XCOM 2
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XCOM Legacy Voices Redux
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9.999 MB
26 May, 2022 @ 9:28am
4 May @ 10:06am
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XCOM Legacy Voices Redux

Description
TL;DR
This mod adds my own versions of the voices for Shaojie Zhang, Annette Durand, Peter Van Doorn, and Big Sky.

Overview
Adds special character voices from EW and Long War. This mod does NOT contain any of the unnamed soldier voices from Long War.

Zhang has about 450 lines
Annette has about 470 lines
Van Doorn has about 90 lines
Big Sky has about 70 lines

  • Built the voices from the ground up using Robojumper's voice script.
  • Volume for each character individually adjustable via a config file.
  • Not affection by attitudes.
  • Available for normal soldiers and Reapers by defualt. Other faction classes can be enabled in the config.
  • Never appears randomly. Can be changed by setting their language to 'english' in the .ini
  • Works with both vanilla XCOM 2 and WotC
  • Voice Patcher support, get it >here<
  • Special variants listed below. They are optional and listed alongside the normal versions.

Zhang:
'English Zhang Redux KAM'
Every time he gets a singular kill, he always says his signature line "Not so different from killing a man". This can still play in the normal variant, just at a the same frequency as every other line.

Annette:
'English Annette Redux DYK'
Does two things: First, singular kills make her say "You... you can kill them?" and second, when she panics or a teammate dies, she says her signature line "DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY OF US THEY'VE KILLED?!?!".

Van Doorn:
'English Van Doorn Redux Random'
A random line is played no matter what action is taken.

Detailed Explanation
I mainly made this mod because I really like Zhang and his voice, but decided to go the extra mile and support Annette and Van Doorn as well. As a result, Zhang has been pretty much exclusively used in the examples since I have the most experience with his voice.

If you're like me, and like using pre-written soldiers from established lore (What few of those XCOM has), then you've probably been using >this< mod every time you've played XCOM, primarily for the hero voices. Being made and last updated over 5 years ago though, this mod suffers from some problems. Putting this on a list for easy reading:
  1. The mod does not use Robojumper's voice script, so some voice events in the banks are listed but never actually used. This is more of a problem for mod devs, but I think some lines used exclusively for voice cues like 'AreaSuppressing' and 'GhostModeActive' went unused because of this. The sound preview can also be buggy in that it requires a second click to play the preview.
  2. Many voice lines do not fit their assigned voice events, for instance, Zhang could say "Firing Arc Thrower" when attempting to hack, or "I have an enemy in sight" when spotting a friendly VIP, or "Moving to designated coordinates" when extracting, the list goes on.
  3. For Zhang at least, some events don't even have cues assigned to them, like 'TargetArmorHit' for hitting targets with armor, or 'ADVENTsighted' which I'm pretty sure is the only event that's actually used for revealing an enemy pod while not concealed, or 'LootSpotted' and 'LootCaptured' for spotting/picking up loot.
  4. For Zhang and Van Doorn, the cues do not have the volume at 100%, they are instead at 75% (Which is the default for some reason), leading to the voices being much quieter than ones from the base-game and other mods.
  5. For Zhang (and Annette, I think), the 15 voice banks only have a single voice line attached to them. This means than any action that had more than 15 lines voiced for it originally, any lines beyond the 15 mark are unused. This affects the following voice events 'Dashing', 'Moving', 'TargetKilled', and others I'm probably not thinking of. Notably, the 'Moving' and 'TargetKilled' events have half of their lines unused because of this. Two of the most common events.

If you're especially like me, you've probably been aware of these problems, but still decided to laze around hoping that someone else eventually made a mod that fixed these issues first. After many years of waiting though, I finally broke first and did one no one else would do, manually extract all of the lines from EW and just completely remake the voice packs from scratch.

So what have I done? Well...
  • Rebuilt the voices from the ground up using Robojumper's voice script.
  • Corrected volume.
  • Nearly every single vanilla game sound event listed in Robojumper's voice script is covered (Which is all the used ones). The only ones that aren't covered are extremely situational ones like 'MeatFactorySighted' that only exists for game narrative on specific map parcels, or ones that I just couldn't find ANY fitting lines for, like burning from acid.
  • Some less specific voice lines have been moved to other actions to support as many in-game events as possible, as fittingly as possible. For instance, in EW, one of Zhangs lines for taking fire was "They have identified me!", as you can probably guess, this line would be perfect for breaking concealment, so that line has been moved to that event. As another example, Zhang had multiple lines for missing rocket shots, three of which are generic enough to put over a normal 'TargetMissed' cue, they would have been otherwise unused since there's no way for heavy weapons to miss their targets in this game.
  • For at least a few lines, I did some sentence splicing to change something like "Firing Shredder Rocket" to "Firing Shredder", I'm sure you can figure out where I put this. This is the general mindset I had when making these voices, going by ear with each of the voice lines and deciding where else they might fit. So basically, exactly how everyone else makes voice packs (Or should anyway).
  • Zhang and Annette also now use some voice lines from their respective story missions in XCOM: EW. I applied a radio-like filter to these lines, but there is still some disparity in the difference of how these lines sound versus the original ones. Because of this, I tried to make these lines play less often than the others. This did however, give me an opportunity to add some humorous alternate voice options in the customization menu, as mentioned earlier.
  • Added support for events added in Voice Patcher, so some base-game abilities that have no dialogue for them, even when using base-game voices, like Chain Shot and Faceoff will have dialogue now, assuming you have the mod installed. Some Long War and Akimbo class abilities are also supported. Although it's not a requirement, I highly recommend getting the Voice Patcher mod (Assuming you have WotC) >here<. All you have to do is install the mod.

Q&A
Will you create a variant than does X?
Maybe. No harm in asking.

Long War voices when?
Why do I torture myself.

Credits
Robojumper for their voice script.
Aquilio for their Voice Patcher mod.
Plumse and ObelixDk for making the original mods.

Shaojie Zhang voiced by Feodor Chin
Peter Van Doorn voiced by Dale Inghram
Don't know who voiced Annette or Big Sky
19 Comments
Ayser  [author] 9 May @ 4:07pm 
@Kinsect If you're referring to the special faction abilities, that it by design. Only some Reaper abilities are supported. It's why Skirmishers and Templars are disabled by default. They just didn't have any lines that fit those actions.
Kinsect 9 May @ 3:57pm 
ran into a bug
the voices aren't saying anything on the hero classes
Circle of Psi 4 May @ 11:08am 
Congrats!
Ayser  [author] 4 May @ 10:10am 
Finally did it. Cooked and added Big Sky. Voices can no longer appear on civis either, so you should never get Van Doorn randomly talking about analyzing samples when one dies.
Dragon32 3 May @ 10:14am 
@Ayser
Nice, thanks for persevering. And for the mod, of course.
Circle of Psi 3 May @ 2:02am 
Ey nice!

Lookin forward to it!
Ayser  [author] 2 May @ 5:04pm 
@Circle of Psi Yes, the mod will work in 2024.

For the cooking question, working on it as we speak. Trying a different method. If it works, I'll be updating it with more than just cooking.
Circle of Psi 2 May @ 6:35am 
Does this mod still work in 2024, also if I may ask, do you plan on making a cooked version, I know you said "I don't know" but that was a year ago, have you changed your mind?
Ayser  [author] 15 Nov, 2023 @ 1:05am 
@Kinsect Made my own version of Big Sky's voice with the expectation to include it in this mod once I eventually cooked it. I ended up never publicly releasing it because:

1. I was never able to successfully cook this mod. Including Big Sky's voice with this would put the mod up to 90 MB in size.
2. Big Sky was never a soldier voice in EW or Long War. Everyone else here was.
3. Big Sky has been done before >here< by CastledCard. I have some thoughts on the mod, but I felt it was simply too low-hanging fruit to provide my own version for. Even though I didn't take any assets directly from the other mods, mods like this incentivize reducing the subscriptions of another persons mod.

I don't know, I'm probably just making it a bigger deal than it actually is. If you really wanted it, I'd add it to the mod. I need to add proper previews for this anyway.
Kinsect 14 Nov, 2023 @ 8:49pm 
Say what's the Big sky voice pack?