Eterninox Posted April 6, 2012 Posted April 6, 2012 (edited) I am fairly certain that this suggestion has been made before, but if that is the case, it definitely bears repeating, and if not, well, I think it is something that should definitely be brought up: As things stand at the moment, when you attempt to trigger an ability that is for whatever reason not viable at the given point (because you do not have enough resource, LoS of your target, you are too far, etc), you get only a small-ish red notification near the centre of your screen, which is, however, fairly hard to notice and read, especially in a hectic situation like PvP or a boss encounter. This often leads to confusion, mistakes, and generally less enjoyable gaming experience. Therefore, i suggest that the reason the ability is not being triggered correctly should also be communicated by the player character via voiceover (e.g. "I cannot see my target"), much like it is done in WoW. Not only would this make the game's combat a significantly less gruelling experience for the players, but it would also help them identify and "bond" with their characters, which I think is rather important in an MMO that strives for storytelling immersion. The latter would be even more so the case if the notifications were flavoured according to the particular class - for instance "That's a negatory!" or "Need to reload!" for a Trooper, as opposed to "Impossible!" (in an incredulous tone) or "My rage burns too cold!" for a Warrior. In addition, although my expertise in game design and programming is limited, I reckon this feature should not be very problematic to implement. The "tell the player what is wrong" mechanism is already in place, so the only thing that would have to be manipulated with is the actual output of the script (from text to text and voice). Moreover. the voice actors (and their dubbers in localized versions) would only have to record a relatively small number of short sentences, so it should not weigh too heavily on the game's budget either. Ultimately, it should even be possible to cut down on the amount of voiceover needed by condensing multiple types of error messages into a single, more general one (e.g. "I can't do that right now") - which would still be much better than only the red screen notification, imo. TL;DR: Making the characters announce why an ability is not firing off via voiceover would be a great quality-of-life improvement to the game, which should not be too difficult to implement. Any feedback is welcome, especially from the devs Edited April 6, 2012 by Eterninox
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