BFV Stupidity

[Ezdaar]

For those of you who haven't played BFV there are set voice messages that can be triggered with a keypress as well as voice messages that play when a key event happens. If you're the Americans the messages are in English. If you're NVA, VC or ARVN, the voice messages play in Vietnamese. Most of us don't speak Vietnamese however, and so many want them in English. EA sees it differently though, here is the official response to the issue:

The NVA and VC both spoke Vietnamese, therefore in the game they will only speak in Vietnamese. There is no way to alter the language that they speak within the game.

Please note that on some maps the American team is actually the ARVN Army. The ARVN Army was the Army of South Vietnam. Since they are Vietnamese, they speak the Vietnamese language and not English.


Surprisingly, the NVA, VC and ARVN could also understand Vietnamese, a fact that EA seems to have missed.

[Speedy Cerviche]

In BF42 I believe you could toggle the foreign voice macros to english. I never used it though, I liked hearing german and russian heh.

[Kylaer]

BFV seems to be BF42 with a few engine improvements, but with all of the useful settings toggles removed. No more changing amount of CPU devoted to AI, or anything of that nature, was one I noticed; no more changing voices, although this isn't as big an issue for me because I usually read the messages instead.

[Der Helm]

Whats the big deal, you need to check the map anyway. At least if you want to know where that stupid tank/plane/whatever is.

And it is not that difficult to pick up several keywords. I don't speak japanese, but after a short time of playing, I was able to "understand" the phrases for "Enemy Armor spotted", "I need reinforcements" etc.

[TripleDES]

When being stressed with defending by base because I've the whole enemy team heading towards my direction (or some other scenarios with lots of people involved), the last thing I want to have to bother with is to spent time into deciphering foreign spout. If I can understand what the damn game tells me, I can save time by not watching the text log first before taking a look at the map.

And if I'm flying a plane, I don't care if there's a sniper reading the NY Times while taking a crap near the northern flag point, so an audio cue telling me so helps me more than diverting my attention to the left side of the screen to find the written english version of the foreign gibberish, if it hasn't been scrolled offscreen already under all the spam, just to find out that I couldn't do jackshit with that radio message to begin with.

Removing the voice change option was a BadThing(tm) IMO, but hey, EA's involved, so who's surprised?

[Toast]

This is immersion run amok. It's annoying, and it exacerbates the balance issues even further.

I have no doubt that EA will eventually cave in and patch this in.

Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a case of "cripple-ware". The feature would have been in, but it was intentionally disabled. Then a few months later, the benevolent developer swoops in with a crowd-pleasing enhancement.

[Liquidator]

For those of you who haven't played BFV there are set voice messages that can be triggered with a keypress as well as voice messages that play when a key event happens. If you're the Americans the messages are in English. If you're NVA, VC or ARVN, the voice messages play in Vietnamese. Most of us don't speak Vietnamese however, and so many want them in English. EA sees it differently though, here is the official response to the issue:

The NVA and VC both spoke Vietnamese, therefore in the game they will only speak in Vietnamese. There is no way to alter the language that they speak within the game.

Please note that on some maps the American team is actually the ARVN Army. The ARVN Army was the Army of South Vietnam. Since they are Vietnamese, they speak the Vietnamese language and not English.


Surprisingly, the NVA, VC and ARVN could also understand Vietnamese, a fact that EA seems to have missed.

Who cares?  Is it really that big of a deal?

After you have played the game for a while, you learn what the different Vietnamese voice commands sound like.  Even if you're retarded and can't remember them, all you have to do is glance in the lower left corner and see what the command says.  It's really not that bad.

-Liquidator

[Gong]

the largest stupidity, in my opinion, is the near-complete silence of EA/DICE regarding the status of the patch. there are some pretty gross imbalances, namely the m60/LAW combination, as well as numerous fairly severe technical problems especially for ATI users.

i don't really understand how they could have left out so many of the interface improvements/features that have been added to bf1942. it's just so wantonly stupid to leave out fixes which the community already proved a strong desire for in the previous game.

[hirebrand]

I think they are not going far enough. Everyone playing Vietnamese should also be forced to read Vietnamese in the chat window!

나는 근해 실에 한국어를 사용하고 있다

(OK that is Korean, but you get the idea)

[daveNYC]

It makes me wonder what sort of idiot would think that this was a good thing.

[Alrindel]

Me, I guess.  I thought that having the voices in Japanese and German in BF1942 was quite good, and it certainly never caused me any problems since the text chat contained the translations.

From the "you can't make everybody happy all of the time" department, I recall that Return to Castle Wolfenstein was criticized by some people for having the Germans speak English with a thick Hollywood-German accent.  And in the case of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory the German-English voices were so horribly, awfully wrong that it actually broke gameplay immersion for me every time someone used them.

[SirBruce]

But you CAN make everyone happy: make it a client-side toggle as to which voice you hear for a given command.  Those who want to hear voices appropriate to their country still can, and it doesn't break their immersion if someone else chooses to hear English instead.

Moreover, such a choice is an amazingly trivial to code.  You'd almost have to write code specifically to disallow this.  (I say almost because that's not strictly true, but based on my view that if you wrote well-designed code such a feature would almost naturally fall out of it, even if you didn't connect it to the UI.)

Bruce

[daveNYC]

Er... what Bruce said?

It's not the Vietnamese speach that's the issue, it's the fact that you have no choice in the matter.

[HaemishM]

Just a guess pulled from my ass, but I'm sure the reason EA doesn't want it changed is because of the expense it would incur in having to record 2 voice tracks for each command instead of one. And since EA is following their usual modus operandi when dealing with developers they partly own, don't expect this to change.

They will continue releasing marginal "improvements" to the same engine for a few years, all while refusing to give the developers any (or enough) funds to patch the game the right way (i.e. more than twice) until the buying public is sick of the same game with different skins and stops buying the products. Finally, EA will close the dev shop and absorb all the "useful" bits of the dev company into EA proper.

See Westwood, Origin, Maxis, et. al. for examples of the practice.

[TripleDES]

Both sides have the same radio commands. They're available in both English and Vietnamese voice files. And the code for the switch is also there (it was in BF42 1.0 already), they just decided to hide it for some stupid ass reason.

[ceej]

Haven't they already recorded two voice tracks for each command? I'm assuming this is like BF1942, where the voice commands are identical for each side. And where there is a toggle to have the English version be played, even when you're on a non-English-speaking team. Seems like they made extra work for themselves removing the option.

I think having understandable audio is an advantage. Sometimes you're focused on something else on-screen, not keeping up with the chat text. Audio can give you extra information without interrupting your concentration.

(TripleDES slipped in ahead of me with the same point.)

[HaemishM]

I'm of course, assuming that EA would want the NVA voice files, even if they were in English, to SOUND like Vietnamese, i.e. local color. But I could be wrong.

[TripleDES]

I'd doubt that, because in BF42 the germans/japs use the Allied voice files, no dialect or anything. Some people are probably going to write a tool that changes the voice files (repackaging the sound archives or something), but this will probably make Punkbuster tick off and tag you as cheater due changes in the data structures.

[penfold]

Day of Defeat has the axis voice messages in german, albeit with a english text message too.

It makes it alot better, especially when you allied and hear some german being spoken from behind a wall or in house, it adds to the immersion.

[Alluvian]

Yeah, but it would still be trivially simple to have the allies hear the german voices all the time and a switch to let the german PLAYERS hear english.  I used german/english because of your DoD ref, but replace it with vietnamese for this point.

Anyway, dead dead dead topic.  EA went out of their way to remove a feature the players wanted in the last title and had patched in.  Stupid move by EA no matter how you cut it.  They knew players wanted it. Whether an individual here and there may like the way it is now does not change the argument at all.