I think Betty added the single biggest boost of immersion to the X games ever. Sure, there were plot missions and NPCs here and there, but it was Betty who was there for the entire journey. Always telling me what I'm looking at, if there's a missile approaching or if something is wrong with my ship. And of course all the sleepless nights waiting for HUB deliveries, just flipping through the Encyclopedia, listening to the history of Argon Meatstake Cahoonas and Specter Missiles in Betty's dulcet tones just made the entire game world come alive that much more. For being an incredibly repetitive and droll "hey, listen" character, I could
never get annoyed or bored of Betty for some reason, even when she said "Argon Wheatfarm M ALPHA!" for the billionth time.
I think EGOSOFT
severely underestimates the power of immersion, and sound design in general, as evidenced by the huge step backwards in X4 on this front. The music is generic and boring, the voice acting is just as terrible as ever, if not more, and now Betty is all but gone? When I brought this up a while back, CBJ from EGO actually replied and had this to say:
CBJ wrote: ↑Wed, 12. Dec 18, 17:38
No, we're not planning to voice the descriptions in the encyclopedia. That requires an
awful lot of studio time, in most cases for very little practical benefit, and also removes any flexibility for as to amend and improve those descriptions once they are recorded. We will, however, get Betty talking some more. Indeed I've just been working on that feature Bernd promised, whereby she says the name of the object type when you target an object (optionally, of course!).
So that's it. She gonna say ship names and nothing more. I actually got friggin upset at this answer. Wasn't it for "very little practical benefit" back in X3? Yet they still did it, and Betty became I think one of the most memorable features of X ever since. Hell, if I was in their place, I would use Betty literally
everywhere! Trailers, cutscenes, make her the unofficial spokesperson,
the voice of the X series. As mentioned before, Betty is pretty much the CORVAS system from Elite Dangerous, but she also so much more. And people, especially simulator players, always want to feel more immersed and expand the game, like with VoiceAttack. For Elite Dangerous, there are external programs like EDDI, that add TTS (text-to-speech) voices to the game with modifyable AI logic, that reacts to things that happen in-game and can even handle controls for you with voice commands. If you want to, you can have entire conversations with your ship computer that feels almost natural even. Granted, it takes time and effort to write these AI scripts for yourself, but you can also get scripts others made.
The only issue is, this is all modded/community made stuff and the stability and implementation is shaky at best. I really think VoiceAttack and TTS integration is a huge missed opportunity for EGO. They could've done something revolutionary, that no other sim game ever did before. You could not only just listen to Betty, but for the first time ever, even talk to her! I mean, how awesome would
that be?
On that note, I think there are tons of missed opportunities for EGO. They just keep focusing on the wrong things, trying to reinvent the wheel, while they miss crucial elements that made X...uh...X, like Betty.
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