Is there a way to disable guiding voices?

[Spec oups]

During my playthrough, I found these voices to be extremely annoying and often borderline experience ruining because they're always telling you what to do and babysitting you, basically breaking the fourth wall way too often for my taste.

On the Internet, some people asked this but always were adressed in a very insulting manner by idiots with a superiority syndrome saying things such as "You don't deserve to play this game if you think you have to disable voices, cuz they are part of the story and experience", while it is clear that they do not contribute at all to the experience and are just here to provide hints on what to do.

Only the voices of the protagonists of the story provide plot advancement, lore and ambiance. The rest is sh!t, ruins immersion, and I want to remove it from my game.

I hope someone can help me there, thank you by advance :D

[Lieste]

:)

[Djinghis]

Originally posted by 2CockY/mE NOR:

Can you just answer the guys question and stop lecturing?

Originally posted by Spec oups:

Is there a way to disable guiding voices?

No!

But the the OP already knew that and seems to just want to winge about it.

Basically I turn the volume down to a more reasonable level and the voices are less irritating, I'm sure the OP can work out how to do that.

Originally posted by 2CockY/mE NOR:

Only the voices of the protagonists of the story provide plot advancement, lore and ambiance. The rest is sh!t, ruins immersion, and I want to remove it from my game.

The annoying voices are not part of the gameplay, they're audiable effects to add to immersion much the same as visual effects do. Often visual effects are annoying like motion blur or strobe lighting, and often there is no way to toggle on/off the annoying ones and keep the good ones, it's all subjective anyway. This game is a once only play-through, not an RTS where you spend hundreds of hours. My take on this game is you experience the good and the bad from start to finish and that's it.

[Lieste]

It isn't a once only playthrough. Or at least not necessarily. I have a dozen completed runs, and while it is simplistic and repeats exactly each time, there is still much to get from the play.

Atmosphere and ambiance is a strong point of the title, and the swordplay, while simple is entertaining.

[Spec oups]

Originally posted by Djinghis:

Originally posted by 2CockY/mE NOR:

Can you just answer the guys question and stop lecturing?

Originally posted by Spec oups:

Is there a way to disable guiding voices?

No!

But the the OP already knew that and seems to just want to winge about it.

Basically I turn the volume down to a more reasonable level and the voices are less irritating, I'm sure the OP can work out how to do that.

Who the ♥♥♥♥ are you to tell me what I think and what are my real motivations? Do you think you're smart because you can make up any explanations on the go just to make me look like a fool? What do you want from me?

Originally posted by Djinghis:

Originally posted by 2CockY/mE NOR:

Only the voices of the protagonists of the story provide plot advancement, lore and ambiance. The rest is sh!t, ruins immersion, and I want to remove it from my game.

The annoying voices are not part of the gameplay, they're audiable effects to add to immersion much the same as visual effects do. Often visual effects are annoying like motion blur or strobe lighting, and often there is no way to toggle on/off the annoying ones and keep the good ones, it's all subjective anyway. This game is a once only play-through, not an RTS where you spend hundreds of hours.

Already explained to other people why I think these voices break immersion more than they create it. Not gonna repeat myself again.

Originally posted by Djinghis:

My take on this game is you experience the good and the bad from start to finish and that's it.

Now this is discussing. This is an interesting point of view, but trying to ignore things won't really make them go away or get fixed... See what I did here.

[Spec oups]

Originally posted by locky3:

voices? they must be in your head, i hear no voices in game :P

Thanks for the smile, helps to lighten up the atmosphere a bit. Some people here can really make you have a bad time ^^

[Spec oups]

Originally posted by Killer Kitten:

You know, that's about like saying, "I really love Total War, but I would really like to get rid of the Army management part. Can I just get rid of the army management part?" And the answer is no, because that's part of the game. Whether its part of the game because asthedic or because it's part of the game play.

Your comment doesn't make any sense. What enables you to draw that comparison? Why wouldn't I be allowed to take away a detail of the game that I dislike? Who the ♥♥♥♥ do you think you are to tell me what I am allowed and not allowed to do or ask?

[Spec oups]

Originally posted by scorchbite:

This "game" is an attempt to re-create the struggles of mentally ill people. If you want to disable "voices" as though they are some sort of optional gimmick feature, then you are really missing the point of core experience you are supposed to receive.

https://medium.com/@ninjatam/psychosis-and-hellblade-my-journey-grappling-with-reality-f223cd126bd4

Don't treat this as a regular mainstream entertainment game. It is not. Rather perceive it has an educational exercise to help you, just that little bit, better understand psychosis patients.

You didn't make the effort of understanding why I think these voices are more gameplay gimmicks than anything else while I kept writing why I believe these voices fail miserably at being an immersion into psychosis. THEY ARE GAMEPLAY ELEMENTS BECAUSE THEY DON'T MAKE SENSE ON THEIR OWN 90% OF THE TIME.

Why would I make the effort of understanding you if you don't want to understand me before talking to me? Do you feel this special that you think you don't need to reply properly to engage in a discussion?

[Spec oups]

Originally posted by xTheVisionary:

The voices of The Furies are meant to pester, as you know. But, the advice they give you is a substitution for the lack of a HUD; The Furies are your actual HUD, in some sense. It’s a balance between immersion and functionality, and you seem to prefer a more functional style, while most people (from what I’ve seen) seem to like the immersion aspect.

Oh, in fact, I prefer trying to not have indicators at all when possible and while it doesn't make the game unplayable. I don't really like being handholded by videogames. If you read what I wrote earlier, you'll see that I already understood that these voices are mainly here for gameplay purposes. But I want to get rid of them not because I prefer visual indicators, but because I don't want the game to tell me what to do exactly, because I find it already simple enough to understand without having these voices to guide me.

The excuse that is often brought to defend the existence of these voices is that they're part of Senua's psychosis, but this doesn't really hold as these voices do not deliver actual meaningful lines 90% of the time they can be hard.

Originally posted by xTheVisionary:

As far as I know, there is no way to turn off the voices. But who knows, down the road. Maybe some coder down the line will mess with it. It’s running on Unreal, so I suppose it’s accessible to coders, based on how popular the engine is.

I tried exploring the game's files to see if these voices were available as audio files I could alter, but it seems they're encapsulated in the game. My skills in coding are very limited and basically non-existent when we're talking about game dev, as I am only a mere front-end web designer.

Since the vast majority of the players who enjoyed Hellblade also liked the guiding voices, I think I will have to accept their existence and I will never manage to remove them unless I learn game development specifically for this purpose, lol...

I want to thank people who answered normally even if they derived the purpose of the thread, I want to thank people who tried to actually answer the question and thank those who tried to defend me against the smartasses over here who have nothing else to do than mocking people who have a different opinion than theirs.

[Spec oups]

Originally posted by Lieste:

It isn't a once only playthrough. Or at least not necessarily. I have a dozen completed runs, and while it is simplistic and repeats exactly each time, there is still much to get from the play.

Atmosphere and ambiance is a strong point of the title, and the swordplay, while simple is entertaining.

For me, it definitely isn't a once playthrough as well. The game is full of details and attention, and as such needs several playthroughs to be fully understood. Talking about raw gameplay mechanics for example, it is unlikely that you will find all Lore Stones on your first playthrough for example.

[Felmo]

Simply put, there is no way of disabling those voices and they are not there just to provide hints. They contribute directly to the experience. In other words, the game itself is built on the idea of experiencing the mental state of a person with psychosis, like it or not.

I'm quoting this from the creative director of the game, Tameem Antoniades:

"We wanted to represent symptoms such as voice-hearing and hallucinations, but also to go below the surface and explore what we know about normal perception. We all tend to think that we have a clear representation of reality, but most of the time our minds are actually making it up, deciding what should be there rather than what is there. It’s a kind of controlled hallucination. This idea, too, is deeply embedded in the game: the player becomes sensitive to the visual clues and illusions around them as they progress through the world.
Psychosis used to be thought of as this extreme phenomenon that was completely separate from the normal experience of the world. But we are coming to realise that there’s a continuum, and all of us are prone to becoming separate from reality. Hopefully this game will help to demonstrate that."

[Spec oups]

Originally posted by Felmo:

Simply put, there is no way of disabling those voices and they are not there just to provide hints. They contribute directly to the experience. In other words, the game itself is built on the idea of experiencing the mental state of a person with psychosis, like it or not.

I'm quoting this from the creative director of the game, Tameem Antoniades:

"We wanted to represent symptoms such as voice-hearing and hallucinations, but also to go below the surface and explore what we know about normal perception. We all tend to think that we have a clear representation of reality, but most of the time our minds are actually making it up, deciding what should be there rather than what is there. It’s a kind of controlled hallucination. This idea, too, is deeply embedded in the game: the player becomes sensitive to the visual clues and illusions around them as they progress through the world.
Psychosis used to be thought of as this extreme phenomenon that was completely separate from the normal experience of the world. But we are coming to realise that there’s a continuum, and all of us are prone to becoming separate from reality. Hopefully this game will help to demonstrate that."

Again another person who didn't read why I consider these voices as a failure in terms of storytelling. Not gonna repeat myself. I will now Copy/paste the following text to everyone answering in your fashion.

--------------------------
Generic response ↓

The voices in Senua do not make sense. By making sense, I mean that they always are linked to a reality, lest to something you can mentally relate to, or even less, a concept that plays a role in your illness for example. In Hellblade, most of the voices can't be related to anything. They're just gratuitous mockery or taunting and only can not reasonably be assimilated to Senua's past, present of future experiences. By future I mean what she consciously or unconsciously expects from her future. The only thing the voices can be assimilated to most of the time is just a gameplay feature called "hinting", and by most of the time I said most of the time, meaning some of the time these voices can be made sense of, but not most of the time.

Sometimes their tauntings make sense, sometimes they attack the character in very intelligent ways (attacking her about her relationship with Dillion or saying remarks about the voice she hears in the maze of her consciousness during Odin's trials for example). But most of the time...

It's a trap
It's a trick
Go back
She won't make it
Hahaha
→ x99

And honestly it gets more and more unbearable, in a bad way. Unbearable because it's always the same thing repeated over and over while I can't buy what they say and Senua doesn't seem to be open to what they say either. It's like someone repeating you over and over something you will 100% never be convinced of. It's not real mental plays and thought torture, it's just plain and simple physical ear torture and this has absolutely no links to psychosis unless you developped a fear of voices/human interaction or something along these lines.

Other voices such as Druth, Zynbed, Hela, etc... Are excellent and they're basically voices, because they do not exist since the whole game is a mental projection. But these generic voices thrown here and there are just there under the excuse of psychosis ARE gameplay features. Most of the time, they do not make any sense and provide a betterment of the experience or have a useful role in the game.

I love persons explaining to me that these voices have a place in the game because they read one articles or two about psychosis on Kotaku, and the devs comments just roughly stating "persons with psychosis hear voices", and now consider that these particular guiding voices in Senua are an accurate representation.

No, people with psychosis do not necessarily have three or four girls constantly mocking them in their heads for ► no apparent reason ◄. What people with psychosis endure can always be explained and the voices they hear can always be made sense of or linked to what they endure. But the voices Senua hear?

"The door is now opened!" What the ♥♥♥♥ does this have to do with her psychology? The doors we unlock, most of the time, aren't important. I get that the doors to Helheim, to Hela, and stuff like that may be important and justify having voices talking about them. But random doors located in rooms devoid of meaning, just here because of gameplay reasons? Most of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time, voices do not talk about stuff linked to Senua or her experiences, but stuff linked to gameplay elements. Thus, they are more gameplay hints than they are elements to help immersion and understanding. And thus, I don't like them because I don't like to be babysitted by games. So I want them gone.

Is it finally understood, or do I have to copy/paste it again?

[Felmo]

Dude I don't know and I don't care if the game represents the symptoms perfectly in a very authentic way or not; but those voices are there with such intentions (created with binaural recording) and currently you can't disable them in the game. Cheers.

[Spec oups]

Originally posted by Felmo:

Dude I don't know and I don't care if the game represents the symptoms perfectly in a very authentic way or not; but those voices are there with such intentions (created with binaural recording) and currently you can't disable them in the game. Cheers.

If you don't care to read what's going on here and just come to throw a random comment, just don't. Will save time for everyone. Cheers.

[Felmo]

lol

[zplosion]

Originally posted by Spec oups:

Originally posted by jack_of_tears:

It sounds like your understanding of mental illness is based on what you've seen on tv.

By making sense, I mean that they always are linked to a reality, lest to something you can mentally relate to, or even less, a concept that plays a role in your illness for example. In Hellblade, most of the voices can't be related to anything. They're just gratuitous mockery or taunting and only can not reasonably be assimilated to Senua's past, present of future. By future I mean what she consciously or unconsciously expects from her future.

The only thing they can be assimilated to most of the time is just a gameplay feature called "hinting", and by most of the time I said most of the time, meaning some of the time these voices can be made sense of, but not most of the time.

You're getting mixed up with voices from dissociation which always make sense in some way when viewed from the right angle. Psychotic voices can and will talk ♥♥♥♥ that is plainly wrong or meant to be disruptive without any helpful intent, unlike dissociative voices.