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My biggest pain with voice acting is when you get that one soundbyte that keeps cropping up, driving you mad, so you have to sacrifice that soldier for the greater good. On the other hand, I do like the idea of crowd sourcing the voice acting, then selecting the best of what the community has to offer. I'm fairly sure that most of the community is from the Anglosphere but I bet there is a fair amount available from elsewhere. Also, more blood. Always more blood

Yup. Maybe getting a bit off topic here, but I think Oblivion's horrible VA wasn't so much because the actors were bad (though some were IMO), but rather because there were so few voices. When every Orc in the game has the same voice, it's immersion-breaking. And that leads to the conclusion that quality VA is costly. If I imagine VA in Xenonauts, the idea is fine, but if the game only had 1 male and 1 female soldier voice, it would just detract from the atmosphere. Goldhawk is obviously a small studio, and while I'm sure they could record a few lines, they just couldn't afford VA that's even halfway immersive. Overall I really think X1 had a great amount of character for such a low-budget game. The art had a distinct style, the Chief Scientist was a great snarky character - a major writing achievement since the game's text was almost entirely research reports - and the soundtrack was pretty great. The visual design of aliens is the only major flaw of X1 atmosphere-wise.

Agreed. And Oblivion was my favorite of the Elder Scrolls games. As Skyrim proved, however, better voice acting does not equal a better story or atmosphere (especially if all that variety in VA talent only leads to two lines per character). Cheezy VA I feel would take away massively from the game. VA in general, perhaps not. This feels, however, like something that would have be planned much in advance of where the game is now. A voice here and there may be more feasible, or perhaps just for the lead scientist's briefs? Also consider the fact that the voice acting does limit modders later on, if they decide to add elements that normally would have been voice acted. I'm not necessarily arguing against voice acting in general, but it's probably a bit late to implement it on a significant scale. Everyone has their preferences, and while I would certainly laugh at a zany line every now and then, too much of that would turn me off personally. That's one reason I personally do not play the Warhammer games. I like the darker theme of Xenonauts, and the humor was done well in a way that did not detract from that. That last part is purely my opinion, of course. I really like what Wyldfyre said as well regarding individualization/customization of the soldiers and vehicles and what not. The medals added were pretty cool, and it would nice if they gave some sort of bonus, but cosmetic differences (not to the fantastic scale of X-Com, of course; we do not want to lose Xenonauts' unique style) for veteran soldiers or vehicles would highly enhance the experience. Also I feel that would be a lot easier to implement than additional voice acting, and easier for modders to add to later on if that becomes plausible. The original post was spot on in highlighting how one of the areas Xenonauts 1 could have vastly improved was the ambiance (I agree with Coffee Potato about 3D modeled shell casings, but if it's not a hugeproject, maybe sprites or images could be used), especially with regards to the dropship sounds and dust and such things. Of course, these are minor things to be added if Chris is happy with the state of the gameplay.

For the time it would take to figure out the appropriate time to play special barks, I'd rather have a more developed enemy AI. While the world is 3d rendered, it doesn't currently need robust collision. Physics objects and ragdolls bouncing around would reveal just how little there is. And if you're going to give soldiers voices, don't give them all the same voice. Every gender and nationality needs a couple different voices, each with enough lines that it doesn't become repetitive- but at least you can cut down on localization costs by making all the short voice lines in the native language of the soldier in question. That would bring the cost down from $ridiculous to $infeasible.