Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback An Important Message about Voice Acting

According to this Eurogamer article, Larian is seeing if it is feasible to put voice acting in the entire game.

So before this gets too far, I'm just going to add a little suggestion:

Larian, if you add voice acting to the game, save yourself some money and the players some several tons worth of irritation and write this down, font size and all:

NO VOICE ACTING FOR LOOPED NPC CHATTER - EVER!

Voice-act everything else in the game if you want, but never, EVER, EVER put in voice acting for looped NPC chatter. One-off chatter (as in in happens only once) is fine.

Whatever small, tiny positive voiced acting for looped dialogue adds in terms of immersion is vastly, hugely outweighed by the negative of BEING INSANELY ANNOYING. Players often like to stay in town areas to think because they're usually thinking "what should I buy, how should I distribute my points, what skills should I equip, or where should I go to advance my quest". Players do not need to be distracted every 3 seconds by some utter sh-tbird reciting a f--king grocery list or looking for their goddamn pepper. There is literally only negative value added by hearing some moron talking about their grocery list. It adds only pain and torment and suffering, and there is zero reason to spend one penny of money to an actor so they can record lines as worthless as that. That SHOULD have been common sense, but apparently it was not.


If Larian does lose their minds and insists, then at the very least they can ensure that they code the sound system to automatically mute looping voices:

• When a dialogue window is open
• When the inventory window is open
• When the skill window is open
• When the quest log window is open
• When the crafting window is open
• When the barter window is open
• When the game options window is open
• When the save/load menus are open
• When the escape menu is open
• Really, whenever ANY FRIGGIN' WINDOW is open except possibly a container
• When the speaker is completely off-screen

That would at least possibly allow players to maintain some shreds of sanity.

Do not reply to this thread with one of D:OS 1's infamously atrocious lines in a FAILED ATTEMPT to be "witty". You. Are. Not.

"No one has as many friends as a man with many cheeses!"

But yeah, I totally agree. They were totally annoying over the time, also because of the high frequency. At some time I think I disabled all of the voice acting or something like that to get rid of it.

I would like to keep the cheese vendor's lines on repetition. A bit. I think. But none of the others, they drove me absolutely nuts. No, I do not want to hear about the drunken shenanigans in Yuthul Gor. Ever again. Shut up about it forever.

I think DOS2 deserves at least one NPC that loops like in the Cyseal Market -- it's a signature feature at this point!

I nominate Hilde from the Fort Joy Ghetto

I've stated it elsewhere, but I agree with this. Those constantly-repeating NPC monologues were pretty unbearable, particularly in the Enhanced Edition. Even if not removing them, at least turn down the frequency by a lot.

Barring that, add a slider in the Sound controls for voice, since I can do without voice acting. Honestly, I'd rather read the dialogue, and it's hard to do that with someone talking over it. Just make sure the slider doesn't affect combat grunts, only spoken words.

I don't mind market stall vendors hawking their wares as that is what they do. How Larian should do it through is have npcs that wander the market stalls and trigger a vendor pitch when interacting with the merchants so that it only happens occasionally and you should only hear the pitch if your in proximity to the market stall when this is going on. This would be a lot more organic and satisfying in terms of atmosphere to me.

Man, I'm so tempted

Yay, it's official, looping cheese vendor dialogue!