Just Spit It Out Already!

Here's the breakdown of gaming at my house lately: I've been playing Defiance, my husband has been playing Sid Meier's Civilization: Revolution, and my daughters are obsessed with Animal Crossing: New Leaf.  We're kind of all over the board.  But do you know what the combination of listening to these three games has taught me?

Voice overs are totally important.

All three games have a different way to handle voice overs.  Defiance has inane, repetitive chatter, but it's completely voiced and in English (or whatever language, I'm guessing??)  Civilization has constant, interruptive voice overs, but the characters just jabber.  Kind of like Sims.  And Animal Crossing is completely voiced, but it's just bleeps and bloops, not really word sounds at all, except when you type it says the letters you hit in a majorly robotic voice.

So different, and what do they all have in common?  SO ANNOYING.

Of the three, I would say Animal Crossing is the least offensive.  I am not crazy about the fact that every time a character talks to you it makes a steady stream of noise not unlike a dial-up modem in the 90's, but it's easily tuned out.  Civilization might be the worst.  You have advisors helping build your civilization, and they are constantly popping up to talk at you.  It stops game play to have you read their blurb and make a decision. But the whole time they're up they are just jabbering away in nonsense.  Why?  Why did they even spend the time recording this inane blabbering?  If you're going to record someone talking away, just have them actually speak the words.  It's super annoying to me.  I wish they were just silent.  My husband stands up for the game by saying this way it could be shipped worldwide without recording multiple languages.  It still grates on me.

And Defiance voice overs are annoying in a category all their own.  There is tons of voiced dialogue during quest hand-outs and cut-scenes, all voice acted and well done.  But during actual game play you have your very own Navi-like computer chick, who talks incessantly but repeats the same lines over and over and over.  Everyone who plays can recite EGO's lines.  And everyone hates her.  I'm not generalizing.

I love the work programmers and designers put into games...but how about going that extra mile, or going a mile less, and just not annoying the gamer?