Music = Good. Voices = ...

[Zild]

First up, something (vaguely) good... I agree the gruff Roman voices sound quite good - especially "Triarii!" But sometimes the words they say seem a little innappropriate...

And I guess the good thing with Victoria is you only have to endure her once - or set the required stat in preferences.txt so that you never have to do the tutorial, but I have to admit even after playing Shogun and Medieval for years that there are some things I need to learn from the tutorial still (I hope they're in there!)

"Victoreeeee"

or why not

"The day is oOOWUUUURRRRSSSSSSSSSSSS"

That's it! That's exactly the one I meant! Do I assume by this that it at least doesn't get any worse?!

i HAVE eye's, i can see when my troops are "at the gate"

I'm glad you made a point of this as I forgot it myself - indeed, when the wall falls or a gate is forced open you want to order your men in straight away (the battle tutor even tells you this!) Instead, you have to sit and watch the "action"... I too wish this would be changed to just an announcement - Sean Pertwee (the name's so familiar, but I'm going to have to search to find out what else he's done) did some good voice-overs for such things and I think the game would not be complete without them (although perhaps suitably delayed if playing general view and the general himself is in battle :) ) But cut scenes? Really, guys at CA, we know it looks lovely - no need to cram it down our throats!

The good thing is I'm sure these could all be pretty easily fixed in a patch - if CA consider it worth the money to call in voice artists again. Whilst the cut scenes should be easily removed, in theory, fixing the voiceovers (which is probably the least of their worries right now, but really matters to some of us!) might be a little hard... Although replacing one sound file with another should be pretty easy, getting the actors back into the studio again might be hard... You know, they're only allowed so many days off at MacDonalds

Honestly, at the very least I think somebody should make a mod to replace "The day is ours!" with "Would you that as a meal?" and "Victoryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy" with "Pizza delivery!"

Seriously though, I would imagine this is a sign that they've not used professionals. I would like to think that professional voice-over artists would want to redo a clip in which they dropped their accent or sounded ineffectual - hell, I wouldn't want my work released if it sounded like the RTW pizza boy. Really, I doubt anybody who ever hears that performance (or Victoria's) will seriously consider employing them for voice-over work.



Actually, this has given me an idea... I wonder if there's anybody here who could remake some of those files? Replace the pizza boy with a real man, and the Greek with... whoever! (Sounds like they cast the Greek and the pizza boy the wrong way round, actually!) Hopefully somebody with good recording equipment and access to a willing (albeit maybe not professional) voice-artist would be able to provide "alternative" voices for the community. Hell, they could even offer it to CA for inclusion in a patch...

Any volunteers??