality of pilots' comms systems.

FD could incentivise it with prizes of unique in-game visual items for chosen voices, and ask the best participants to provide further samples, creating full speech 'sets' for particular characters.
 

K-Rose

K-Rose
If you want a good example of voice chatter in a space game you need to check out Homeworld (1 & 2). The way those ships would casually chat about their tactics and what was going on really brought amazing atmosphere. I wish combat zones could be like this.
 

Kizbot

Kizbot
Siranui said:
Same.

I like the station chatter, but combat chatter would be annoying.
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I can agree that constant voice chat from npcs as the player spend 3 hours farming in a Res to increase combat rank would get annoying, but could you say the same for that pirate lord that is a mission target, takes you 20 minutes to find him and there is a struggle to interdict him and get behind him.

Would the mission target not be a little more meaningful over the 50 npcs farmed if this guy turned around and actually said in an old dirty voice "If you know what's good for you kiddo you better put those guns back between your legs and get the hell out of here before I empty the contents of your spacesuit into the vacuum!" or something like that. Important characters having a voice is part of what makes them important over the random dude that gave you 100k in bounty creds.

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K-Rose said:
If you want a good example of voice chatter in a space game you need to check out Homeworld (1 & 2). The way those ships would casually chat about their tactics and what was going on really brought amazing atmosphere. I wish combat zones could be like this.
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Bingo! Another great example that I hadn't thought of. They were tiny ships made of like 20 polygons but the occasional chatter really brought them to life.

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Artemis Zodiac said:
there was a mod around here called echo.....it used txt to speech to read back the galnet news.....
pretty cool bit of immersion....if im bored and cruising ill say"open galnet" then it all gets read to me...and the txt displayed on screen.

I can tell it to skip and stop reading ect....very cool
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I didn't know about that one, I'll have to look it up.
 
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Siranui

S
Kizbot said:
Would the mission target not be a little more meaningful over the 50 npcs farmed if this guy turned around and actually said in an old dirty voice "If you know what's good for you kiddo you better put those guns back between your legs and get the hell out of here before I empty the contents of your spacesuit into the vacuum!" or something like that. Important characters having a voice is part of what makes them important over the random dude that gave you 100k in bounty creds.
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Like I say: Very cool the first time; maybe even first ten times. Then annoying.

'Didn't I kill this guy already?'

All that effort just for me to mute it.

It's cool and all, it's just that it would wear thin very quickly.

Edit: I'm also not a psychopath, so I REALLY do not want to hear people screaming and begging for their lives when I'm enjoying playing a computer game to unwind.
 
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Kizbot

Kizbot
Siranui said:
Like I say: Very cool the first time; maybe even first ten times. Then annoying.

'Didn't I kill this guy already?'

All that effort just for me to mute it.

It's cool and all, it's just that it would wear thin very quickly.

Edit: I'm also not a psychopath, so I REALLY do not want to hear people screaming and begging for their lives when I'm enjoying playing a computer game to unwind.
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Lol! well fair enough, if you are quite certain you are not a psychopath then you can be forgiven for not wanting to hear the screams.

I guess I played a bit too much Carmageddon and GTA in my teens to really think this was an issue.
 

Andovar

Andovar
Cynaqq said:
If you add 'cheap' voice to the game, it 'cheapens' the whole experience.

You say it yourself. The audio in this game is fantastic. It's for a reason. They care about its quality and have amazingly talented sound engineers. This pushes the quality standard of any voice acting to be in the game quite high.

So, voice may be cheap to compute but it sure as hell very expensive to do right. This creates a repetition scenario where any good bits of voice acting gets repeated ad nauseam through a gameplay session, leading to players disable NPC voices wherever possible, negating all the work and money the developers put into it.

Text, you can ignore very very easily. As you say, they have some scripted messages. How many times would you stand hearing it before you shut it all off? You are also wrong about Morrowind. Is it you memory playing tricks on you? Morrowind had very little voice acting compared to the text based conversation you had with NPCs, a very small fraction of it really.

So, you are right that voice acting livens up the experience, but only for games with a set and scripted scenario. For PG games such as ED where encounters are random, it should be avoided like the plague.
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Very much this.
The flight control voiceovers were very well done, and I do enjoy them.
But if i had to repeatedly hear "...all that tasty cargo" and "i forgot my vows, what can i say?", I'd either ram ice picks into my ears, or disable the audio completely.
 

Cynaqq

Cynaqq
Andovar said:
Very much this.
The flight control voiceovers were very well done, and I do enjoy them.
But if i had to repeatedly hear "...all that tasty cargo" and "i forgot my vows, what can i say?", I'd either ram ice picks into my ears, or disable the audio completely.
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Don't be that dramatic. If they add pirate taunts as voice acting, they'll probably add a separate toggle to the audio settings. Did you look at the thing. It has toggles for INDIVIDUAL SENTENCES of the ship computer. FD is insane when it comes to their sound system.
 

DragoonKnight

DragoonKnight
Voice acting is great if its meaningful. I really dont need to hear a random NPC say "I am going to boil you up".

Maybe give the engineers some voices or give the soon to be introduced aliens some voices in certain circumstances.
 

satrycus

satrycus
Lysander lysan said:
Good catch, didn't know that, well can assume that they are on the case then :)
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The company was bought by Google in 2010 so he's no longer on the board, but I don't think it would be too far fetched to suggest that voice synth is on the cards in the future. I'm hoping the comms are placeholders for now and one day we'll get interactive NPCs with voice synth'ed dialogue, but rather than devote a whole season to it, it's going to come through a bit at a time.
 

Cliché

Cliché
If/when we get space legs, I can see it now - you walk up to an NPC, or even a player, and a text bubble pops out of his head, lol. Yes, I think there will need to be more voice at some time. If you keep adding a little bit more, different voices, different sentences, you will have a much better variety over time.

For a QoL improvement, I'd like them to do a better job of matching responses to situations. For example: I keep having the traffic controller scolding me for speeding when I'm not, or only saying I have 1000 meters to touchdown when I'm boosting into the station. It's almost like they are on a loop.
 

Soon(TM)

Soon(TM)
Employing the required amount of voice actors for the audio in game would be extremely expensive.

Remember mission givers are procedurally generated so there are thousands of combinations possible, whcih means there would need to be an equal number of voices to read the missons out to you.

Plus the pirate dialogues are very very repetitive so having a NPC saying the same phrases over and over again on comms would just make it sound dumb.

Adding in more background chatter outside stations would be more feasible, maybe hearing the audio from the station security vessels on patrol and other large ships requesting clearance of the docking port hole due to their size etc.
 
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