You should try with the "I would have been your daddy" skull enabled. I've heard some pretty awesome stuff come out the marines in that case.L.B. Jeffries said:
174: Bark! Bark! Bark!
- Thread starter Wendy Despain
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Dawn of War was a mixed bag. On the one hand, the units all recite the exact same barks every single time you click on them (which you have to do about 50 times a mission). But on the other hand, those bits of dialogue were so fantastic and funny that they still make me grin, even after hearing them hundreds of times.
So good quality barks can eliminate the insufferability of repetition.
To be honest, though, the first thing I thought of when I read this article was,
"Reload, Dr Freeman!!!"
"Reload, Dr Freeman!!!"
"Better reload, Dr Freeman!"
Ugh...
So good quality barks can eliminate the insufferability of repetition.
To be honest, though, the first thing I thought of when I read this article was,
"Reload, Dr Freeman!!!"
"Reload, Dr Freeman!!!"
"Better reload, Dr Freeman!"
Ugh...
An example of bad barks: Oblivion.
"I better cut down on the ale. Starting to see things, I am." This line delivered as a bandit archer looks down at the corpse of one of his buddies, decorated with thirty steel arrows. It's bad enough that every AI seems to only have six lines for any situation; what's worse is that there only seem to have been five voice actors available, so of course all the Elves sound the same, the Khajiit sound like Morrowind's Argonians and the female Orcs sound like a suburban housewife from Cleveland.
An example of good barks: the Thief series.
"I'm warning you, I'm a big... guardy... guy!" Honestly, the conversations held by the AIs in the Thief games are hilarious. And while Thief: Deadly Shadows had its fair share of shortcomings, listening to the AIs "bark" at each other was something sweet. "Evening, officer!" "Eh, bugger off." And then, of course, there's ANYTHING that Benny says. Pure comedy gold.
"I better cut down on the ale. Starting to see things, I am." This line delivered as a bandit archer looks down at the corpse of one of his buddies, decorated with thirty steel arrows. It's bad enough that every AI seems to only have six lines for any situation; what's worse is that there only seem to have been five voice actors available, so of course all the Elves sound the same, the Khajiit sound like Morrowind's Argonians and the female Orcs sound like a suburban housewife from Cleveland.
An example of good barks: the Thief series.
"I'm warning you, I'm a big... guardy... guy!" Honestly, the conversations held by the AIs in the Thief games are hilarious. And while Thief: Deadly Shadows had its fair share of shortcomings, listening to the AIs "bark" at each other was something sweet. "Evening, officer!" "Eh, bugger off." And then, of course, there's ANYTHING that Benny says. Pure comedy gold.
Two words for you: Mud crabs.The Rogue Wolf said:
The world is falling apart, hell opens itself upon the world, but who cares? There are mudcrabs to be bitching about.
Good article... I love learning new things about my favorite industry.
I honestly never noticed barks much until reading this article... I sort of took them as entertaining quotes to yell at friends over battle.net or Ventrilo. But I now realize how irritating it could be to constantly hear "You wanna piece a me, boy?" EVERYTIME you select a marine.
I honestly never noticed barks much until reading this article... I sort of took them as entertaining quotes to yell at friends over battle.net or Ventrilo. But I now realize how irritating it could be to constantly hear "You wanna piece a me, boy?" EVERYTIME you select a marine.
Voice acting is the least recognized tool that can easily increase the immersiveness of a game.
Rainslick precipice is good in this respect for satirizing the old, weary, wise voice.
Games with awesome voice acting:
System shock 2
Prince of persia sands of time
Portal
The Shivah
Rainslick precipice is good in this respect for satirizing the old, weary, wise voice.
Games with awesome voice acting:
System shock 2
Prince of persia sands of time
Portal
The Shivah
I have to admit that even though the barks of the splicers in BioShock were repetitive one would catch me off guard from time to time and allow me to test the tensile strength of my curtain rods.
Yes, that got very unnerving in a couple of fights; especially eerie was hearing a male and a female character saying exactly the same lines, one after another. They needed to mix the dialog up a bit...MossStone said:
The Halo series did a better job, but that might be a bit over-the-top as an example. (40,000 lines of "unscripted" dialog, in a shooter?)
Indeed; I've heard some remarkable stuff, both serious and hilarious, with that skull enabled. The characters voiced by Pete Stacker (the guy who used "I would have been your daddy, but that dog beat me over the fence" as a rare taunt in Halo 1, also the voice of those Budweiser "Real American Hero" ads) especially hatched out some good ones.Thunderhorse said:
-- Steve
Paste makes an interesting point about how those barks become aural cues for the player-how you know when your character is hurt, or at risk of falling.
I'd say it's a careful balance you want to strike. Turning off the sound of game will kill the immersion in most cases (see Dead Space) but there comes a time when you just need them to shut the hell up.
I'd say it's a careful balance you want to strike. Turning off the sound of game will kill the immersion in most cases (see Dead Space) but there comes a time when you just need them to shut the hell up.
Great article however I think the issue extends even further into game design. I mean what about canned animations? Can you imagine how insanely fluid and dynamic Street Fighter IV would look if each attack had at least 3 different animation routines (that obviously timed out exactly the same)?
You're absolutely right about the annoyance of the audio.. I usually end up playing with the volume almost all the way down, with subtitles on just so I won't annoy the crap out of my wife with the repititious chatter of the video games
You're absolutely right about the annoyance of the audio.. I usually end up playing with the volume almost all the way down, with subtitles on just so I won't annoy the crap out of my wife with the repititious chatter of the video games
BallPtPenTheif: that actually sounds like it would be really annoying and not make much sense. If it's supposed to be the same move why animate it differently? It seems like the net effect would be confusing the player by making it exceedingly unclear what is actually going on. Not that rote repetition of animation isn't terrible when misapplied. I can't tell you how many games I've seen where a crowd was moving in perfect unison. Seriously, add another cycle or two or at least put them a little out of phase.
I agree that barks are necessary for communicating valuable information to the player, but adding more barks is a good way to communicate more to the player. For instance Team Fortress 2 has several different barks for when a player calls for a medic. Some of these are just there to add variation, but they also differ by degree of urgency. If a player calls for a medic you can instantly tell how much he needs it by the sound of his voice.
I've been playing the demo for Left 4 Dead and I have to say I think that Valve has dynamic dialog nailed. Even the first bit of dialog in the demo, which could be summed up as the following:
Survivor 1: We should take the subway to the hospital
Survivor 2: Okay.
Has tons of different permutations depending on who the AI director casts into those roles. It really helps the suspense of the game that so many things change on a new play-through.
Up there with barks for potential annoyance is voice macros. If you have these in your game always put some limit on how much a player can activate them. There is no reason you should be able to say "need a dispenser over here" 10,000 times in one minute.
I agree that barks are necessary for communicating valuable information to the player, but adding more barks is a good way to communicate more to the player. For instance Team Fortress 2 has several different barks for when a player calls for a medic. Some of these are just there to add variation, but they also differ by degree of urgency. If a player calls for a medic you can instantly tell how much he needs it by the sound of his voice.
I've been playing the demo for Left 4 Dead and I have to say I think that Valve has dynamic dialog nailed. Even the first bit of dialog in the demo, which could be summed up as the following:
Survivor 1: We should take the subway to the hospital
Survivor 2: Okay.
Has tons of different permutations depending on who the AI director casts into those roles. It really helps the suspense of the game that so many things change on a new play-through.
Up there with barks for potential annoyance is voice macros. If you have these in your game always put some limit on how much a player can activate them. There is no reason you should be able to say "need a dispenser over here" 10,000 times in one minute.
Well, in reality no two punches are exactly the same. So in the game, it would be the same punch, like i said, timed out the same.. so it's literally the same attack however there would be some slight deviation in the animation to give it the appearance of randomness.shMerker said:
You, Mrs., can be described as what is called an "acoustical terrorist".
Thankfully, when mankind encountered "the wolf" for the first time, he quickly invented conditioning, rewarding, training - in short: education. The praised product of these efforts was "the dog". Mankind's best friend and helper.
Unfortunately, you didn't consider education because you chose to humanize your dogs, which ultimately turned them into the common-issue "carpet rat" - fulfilling their role as dressed-up, misbehaving, stranger-biting, 24/7-aggression "cuties".
So they bark, but I think that's the natural result of neglecting the dogs' education.
You called for it, you got it. No reason to complain about the barks, which makes them a bad intro for your story about "ultra-sensitivity to sound-bits in games", as you yourself totally neglect your neighbours' peace of eardrums.
So, in the end, what reason does an acoustical terrorist have to complain about repetitive loudness?
If you don't care about your fellow man's sense of hearing, why should fellow game developer guy care about yours?
Thankfully, when mankind encountered "the wolf" for the first time, he quickly invented conditioning, rewarding, training - in short: education. The praised product of these efforts was "the dog". Mankind's best friend and helper.
Unfortunately, you didn't consider education because you chose to humanize your dogs, which ultimately turned them into the common-issue "carpet rat" - fulfilling their role as dressed-up, misbehaving, stranger-biting, 24/7-aggression "cuties".
So they bark, but I think that's the natural result of neglecting the dogs' education.
You called for it, you got it. No reason to complain about the barks, which makes them a bad intro for your story about "ultra-sensitivity to sound-bits in games", as you yourself totally neglect your neighbours' peace of eardrums.
So, in the end, what reason does an acoustical terrorist have to complain about repetitive loudness?
If you don't care about your fellow man's sense of hearing, why should fellow game developer guy care about yours?
There is more to it than that though on the development side. Audio is at the very end of the pipeline and as such is always in crunch. Add to it the fact that while all other aspects of development have gotten more space to really branch out and add more to their respective fields, sound doesn't get that luxury. They have just enough space to keep up with all the new objects added, characters, etc. So while artists and designers can cram in more and more with each generation, sound is afforded just enough space on the disc to keep up with what they are given. Add to it that they are often times understaffed, and you have the sound department of most studios. Beyond that, once you are in it is a fairly stagnant field with not much upward movement, mostly just lateral. Sound guys are bar none the most under appreciated, misunderstood roles in development. And as such, they are always going to be the most cynical, God bless their soles.
So I agree, more grunts would be great. And sound guys will agree with that. But they just don't have the bandwidth to implement them, on top of all the other thankless chores they are given. It is just one more example of what should be re-examined on a big scale in this industry.
So I agree, more grunts would be great. And sound guys will agree with that. But they just don't have the bandwidth to implement them, on top of all the other thankless chores they are given. It is just one more example of what should be re-examined on a big scale in this industry.
I think it's more to do with certain sounds, we've all played first person shooters where you try to avoid using a certain machine gun because it has a very loud repetitive sound. In Perfect Dark Zero when Joanna takes a hit she sometimes lets out a "EEEEE!", which isn't fun, but get hit in Gears of War and you'll get a lesser sounding "ugh" which you can barely hear, and won't be annoyed by.
From the developers point of view there is also memory to consider, you could have 50 different variations of "ugh" "oof" "ahh" "oowhahoo" for 1 character, but that could be anything up to 25MB depending on sound quality, multiplied by the number of characters who need similar treatment like squad members plus other sound effects. These voices and sound effects get played on headsets and surround sound speakers so they need to be high quality.
You may well say "25MB is nothing, you could compress it even smaller", more compression requires longer load times to decompress everything, to have a very large number of sounds loaded and ready to play in time with instant events would require more powerful hardware or it will directly impact how smoothly the game plays.
You've probably noticed in some games with big conversations, the disc spinning or the hard drive ticking away whenever someone is about to speak, followed by a brief pause, and then the audio coming out, sometimes the character will even proceed to talk before the words come out, seen often in Oblivion and Mass Effect, these audio files are not pre-loaded as they don't need to be, gamers can afford to wait in these slower moments of gameplay.
So, for now, we will have to put up with our 4 or 5 "barks" per character, and developers will have to carry on making them more discreet to avoid repetition.
From the developers point of view there is also memory to consider, you could have 50 different variations of "ugh" "oof" "ahh" "oowhahoo" for 1 character, but that could be anything up to 25MB depending on sound quality, multiplied by the number of characters who need similar treatment like squad members plus other sound effects. These voices and sound effects get played on headsets and surround sound speakers so they need to be high quality.
You may well say "25MB is nothing, you could compress it even smaller", more compression requires longer load times to decompress everything, to have a very large number of sounds loaded and ready to play in time with instant events would require more powerful hardware or it will directly impact how smoothly the game plays.
You've probably noticed in some games with big conversations, the disc spinning or the hard drive ticking away whenever someone is about to speak, followed by a brief pause, and then the audio coming out, sometimes the character will even proceed to talk before the words come out, seen often in Oblivion and Mass Effect, these audio files are not pre-loaded as they don't need to be, gamers can afford to wait in these slower moments of gameplay.
So, for now, we will have to put up with our 4 or 5 "barks" per character, and developers will have to carry on making them more discreet to avoid repetition.
Ahaha I hate those poorly made/repetitive barks!
I've never really been annoyed by them, but the biggest offender for me is Mass Effect. Great game and all, but the enemies have the same dialogue and repeat them too quickly. Seriously, hands up if you've heard "Enemies everywhere!" or "I will destroy you!" about a couple of hundred or so times in a playthrough.
However, there are games that get "barks" right. They do it so well, it actually adds to the immersion of the game and can actually be useful to the player as audio cues.
Company of Heroes is the only game that I've played so far that does this well. The game is loaded with dialogue for each unit, and a ton of them are contextual to the action that is going on. You will hear soldiers yelling about what they're being attacked by (infantry, tanks, artillery etc.). You will hear panic and 'realistic' screaming when they're being killed or suppressed. You will hear sarcastic remarks and casual talk when they're calm. You will hear humorous 4th wall breaking dialogue when you annoy them by selecting them repetitively in quick succession.
More importantly though, there is so much dialogue that you can hear new phrases every once in a while, and although you will hear the same phrases after playing for a while, there is enough differentiation so you won't be annoyed.
It'd be great if more games could follow through on what CoH did for "barks".
I've never really been annoyed by them, but the biggest offender for me is Mass Effect. Great game and all, but the enemies have the same dialogue and repeat them too quickly. Seriously, hands up if you've heard "Enemies everywhere!" or "I will destroy you!" about a couple of hundred or so times in a playthrough.
However, there are games that get "barks" right. They do it so well, it actually adds to the immersion of the game and can actually be useful to the player as audio cues.
Company of Heroes is the only game that I've played so far that does this well. The game is loaded with dialogue for each unit, and a ton of them are contextual to the action that is going on. You will hear soldiers yelling about what they're being attacked by (infantry, tanks, artillery etc.). You will hear panic and 'realistic' screaming when they're being killed or suppressed. You will hear sarcastic remarks and casual talk when they're calm. You will hear humorous 4th wall breaking dialogue when you annoy them by selecting them repetitively in quick succession.
More importantly though, there is so much dialogue that you can hear new phrases every once in a while, and although you will hear the same phrases after playing for a while, there is enough differentiation so you won't be annoyed.
It'd be great if more games could follow through on what CoH did for "barks".