I'd LOVE to see animated NPC avatars, and to hear their voices in-game

Katkon

K
I love ED. I really do. The scale of the game, and the variety of possible gameplay is fantastic. However, the universe doesn't feel as alive as it could.
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I recently stumbled upon Homeworld Remastered and Rebel Galaxy, though I've bought neither. Why? Single player only, essentially. But I loved the beauty of their galaxies (even if unrealstic). Moreover, I REALLY loved hearing NPC voices over comms and seeing in-game NPCs (eg mission givers, traders etc) speak. It really brings these games to life - especially Rebel Galaxy. I know avatars are coming to Elite, but would really like to see these for NPCs as well. Imagine being interdicted by a speaking NPC? Could synethesize their voices so there could be many variations. Heck, some of them might not speak English - but the in-game text could act as a universal translator....
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Bottom line: I think ED would benefit hugely from animated/pictured NPCs with voices. Anyone know if this is planned for Elite? Or will we be stuck with text messages and voices in stations only indefinitely....
 
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Flash_Baggins

Flash_Baggins
I have a feeling its not going to have any star trek/ civ 5 video comms anytime soon, or speaking npc's for that matter. However I feel that it would give a lot more depth to the game, especially with multicrew: Id love to hear, "incoming hail commander" to have me reply "Put them on screen 1" t would add a lot more fun to the game, if only just to hear "IM GONNA BOIL YOU UP!" blaring through the speakers!

Unfortunately FD have other ideas and for now I dont think theres going to be any npc voices heard for a while yet
 

LawHunter

LawHunter
Think these were suggested a looooong time ago. With the developments in synth speech and the relatively low CPU usage nowadays I dont see why not.
It would be annoying if the NPCs still stay the same things over and over again, however. So a system where the game can intelligently create sentences that are different every time would be great.

The animated faces seems more likely with what they have shown.

If only we could look ahead into the future to see how ED turns out.
 

Tarman

Tarman
That was one of my very favourite elements from Freelancer, all the NPC chatter going on all the time. Even if it was just Black Seventeen shipping Water to the California System. It really added a lot of background life to the experience.
 

W4rSkuLL

W4rSkuLL
Putting a face on some of the NPCs and voice comms would certainly add to immersion. It is possible and might happen in the future. This would certainly add to a persistent NPCs life cycle. Make it more alive.
 

CMDR Corlas

CMDR Corlas
I disagree.

It seems unlikely that the voices would be able to be varied enough to avoid sounding very repetitive very quickly. And even if that were to be overcome, the lines of dialogue would get annoyingly repetitive very quickly as well.

As text, it's easy enough to ignore and so not notice the repetition so much. But do you really want to take a few missions and launch into supercruise, only to have a half-dozen NPC Eagles now vocally yelling at you to follow them into a low-wake for a "better" offer? That sounds incredibly annoying.
 

ShadowWolf Kell

ShadowWolf Kell
Tarman said:
That was one of my very favourite elements from Freelancer, all the NPC chatter going on all the time. Even if it was just Black Seventeen shipping Water to the California System. It really added a lot of background life to the experience.
Click to expand...


I agree. I liked the background chatter in Freelancer because it seemed to make the universe come to life. On the otherhand, the comm chatter in X3 was extremely boring and mot players wished they could turn it off (along with Betty).
 

Arubeto

Arubeto
+1 from me! Improving NPCs and the ways we can interact with them (I don't just want to shoot them in the face all the time) should have very high priority for the designers/devs, IMHO!

I don't know how feasible it would be to have many different voices or even automatically (may I say procedurally?) generated voices to avoid all NPCs sounding the same, but if FD can pull it off, I'd really welcome it!

NPC avatars go without a question, they are an absolute must! What else could the character creator in the Horizons season be good for if commanders can't even leave their pilot seats, yet? Adding NPC faces to bulletin board missions, the commodities screen, the black market and so on would be a perfect fit for the character creator!
 

[VR] Bac Ho

[VR] Bac Ho
Katkon said:
I love ED. I really do. The scale of the game, and the variety of possible gameplay is fantastic. However, the universe doesn't feel as alive as it could.
-
I recently stumbled upon Homeworld Remastered and Rebel Galaxy, though I've bought neither. Why? Single player only, essentially. But I loved the beauty of their galaxies (even if unrealstic). Moreover, I REALLY loved hearing NPC voices over comms and seeing in-game NPCs (eg mission givers, traders etc) speak. It really brings these games to life - especially Rebel Galaxy. I know avatars are coming to Elite, but would really like to see these for NPCs as well. Imagine being interdicted by a speaking NPC? Could synethesize their voices so there could be many variations. Heck, some of them might not speak English - but the in-game text could act as a universal translator....
-
Bottom line: I think ED would benefit hugely from animated/pictured NPCs with voices. Anyone know if this is planned for Elite? Or will we be stuck with text messages and voices in stations only indefinitely....
Click to expand...

So true, it would add to immersion and bring the game to life. I really like the idea of them speaking other languages than English with a in-game text translator.:D
 

h347h

h347h
Pictures sure.

Animations maybe.

Voice acting no!

Voice acting is the story telling shackles of video games now. The less the games have the more it can open up and be as deep as it wants to be without worrying about having to have those lines voiced.
 

CMDR StackOfCups

C
Forget the faces. That's a lot of work and I'd much rather have other features. But voices for sure. It's such an immersive game but the galaxy feels completely dead. Stations don't actually have people, ships are crewless.... I feel no life whatsoever. I'd like to feel some life.
 

shreddog

shreddog
CMDR StackOfCups said:
Forget the faces. That's a lot of work and I'd much rather have other features. But voices for sure. It's such an immersive game but the galaxy feels completely dead. Stations don't actually have people, ships are crewless.... I feel no life whatsoever. I'd like to feel some life.
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So you want people in stations and crew in your ship, but hell no, not faces!

1sduxre049fj5ryuaqyfskexi.384x313x1.jpg
 
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Ekar

Ekar
h347h said:
Pictures sure.

Animations maybe.

Voice acting no!

Voice acting is the story telling shackles of video games now. The less the games have the more it can open up and be as deep as it wants to be without worrying about having to have those lines voiced.
Click to expand...

Imo voices should be limited to things which happen frequently, like scanning by cops, inderdictions by pirates or welcome messages when docking at stations. They need to be varied enough not to annoy though (and shouldnt be voiced 100% of the time, text works just as well and the game should mix it up). There's good variety of voice messages on the insides of stations these days and it helps a lot with bringing out the human element.

Things that require long bits of text such as mission descriptions should probably never be voice acted imo. Thats one of the reasons i preferred morrowind over its sequels.

In the right places though, it can help a lot..
 
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PhoenicianSon

PhoenicianSon
CMDR Corlas said:
I disagree.

It seems unlikely that the voices would be able to be varied enough to avoid sounding very repetitive very quickly. And even if that were to be overcome, the lines of dialogue would get annoyingly repetitive very quickly as well.

As text, it's easy enough to ignore and so not notice the repetition so much. But do you really want to take a few missions and launch into supercruise, only to have a half-dozen NPC Eagles now vocally yelling at you to follow them into a low-wake for a "better" offer? That sounds incredibly annoying.
Click to expand...

This was my first impression as well, but then after considering the fact that we get that same voice pattern each time we deploy our weapons and we are over powered, or the count down each time we FSD, docking, docking auths, and shields down, and lets not forget the voice categorizing the shields of each ship, you simply tune it out.

My thoughts going beyond that though with the voice controlled NPCs would further be that although it may serve as a quick change for immersion, that novelity about it will tire quickly. The developers would have write a considerable amount of lines to make it interesting as well. It just doesn't seem like it would offer a long term gain, but rather be more of a short term novelity.

As I had suggested before, I think just simply making NPC chatter more interactive. When you are at an RES, and you help a miner by destroying a Pirate attacking the miner, it would be cool to receive a thank you from the Miner. Even ask you if you want minerals, and drop at request (although that is probably going overboard). Or if you assist the police ships, they thank you for your assistance, which they already do after scanning you, so after helping them with an attack against another ship it would be a nice addition.

Same in CZ's. You get chatter responses from enemy ships each time you attack them, how they are going to "school you", but neve from your own NPC teammates for jumping in on an assist kill or helping a ship getting ganged up on by two or three enemy ships in the CZ. It would be a simple addition, and honestly, I expected that expansion from 1.4 of the chatter to include more immersive interaction in that regard, but no.
 

Insomnia

Insomnia
Voices? Sure! Especially chatter between NPC wings.

Animated NPC avatars? Absolutely not! That is so 90s and low budget.
 

Insomnia

Insomnia
Well that was clearly misunderstood. ;)
I don't care how they look or what tech FD are using.
They look good!
But I still think it's quite out-of-date to use such things in modern games.
And about low budget....
I feel that low budget games try to achieve status with the help of animated avatars, making it look even more low budget. ;)
 
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