Traversing the Reikland can be a bit hectic now and then and you don’t always have the time to look at the chat when someone on your team is communicating through the Social Wheel.
Therefore, I propose having the character you are playing as actually say the thing you select.
This can be anything from Bardin saying “This is the path, Dawri.” when selecting “Come Here!”, to Kerillian passive-aggresively saying “No, of course I don’t need help. Idiots.” when selecting “Help!”.
The thing that was selected will still be shown in the chat in case you missed what they said over the screams of the ratmen. There will also be a cooldown (around 10 - 15 seconds give or take) between voicelines to prevent spam.
Voicelines triggered through the Social Wheel will also have less priority than other voicelines, and will be cut off early if you tag something or a horde is incoming (just to give a few examples).
New voicelines for the characters might need to be recorded, though I distinctly recall the characters already having voicelines similar to those in the Social Wheel, just with hitherto no way to manually activate them.
As an added bonus, my absolute favourite part about the game is hearing the Ubersreik 5 (4? Doesn’t matter) interact with each other, so just the tiniest extra voiceline here and there makes the experience all the more enjoyable.
Though, this is all just my own opinion. Would any of you guys be for or against having the characters say what you select in the Social Wheel?
Yes, let them speak their mind.
No, can’t stand them talking.
0voters
(Also, this is my first topic on the forums, so feel free to tell me if the poll got messed up or I posted in the wrong place or whatever.)
I would hope so. There’s no technical reason why they can’t do it, it’s mostly an issue of budget for voice acting. Almost all of the action wheel buttons already have matching voice lines like “I see a patrol/boss”, you just hear them at random instead of on demand.
In addition to banter and action wheel stuff I think there’s a ton of opportunities to add more random action based lines for combat. The most common one is when you get a headshot, multikill some enemies in quick succession, or miss a grenade throw. Bardin and Kruber also have special lines when using a shield that boil down to “get behind me”, so adding more weapon specific dialogue would be cool. They could also be weapon specific versions of existing dialogue like “haha the chaos warrior is dead”, maybe bardin could say something special if you manage to kill the CW with a jumping headshot, that sort of thing.
Like L4D2 you could also use these voice lines to prod players into remembering good practices in regards to teamwork and convey more information in general. If you hear another player say “RELOADING” enough times covering them becomes a reflex after a while and you don’t need to think about it. Ranged weapons that are magazine based could have reloading voice lines. All characters besides sienna could also have voice lines for when you pull out a ranged weapon and try to fire it, but it’s not loaded.
Similar to how characters will warn the team when throwing a grenade you could also add warnings to other AoE weapons like hagbane and drakegun. For weapons with zoom you could have a voice line like “hey get out of the way!” if someone moves in front of you. Or something like “I’m lining up a shot” to remind the other players not to walk in front of you.
I could go on, but you get the idea. More voice acting is always better. It could just be random chance but it feels like every time fatshark patches the game I heard one or two snippets of new dialogue on certain missions.
10 - 15 seconds seems the most fair to me. It’s a big enough space to prevent excessive spam (emphasis on excessive spam, not just spam) whilst still keeping the voicelines, you know, there.
Crouching is a feature, but it does nothing against Packmasters. While funny, that piece of dialogue was just banter. (My personal favourite was “Stop strangling the elf… THAT’S MY JOB!” from Victor.)
But on the actual topic… I think I said this in an earlier topic about the same (yes, it’s been requested before, and about as soon as the Social Wheel got in), but in a stream the devs said that the wheel (and the chat) is meant fully for player-to player communication, i. e. kind of a meta-channel, while the shoutouts are in-character, even if they also give info to the players. So they don’t like to mix the two, and because of that there won’t be voice lines for the wheel (at least for now).
It’s true that spamming would need to be limited if there were voice lines, maybe both for very short-term and mid-term, but otherwise I wouldn’t mind them personally (though I don’t really have a preference either way), at least for the more important messages (monster, patrol, help, at least). In fact, as the OP suggested, there are already lines in the game that could correspond (closely enough, at least) to the situations that a mod wouldn’t really be out of question either, I think. They could at least make a few of the notifications more easy to notice.
The same logic can be applied to the pinging system. Is the pinging system not also supposed to be player-to-player communication? Why do the characters have voicelines for pinging certain things then?
If the Social Wheel is supposed to improve player-to-player communication, auditory communication is always going to be more effective than visual communication, especially in games that need you to be attentive at all times.
When I’m playing the game, I don’t want to feel like I’m just some kind of unknown outside force controlling the character’s every move. I want to feel like I’m the character themself. Having the majority of communication between the team happen through lifeless text appearing in the corner of the screen kinda breaks the immersion for me, especially when the voicelines that are already in the game could easily (or, well, I assume it could be done easily) be reused.
I can completely understand that the characters won’t be able to say what you type in the chat (as it would both break the lore, sound terrible, and also be a nightmare to program), but the Social Wheel? That’s a bummer for me.
Just keep the Chat as well as the Voice Chat as the “meta-channels”, and have the Social Wheel be a kind of middle-ground between player-to-player and “in-character” communication.
Apologies if I’m ranting a bit here. I know it’s something that’s out of your control, I just wanted to share my opinion on the subject.
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