Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Voiced NPCs are talking WAY too much!

Thanks Larian, now I can play with Voices volume up.

I would like to thank Larian for being so quick on addressing this. Yesterday i stoped playing because of this repetitive chatter, i was realing going nuts and had to stop playing, couldnt focus on the text dialogs.

So i was expecting a couple of days to fix it and on the next day, voila? it's fixed! it's great now and i'm having a blast playing the game.

Thanks for listening to fans, larian. /hug

Well, this fix (which I didn't feel was necessary in the first place) has had a negative impact.

I've noticed that there seems to now be a limit to how many comments will be spoken aloud at the same time (I assume to cut down on the amount of crosstalk). However, as the game doesn't prioritize one comment over the other (e.g. random vendors versus your companion or main characters commenting on something that just happened), I've ended up missing out on a number of more important comments which were not voiced, or even cut off mid-statement as a pair of nearby commenting vendors consume all the available audio slots.

Joy. Would rather have the noisier chatter back (as I had no problems focusing on the specific statements I wanted to hear) rather than voices being randomly silenced to appease players who were apparently raised in a library-like environment and can't deal with sound.

banter has been reduced in the latest patch :P

Remember this is text so you can't tell tone, take this is the nicest way one possibly can.

It was their opinion like yours. They > 1, you = 1. I'm not going to get in what is wrong or right here in the choice.

You mention you miss tips this way now... well in Beta we had no voices and we never complained about missing tips then.

What it sounds like to me is more tweaking is ultimately needed.

A few problems with those statements:

1) People generally don't run to the forum to talk about how happy they are with something. Rather, they come to complain about something (or ask questions). It is never surprising to see more people complaining about a feature on a forum (instead of posting to support it). Also, forums represent a tiny, tiny percentage of the people playing a game. All of that makes the "majority" argument very tricky and debatable, which is why they're often referred to as the "vocal minority".

2) In beta we did not have voices, but what we did have was text above the head that remained in place *MUCH* longer than it does now. With the addition of voices that text visibility has (for some reason) been reduced to ~2 seconds or less, making it very difficult to catch without the audio (and probably because they thought it was unnecessary to display it as long due to the addition of the voice-overs).

No one has as many friends as the man with many cheeses!

This is something I can definitely get behind. I'm fine with the voices and the writing, but it needs to come *much* less frequently. I haven't been this annoyed with NPCs since Serana would hound me every five seconds while crafting in Skyrim. And in D:OS I can't FRD the cheese vendor across the city in reprisal.

I'm not ashamed to admit it can be very difficult to read and process silent text while being shouted at about potatoes.

This is odd. I am still finding the npc chatter to be looping rather too frequently. For example, the guys on pier near the scroll merchant. The drone on about the same 2 things in infinite loop. Driving me bonkers anytime I got to buy stuff from that merchant :-(

I normaly realy like your posts, you always seem a realy cool guy with good discussions going around and reasonable ideas, but in this i realy disagree with you, especialy in the tone you address to other people just because they don't agree with you.

I could say that you are a person that was raised in a nut-house like environment and can't deal with reading text in a chat window and you come here and QQ on something that even larian fixed, but ofc i won't because i understand you are just upset and you already proven you can do much more than that.

Every single person i showed this game said they couldn't understand all the random chatter and that was weird and distracting with all the constant looping. I'm happy larian fixed it. The side-effect you mention is indeed true on very rare ocasions, but even if it was voiced, there was danger you couldn't even understand it if there was another random chatter on top of it's audio like a lot of times it was happening.

My biggest problem with this thread are the blatent overreactions. The "This is so bad I can't play anymore." comments are enough to warrant a /facepalm. In a way I really wish it had taken the developers weeks to address this because it would have been interesting to see how many people were serious and how many were just blowing hot air.

I also absolutely believe that at least some of the people complaining (and threatening to put the game away) never made an effort to adjust the various volume settings first. I, for example, have my voice volume set in a way that my characters are talking at a realistically normal conversation level (rather than sounding like they're yelling or talking annoyingly loud). As such, anyone further away from my character (like most of the NPCs in the market) are obviously quieter and not at all overwhelming; they are instead easily tuned-out background noise.

In the end, many of the posts in this thread are coming across like that fellow in another thread who posted that Divinity was absolutely unplayable unless the movement speed was increased by a factor of five. I'm not seeing a whole lot of "The sounds in places like the markets are kind of annoying.. would you consider maybe doing something about it?", which I could empathize with (even I'm not having the same experience). Instead it is "OMG OMG OMG DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE SOUND UNPLAYABLE!!!111ELVENTY-ONE!" and so my reaction has gone to a similar extreme (albeit in the opposite direction).

Since people do not take to the forums to praise, apparently, let me do it. I am extremely happy with the chatter reduction. It would be even more awesome with volume based on distance, but I can now read dialogue without machine gun spammed chatter distracting me. A major step forward. I was ready to put away the game, but then luckily Larian fixed this hugely annoying problem and the game is now immensely playable. Kudos!

volume based distance: +1

They have it, just in many cases it could be better. Heck, in some cases it's overdone - some NPC chatter can't be heard unless you're almost sitting right on top of them (Jake the dog, for instance - although you need Pet Pal to know that). The fish thief in Cyseal is another - his entire conversation with the player is voiced (which is unusual compared to the other NPCs), but good luck hearing the voice-over it if you're more than a few feet away. It's so much lower than the other voices.

Any solution for that?

My QuietDayOnTheMarket mod addresses the voices issue. Just follow the link in my signature (Nexus).

(How is Bairdotr doing?)

Well, I'm not sure about the reference to the problem being "fixed", as I've recently started playing and one of the big two stand-out problems in the game is the relentless repeating barks from people in town. I've found myself walking around trying to find a quiet area where I don't have to listen to the infinite looped repeating lines. Turning voice down is not a good solution as I'm happy to have a conversation with an NPC, I just don't want the unimportant spamming from bystanders.

Abraxas* made a mod to address that for the EE on PC, as stated above: Quiet Day On The Market.