Regarding unit 'voices'

I was wondering if it had been confirmed if units responses for when they were selected or given orders would be just mechanical beeps and boops or perhaps synthesised voices.

I figure full voice acting would be a pretty hefty investment.

No, it has not been confirmed. In SMNC all of the fodder bots are technically voiced by our sound guy Howard Mostrom, I don't know what our plans are for PA. Voice acting is very expensive though ... perhaps this could be a stretch goal?...

beep boop whistle buzz is good for me

Nah, only if every unit tells a joke everytime.

Why would they talk when given commands? They are "brutally efficient self-replicating mechanisms of war", the result of millennias of meaningless war. There are no human beings involved!

Manly one liners like The Duke!

The Necrons from Dark Crusade had cool replies. I cant really describe the noise but this video shows the voices when the player selects them

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23Gh_GwQCek

Rather than it being a clicking and beeping noise its allot more subtle purring noise. It depends on if the game will have a somewhat serious tone to it or if it will be more lighthearted. I can totally get behind my bots making an enthusiastic beeping noise like R2-D2 as I send them to their certain doom.

Every unit could sound like John Patrick Lowrie. Fits with the fiction that every unit has been distilled down to the best possible version over 4000 years, hard to get better than John Patrick Lowrie.

Playing PA could get to be a little bit like that scene from Being John Malkovich though ... "Lowrie lowrie lowrie, lowrie lowrie."

On second thought, maybe beep boops are the way to go.

Supreme Commander didn't have voices for units. Just some machine like sound , would be happy to have that!

There are plenty of voice synthesisers around these days. Why not use one of those? It'd sound bizarrely inhuman and electronic and cool.

I have a DAW (complete music-making program) called FLStudio. It has a voice synthesiser that does a bunch of crazy different voices, male and female, old and young, high and low, tuneful or conversational tone. They all sound AWESOMELY alien but quite understandable and of course with some small trace of human. I'd love to hear this sort of thing for PA

Id also like to say that I can picture the command unit having an actual synthesized voice, id feel it would have a stronger AI than the army it commands and should show this in some way.

There's just one thing I would love to see, or rather hear, in PA regarding unit voices - Dalek-like voice screaming "Annihilate! Annihilate!". And, of course, I'm talking about Daleks from Doctor Who. And here's a sample of what I'm talking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxD-5z_xHBU

Commanders may be the most important unit to protect and micro but aside from aesthetics I feel they just end up looking like another unit. Give a commander some character and features that distinguish it from a regular combat drone and you will make the player care about it more. The loss of the commander unit would also be a more serious matter and to some maybe a bit sad as a result.

Not sure what to say about the whole exterminate line. I guess a Doctor Who reference would be a bit awesome but maybe a bit tacky also.

Bleh. I'd pick just regular "unit sounds" over voices any day. After all, "the age of humanity is long past" and I doubt these guys have a "voice" anymore.

(Plus, it reminds me of Starcraft II )

Don't bother trying to give any of the units(yes including the Commander, I'll get to this after) any kind of character, it's directly counter-intuitive and pretty much unties all the logic holding them as Mass-Produced Warmachines.

We talked about it on the GPG forums too, you should check it out.

When there is the possibility to be commanding potentially thousands of units across an entire system, you don't want those little jokes and one liners spewed out constantly, especially when you've been told they are soulless robots built at your command specificaly to die in copious numbers.

Speaking of commands, lets talk about the commander, The Commander/ACU is actually really great, they have no character of thier own(not even subtle traits or ANYTHING) and that makes them perfect for us as players to project ourselves into the game. Any attempts to characterize the commanders in PA would strain that link, especially considering they aren't any factions, or that rather you are your own faction, which just further support the idea of us projection ourselves into the game through our actions.

Mike

Doesn't have to be voice-acted. Simple robot noises are doable. As discussed in that GPG thread, you don't necessarily have to make each unit distinct. You could give specific noises to groups of units. Ideally, the difference would be between 'land, naval, air, Commander, structures, Orbital,' and perhaps engineers as a separate group, for convenience. You could make them more varied groups, or personalize each of them, but the most optimized and useful would probably be group distinction.

And I'll agree that Commanders don't need to be extremely personalized to the point of Starcraft unit sounds, but I think it should be distinct from other units. You can come to a nice balance between heartless chunk of metal and swearing sailor without compromising the ability to put yourself in the Commander's shoes.

No voices on my robotic war machines, subtle mechanical sound effects only please. We're going to be clicking on these things tens of thousands of times, cute jokes will get old very, very quickly.

Transformer noises! Or dubstep voices.

Everybody seems to be assuming that voices automatically mean jokes.

They can be horribly grating either way.

Mike