excessive commentary

**Terry** · 05-23-2007, 19:00

I know this has been mentioned before, but I sure wish there was a way to tone down or disable the excessive battle commentary that has been introduced by the newest patch.

Terry

**TeutonicKnight** · 05-24-2007, 14:49

Amen.

**Mithradates** · 05-24-2007, 15:07

"Our forces are under attack we must act now!"
WHAT do u expect its a flaming battle!!

**Stuperman** · 05-24-2007, 15:14

I personally don't mind the new commentary, but wish all the time and effort put into the commentary was instead put into bug hunting/fixes/balance.

**Raijer** · 05-24-2007, 19:15

I hate all that commentary during the game, whether on the battlefield or the strategic map. I have the speech slider down to zero in audio options, and peace and quiet to concentrate on what I'm doing without the peanut gallery chiming in.

**Lusted** · 05-24-2007, 20:59

I personally don't mind the new commentary, but wish all the time and effort put into the commentary was instead put into bug hunting/fixes/balance.

Sound artists are not coders, if you did try to get them to fix bugs you'd end up with interesting results. In any case all the sounds were already ingame, 1.2 just activated them.

**Silverhawk** · 05-24-2007, 22:24

To discuss the fact of MONETARY resources being put to better/worse use than recording implementing mildly irritating commentaries is somewhat irrelevant to the discussion of the commentary but to discount it as not being a possible choice is to be rather blinkered in the process of game development.

Anyway, the first few times I heard the voice alarts in battles, they were cute, but now I dearly wish there was a way to turn them off without muting all voices. I like hearing rebels yelling "I'll rip off yer head an' spit down yer neck!" at me. Yeah, I'm strange. An on-off toggle would be an easy-to-implement win-win here , as far as I can see.

**Rhedd** · 05-25-2007, 05:50

Originally Posted by Silverhawk

To discuss the fact of MONETARY resources being put to better/worse use than recording implementing mildly irritating commentaries is somewhat irrelevant to the discussion of the commentary but to discount it as not being a possible choice is to be rather blinkered in the process of game development.

That's just silly.

What are you suggesting, exactly? That they fire the poor sound guys and use that money to hire more QA/coder guys?

Poor, poor sound guys. Well, maybe their skills will make them good street musicians.

Lusted is right, the two things aren't connected (and I sort of know what I'm talking about. ^_^)

Oh, and yeah, the constant warnings that I'm actually (gasp!) fighting a battle have got to go.

**Silverhawk** · 05-25-2007, 17:19

Originally Posted by Rhedd

That's just silly.

What are you suggesting, exactly? That they fire the poor sound guys and use that money to hire more QA/coder guys?

Not so silly at all. A lot of the voice-work for many of the biggest games was outsourced or with professional voice talent specifically brought in for specific recordings. Developers don't usually have a team of voice actors sitting around waiting to do stuff, it's too expensive. I am professional voice talent and have been part of this process for games before. Now, admittedly, I don't know that this was how the budget/development was done for M2 but in house "sound guys" are more likely engineers and score writers/musicians than voice actors.

The in-battle commentary is/was unnecessary frill on a great game, someone had to compile it in, write the activation scripts, then turn the thing on in the last patch. If they went to all this trouble (and expense hiring people for it in the first place), the least they could've done was allow people to turn it the hell off, too!

**Terry** · 05-25-2007, 18:27

I'm with you Silverhawk. It would be nice to modify/turn off this feature. I thought perhaps it would be in the cfg file, but what do I know... Not in there I guess.

Terry

**Stuperman** · 05-25-2007, 18:47

I didn't mean to insult the hard work of many talented Sound people at CA!

I was talking in more general terms. The first time I heard the new commentary was actually confused, and thought there was a problem, I wasn't really listening. And have been so busy lately that I haven't played enought to find them annoying yet.