This is a difficult decision. Should RTS units repeat pleasing traditional notifications such as “ready”, “awaiting orders” when clicked, or ultimately beyond the general assertion of commanders and commanders? Should unit sounds evolve? Conquest vs. Warcraft?With his upcoming Homeworld 3, Blackbird Interactive is taking the latter stance, innovating unit sounds and RTS’ ‘scale of chatter design’ the series has never seen before said to be larger than
Those comments are from new people Homeworld 3 Developer Update This also teases the work Blackbird has done with pre-rendered cutscenes and in-engine environment rendering. Near the bottom of this post there are some strong Nebula pieces worthy of admiration, but it was the big section in the middle titled “Nobody Can Hear You Scream” that caught my attention. is. Collapse of the RTS unit Burke theory.
“Of the four audio design pillars we had for Homeworld 3, the one that pushed the ship pilots the most was ‘humanize the fleet,'” said audio director Dabren Ren. is writing “Real Time Strategy If he’s played a lot of games, he’s familiar with the ‘cries’ he makes when giving orders to his units. “Zag, Zag” and so on.
“But a lot has changed since the golden age of real-time strategy. We could have stuck with tradition, but we’ve innovated and created a voice system that brings the fleet to life and allows you to immerse yourself in the moment. I decided to do it: instant interactivity and battle.”
According to Renn, Homeworld 3’s unit sounds should provide players with two things: “information and flavor.” To do so, Blackbird borrowed a format from sports broadcasts, equipping each ship with commentators and color commentators. “Direct response to player commands, notification of important events such as contact with enemy ships, and several selected flavors focused on his events” and “contextual dialogue” with the commander Focused on “tactical officers, Flavor.
are you talking to meoh no you
What I find most interesting is that Blackbird decided to do away with the idea of units talking. you, players clicking on them, was the case in Homeworld 2 and every other RTS I can think of. (I haven’t played every RTS that has ever existed, so perhaps there are true Chatter pioneers who were doing this in the 90s, but I don’t remember them. yeah.)
“In both creating and designing speech events, a key guiding principle is that the ship does not respond to the player,” writes Renn. “They are reacting to each other.”
So, instead of saying something like, “Okay, we’re starting the docking procedure,” the ship that ordered to dock with the carrier should tell the carrier’s docking controller, “This is the flight lead you’re about to unload, echo back I will.” The airline’s docking controller will respond. See an example dialog in the video below.
If you’re far from the docking ship, you’ll only hear that first line of dialogue, not the entire dialogue, even if you’re the commander floating in space. “This way, acknowledgments to player commands are always audible, and additional flavor lines don’t clutter or confuse the soundfield,” Ren wrote.
Here’s another example:
Ships don’t only talk to each other when you’re interacting with them. The tactical offer includes “a choice of 5-15 contextual callouts and 5-15 contextual responses” for different situations, such as flying through a nebula. You can hear some of the dialogue while playing.
There’s something to be said for the classic Warcraft pion “out of the box”. After hearing it 20,000 times, I really fell in love with that silly cry. I don’t know if you’re ready to accept an RTS unit that doesn’t speak to me, but I respect Blackbird for defying the institutional RTS mindset.
You can read the full breakdown of the chat (and all things cinematic and graphic) below. Homeworld 3 Developer Update on steam. This strategy game was postponed earlier this year and now he is scheduled for release in February 2024. At the time, Blackbird said the reason for the delay was simply because they wanted to make the game better. “This work is especially time-consuming, as we’re raising the bar for what players experience in their Homeworld universe.”