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Will characters be able to "speak"? With sound?
RichardB
Member Posts: 5
Will characters in EQII be able to really speak? In another game i play (Americas Army Operations) there are about 30 fixed sound files to shout and whisper certain expressions.
I tested EQ once and what really annoyed me was that in such a 3D world where all persons look so real nobody can actually speak. At least not the chars.
I would love to see something like the emotions in a way of sound. And for each race with different languages. And when you character has learned that language he hears them talk in english (or whatever other language your version is) with a strong accent.
It would be enough if there were some dozen fixed expressions to use. But it would be really great if people could configure their own sound files. Or if hundreds of them would be created by SOE and you could choose some for your character.
Or *gets crazy* if we could use voicecom to speak to other players. And they would hear us depending on how loud we talk and how far their are away. And our words would be automatically translated into the language oru character speaks. Or at least the voice would be changed so i dont sound like the geek i am anymore but like my character (an orc for example).
That would be so cool. But i guess thats technically not possible yet...:)
Comments
All of the NPCs will have voiceovers for anything they say in the game. So far over 200 different voice actors have been used to record all the different lines and sounds etc.
At the Fansite VIP event I attended the Devs were asked about player characters getting the same treatment and they said that it's possible, but unlikely. The main reason being is that it would really lower the immersion factor for a lot of people. If your character is speaking in a voice which doesn't match your mental image of that character it's worse than it not speaking at all.
They did however say that the game will fully support all the voice comm programs on the market (Ventrillo, TeamSpeak, Roger Wilco, etc) so if you want to speak for your character that is perfectly available for you.
---------- MMORPG.com Staff --------- Desolation Guild Website ----------
Richard J. Cox
"There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust."
Thank you for that in-depth answer!
Though i don't really understand why there couldn't be a range of choices for your characters voice just like for your characters appearance (hair color, beard and so on). Then you could choose a voice which fits your picture of your character.
VoiceCom programms are nice but when you meet other players in the game they often do not have that possibility. And it also disturbs gameplay quiet much when you have to turn on another programm when you meet someone.
Also on relatively short encounters with other players it wouldn't really be worth the effort to exchange IP's and stuff to go on voicecom.
Naturally you would also often have a very hard time of imitating a voice which fits your character...especially if you are for example a 60 year old man who play a young female elfen princss...:)
Anyway , i just want to ask if that was the only argument against voice sounds for player characters? Or are there also purely technical reason like its take up to much bandwidth or anything?
And i also would like to ask some things about future developement of such voicecommunications...perhaps you have some insights...:)
Will it in some time be possible to have voicecom programms in which you speak and then what you say can be heard around you inside the game? Possibly even with a voice and language you choose respectively one that fits you in-game character? Is that from a technical standpoint already imaginable?