I promise that those of us with auditory processing disorders will still follow what's going on through the subtitles, and enjoy it far more than the canned speech.

@gsuberland 500ms? Try 3000ms in many games

@gsuberland I wish I could remember where I read an article on this phenomenon. Its apparently much harder to pull off given the way audio for games is managed than you'd imagine.

@jon it's to do with frequency masking and you can resolve it with a stereo multiband compressor, essentially mutually side chaining each sound against the other.

I find it kinda funny that studios will send their sound artists and engineers out with high end recording equipment to do sound studies and record foley, but nobody thinks to have them (and the writers) study the dynamics of human conversation so that they can make dialogue sound organic and relatable.

@gsuberland waiting for a game that has dialogue directed by robert altman

I would *love* to play a game with a rich environment full of NPCs, like GTA or Cyberpunk, and have nearby conversations overlap, with people chatting like a regular group, instead of these canned back-and-forth quips. I hate those things. They're almost always written like a knock-knock joke, where everyone has their cue to say their thing. Human communication is messy, and crowds where each delineated subgroup holds a sequential conversation at once are just *weird*.

I'd love to see someone try out recording crowd audio by just clipping mics to their own devteam and doing a regular hangout thing. First 30-60 mins will probably be a bit awkward but once people relax you'll get *way* more believable crowd chatter than any other game has ever produced.

@miunau I've never seen anything of his (afaik) so that reference unfortunately goes over my head.

@gsuberland nashville and long goodbye are well worth checking out. he's well known for inventing a type of mixed speech dialogue format where there's always some overlapping dialogue going on