Ability to not hear Unit voices

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
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Hello everyone. With this post I want to mainly focus on the option for us the player to have the unit voices turned off.

When we go to Options there is only 1 master option that shuts everything down.

I as a player want to be able to turn off my unit voices which becomes really annoying after long hours of playing. And I would like to only hear the sound of Swords, Shooting, Canons, When units finish training And when upgrades finish sounds Like those that really matter for reaction purposes. The irrelevant ones like ambient, Voices & menu clicks. Could we have different options to turn these off instead of 1 master volume that shuts all down?

What do other players think about this? What other suggestion would you add?

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I agree, and I also think that the hearing the background music over and over is quite tiresome sometimes.

It’s actually amazes me that this game does not have those option.

I literally just went through my all my games while writing this post, and all of them have option that allows the players to change at least the volumes on the background music, the speech and FX (Ambient sounds). Age of Empires 3 is the only exception.

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AoE3 has separate sliders for each of background music and ambient sounds. The game has always had those options since 2005.

As for unit voices, personally I think disabling those would be harmful to gameplay, as you will not have clear indication of what command your units are executing. I would never disable them because it would cause me to make mistakes and play worse.

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Fully agree. I asked for this (and other audio sliders, like for the battle horn sound which is incredibly loud, repetitive, and annoying) when the game originally came out, if not before
 and since. Have been surprised by a lack of audio options in this and all AoE games for a loooong time, to be honest
 and to have the DE versions come out with nary any attention applied to it is disheartening.

I don’t want to derail the thread, but I’m still surprised the simplistic ‘thud’ sound for clicking any building made it into the game and has never been updated/fixed. (How was devolving it from AoE2’s varied approach even a thing in the first place, I wonder?)

I’ve never liked how AoE3 implemented unit voices and it’s one of several main reasons I never have the desire to play AoE3. I cringe at the thought of playing as a result.

Their sayings feel too much like Baldur’s Gate 2 to me, where you’re reminded by the units with every click on them that you are simply a player behind a mouse and they are merely little digital units waiting for you to click them and tell them which pixel to go to; acknowledging you as their overlord with every mouse button press
 talking to you, the player, non-stop. It ruins immersion for me, and is why I could never play BG2 more than 20 minutes. Somehow, AoE2 hides it better; it may be because I don’t know the languages spoken in AoE2
 but it’s other reasons, too.

I get tired of hearing AoE3’s, “Riiiight!”, “Commandemante?”, “Ready!”, “Right!”, “Yesssh”, etc. with each. and. every. click. i. make. :wink:

AoE3’s sound files also don’t feel as rich and warm as AoE2’s to me
 which makes them stand out like a sore thumb, imo. A lack of good equalization and normalization, or something, and a lot of focus on the “s” and “t” parts of the sound spectrum going on. Just my opinion, but I don’t feel they blend into the game as well as AoE2’s. They’re more like in an audio overlay that stands out a lot. (Again, nothing new here. I mentioned it and lots more years ago and various times since, to no avail.)

If I ever play AoE3 again, I hope to find warmer, better-integrated unit voices and a volume slider for them. Would like the option to turn their volume down to 10% if not completely off. And a multitude of other audio ‘fixes’ I’d like but won’t go into here :stuck_out_tongue: The audio definitely needs some TLC, in my opinion. For AoE2, too

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I respect your point of view. This is why I’m opening the thread to heard other people’s opinions. Just clarifying. You don’t get anything out of listening to your units saying yes/no Or attack/ Or right away. That gets too repetitive after many hours of playing and it becomes very annoying. [I could think that the only thing you get out of listening to Unit voices is that you know you have them selected] but after playing for so many years there are other ways of knowing if you have units selected or not. Your screen shows what you have selected currently.

The voices that would make you play worse or to know if you’re units are functioning For example say you have skirms and the shoot. The sound of the shoot is the one I want to listen to only.

Clicking the skirm to heard him say Yes or w.e his lines are Then proceeding to shoot. I just want the shooting sound.

If anything all I’m asking for is sliders to modify what I want to listen to and what not. It shouldn’t be that hard and most games are giving this already

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Sounds great to me, Khorix! I hope they’ve finally figured out how to add more volume sliders for AoE4, and not taken inspiration from Baldur’s Gate 2 and AoE3 for unit confirmations

I even proposed a frequency slider in the past
 like, ‘how frequently do you want to hear the battle horn?’ If that type of thing was ever implemented, they could do the same for unit confirmations. For example, if I only want to hear unit confirmation voices once every 75-100 clicks, just to have some infrequent audio flavor – or none at all – I should be able to do so, imo.

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But I do! Allow me to explain further what I mean.

All units have well-defined different voicelines based on the specific type of action you ask them to do, and this serves as an indication/confirmation that I have indeed commanded my units correctly as I wanted to. Without the voicelines, I could easily fail to notice that I misclicked and tasked my unit to move instead of build, for example (or move instead of attack, move instead of gather, and so on
). Thanks to the voicelines, I can instantly notice something went wrong, because I hear the unit saying the wrong thing.

I would go as far to say I actually see more value in units confirming my commands than in hearing shooting sounds. In fact, I have seen a number of instances in high-level games where the difference of a player not listening to their unit voice lines had a big impact on the game.

For example, here is a twitch clip of GUA losing his army due to a misclick and raging (warning: LOUD), which could’ve been potentially alleviated by carefully listening to the voice lines (there was initially no other indication something went wrong).

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I saw the clip. It is frustrating to lose your army due to miss clicking. But if you carefully pay attention by the moment he missclicks. There was a lag spike. He missed clicks due to lag.

Everything that happened in the clip itself doesn’t need voice confirmation. Well I personally would not need it.

In fact I would go further to even say the only thing I would need in that scenario is to hear the shots of my musks and then quickly proceed to move after hearing them shooting and counting seconds to reshoot. Maybe even splitting the musk that was being target by the explorer. Prior to sword hitting or after the sword hitting sound