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Recently, Game Developer Conference uploaded another talk by Ubisoft's Adam Ritchie about NPC Voice Design in The Division 2. You can find my previous post about “Game Server Performance on Tom Clancy’s The Division 2” here as well. Some of the takeaways are:
- There are behavioural barks (voice calls) and timer based barks in The Division
- “They got Alex!” was a bug. It was supposed to be a random name from the list but it always picked the first item on the list which was Alex
- At launch, 645 AI stimuli (like desired intent) which can result in around 65k different barks split across 288 characters (189 combat characters). Average of 228 barks per character, max of 630 barks per character, and min of 11 barks per character
- In The Division, barks were evenly weighted between the build up to combat, actual fighting and detection but NPCs mostly used fighting barks since that’s where players spent most of their time thus resulting in lower variety among barks. Based on this experience, they created a lot more barks for fighting in The Division 2
- Some stimuli have as many as sixteen barks per NPC to avoid repetition
- Bark sequences are given the length of starter voice line so when it comes to localisation it is easier to queue multiple replies independent of the language used
- Barks can be based on the type of cover used by player. E.g. NPCs can say he is flanking behind the car
- 7/10 bark tags are group agnostic meaning they can be used for solo gameplay as well as group play. 3/10 bark tags are used in group play only
- In The Division, barks were client side. In The Division 2, barks are server side for more immersion for players. Also, makes it possible to do server side fixes
- 4 microphones are used when recording dialogues. 2 of them are used for In-World barks, 1 of them is used for radio calls, and another for special characters and voice-overs
Some more stats:
- Most common stimulus from Open Beta is Reload which is played 745B times. Least common stimulus played for 1M times.
- 17 languages localised for text, 10 languages localised for voice at launch of The Division 2.
- 547k words translated per language to overall of 6M words. 73k lines per language, overall 662k lines
- 1217 actors, 57 localisation testers
- Since launch with WONY, 900 stimuli, 78k barks, 364 characters (217 can fight), 93k voice lines per language, 477k words
- 31.36% use English subtitles, 19.59% use localised and 49.05% don’t use any subtitles
Here is the link if you want to watch it yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXPWQFe8NYQ
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