Please Speak Basic

[Tolnorus]

The flavor of meeting aliens that speak strange languages is neat. But it is beginning to seriously annoy me. If I'm doing a mission with another player, sometimes I can't finish reading whatever the NPC has said before the timer expires for me to select a response. Not only do I not get to choose an option, but I think it selects a response at random, which can have an affect on my Light/Dark scale and my companion affection. Also, I don't have any clue what the conversation was even about. The situations that annoy me the most is when the NPC has about 3 sentences of dialog, and speaks 7 words; that's so fast, i doubt even faster readers can finish it before it moves to the next stage.

 

Correcting this would be simple.

 

A) Let me pause the response condition so I can finish reading. Yes, I know there is another player waiting on me.

B) Let me choose to hear NPCs speak Basic (English) all the time, no matter what language they are theoretically speaking. Yes, I know this means someone would need to record the dialog in a studio.

 

I have noticed that I've heard the same alien sentences again and again from different characters on different planets, and they invariably have totally different meanings. I can't help feeling like this was a labor shortcut skillfully disguised as game mood dressing.

 

Honestly, it's to the point now that if someone is speaking non-Basic, I just hit the spacebar and stare at the part of the screen where the responses appear so I have maximum time to read them before they vanish, hoping to glean the mood of the conversation from responses alone. Sometimes, depending on the situation, say if we need to hop on speeders and ride for a minute or so to a destination, I can review the dialog in my chat window, but that's after the fact and still doesn't let me choose responses intelligently. I can't imagine how much more terrible this may be for people who are dyslexic.

[Aedey]

Yeah, I'm with you there.

 

What is the point of paying some voice actor $50 an hour to go "Gawrule'ma"???

[Katahn]

It is a shortcut. If you listen very carefully you can hear that they are basically repeating the same alien "words" in different orders depending on whether they are speaking Huttese or some other language. It gets really obvious if you have a non-Basic speaker as a companion. My guess is that in order to save on some space and memory usage that most of the NPCs you see speaking some other non-Basic language had that voice work put in as a placeholder.

 

I can't fault BW for doing that, voicing everyone was not something I expected to work although it definitely sounds cool. I tend to wish they saved the voice acting for our companions, for flashpoints/operations/heroics, and for class quests and left everything else alone. Sure it would be a little disjointed to listen to someone talk for one mission and then have to read a traditional "quest text window" for another mission, but it would make it easier on BW to introduce new class missions and account for things like faction betrayals or playing something strange like a Republic Pureblood or such.