Because I still inexplicably like wading through tons of other game's soundfiles to rename and use them out of context, we now have yet another merc: Angela "Mercy" Ziegler from Overwatch. Somewhat following the lore, she is a brilliant medical researcher and field medic. After spending several years in UN relief efforts, she has now joined AIM, bringing along her superior medical and limited combat abilities.
Considering she is about the only Overwatch character who often has no need to personnally fight an entire game, she thus gets the lowest marksmanship of all AIM mercs by far (even at MERC there aren't many worse contenders). So you have to decide whether you want to make the effort to train her, simply use her for indescriminate suppressive fire or just leave her patching up the wounded in previously taken territory. Her gear kits somewhat reflect that - the "Hospital" kit has no gun, but about every medical equipment you'll ever need.
She has a rather positive outlook and is a pacifist. Due to sound file selection, she has no buddies or hatreds yet - that might change in the future, but I'm not that hopeful.
As seen in the video, she heavily uses additional dialogue. Of special interest will be that she comments every time she bandages someone - there was a wide variety of files to choose from, thus using her as a field medic will yield many unique sounds (it also makes sense as her Doctor trait and individual background gives her an impressive bandaging speed).
Note that since all of the fuckton of characters in Overwatch mostly have about the same amount of dialogue, this serves as a proof that we can create new mercenaries from Overwatch characters in principle. As that game has 29 full voiced characters and is likely to get more, that is quite the reservoir to fishing in. You don't even need to own the game, as helpful people have already uploaded the dialogue for each character in youtube videos. It is notable that most of these characters have a nationality and a personal 'stick', which can be good or bad for our endeavour. My notes on whether that is feasible and sensible in individual cases:
Ana: Markswoman, leader, doctor. Also a grizzled old egyptian lady with regrets. Would work very well. How often do you see a playable old arab lady in games?
Ashe: Has the same voice actress as Shepard, so not exactly needed. Has a notable 'wild west' tonal thingy, which wouldn't mesh well with stock Shepard. But from what she says it isn't different enough to justify an alternative persona like for Larry and Buns - stock Shepard shoots you in the face, Ashe shoots you in the face and says 'Howdy'. Maybe extract just her 'Bob' lines?
Bastion: ...
Brigitte: Swedish knight girl who is all about heroics and helping and all that. Hmm.
D.Va.: Meh. If we decide we need underage korean meme-droppers in a battlefield, visit her, I guess.
Doomfist: Now we're talking! A black african martial artist who is rather arrogant and villaneous? Sounds very promising.
Genji: Japanese ninja, I guess. Quite a few japanese lines we can use as placeholders for missing dialogue, unless someone with an understanding of the language objects :-)
Hanzo: Genji's brother. Would be neat to have both, since they tried to off each other, though all that talk about dragons and honour is tiresome.
Junkrat: Eh. Maybe as a nutty explosive expert, but we aren't exactly short on those.
Lucio: A battlefield... DJ? I feel too old for this.
McCree: Cowboy. Would work, but... bland.
Mei: Chinese cryosciene lady (yeah, not sure how to translate that into traits, give her cryo ammo in her gearkits?). All her bubbly positivity is off-putting.
Mercy: works, as you are witnessing. Many doctor-related lines, which work stupid well.
Moira: Extremely arrogant scientist/commando lady. More dialogue from an ingame event. Like Shepard, if Shepard was more arrogant, ruthless, irish and looked like David Bowie. As this game is called Jagged Alliance, we could use someone who tells others the deaths of their friends were useful from a scientific standpoint. Would work very well, methinks.
Orisa: Added when Blizzard realized they could just add whatever shit they made up and the fanbase would love it. Voice is way to robotic to be useful.
Pharah: Daughter of the above-mentioned old arab lady. Useful in principle, though a lot of her talk about air superiority and JUSTICE!!! might not be that useful.
Reaper: Baby'y first edgelord would be useful if it weren't for that stupid voice. Hmm. Maybe we could say in his bio his throat was burned in combat? His callsign is already in use...
Reinhardt: This is what one ends up with if all german you ever hear is from parodies, or something. All that dialogue about HONOUR and GLORY and SMASHING THE ENEMY wouldn't fit that well.
Roadhog: The voice is barely understandable. Nope.
Soldier: 76: A grizzled aging veteran full of regrets and bitterness, who tells people to get off his lawn? Would work rather well.
Sombra: All her hacking and stealth dialogue might or might not work. I'm rather neutral on this, but a spanish-speaking lady is something we lack.
Symmetra: Indian scientist lady. Rather cold, though all her talk about tech and turrets and teleporters is not useable.
Torbjörn: Meh. All those lines about turrets and robots and armour doesn't sound good for us.
Tracer: If we can sell MERC using british ADHD child soldiers on cocaine, maybe.
Widowmaker: A french sexy sniper lady with has a spider theme. Emotionally stunted and maybe a bit dead. Would work. (Why are french women always seductresses? Flo almost counts as a unique trope subversion at this point.)
Winston: Too many science/ape related lines, perhaps?
Wrecking Ball: Is it a robot? No, it's a hamster piloting a ball with machineguns. The notion that Blizzard is throwing shit at the wall is fake news. Noooope.
Zarya: Patriotic russian lady who is all about strength and russia and bears and mother russia. Would work.
Zenyatta: Robo-monk who throws his balls at people. Too robotic to use methinks.
As you can also learn from the video, I've finally used the Max Payne 1 sound files calu kindly gave me. The tonal difference to MP3 is striking - Max in MP1 is a brooding man on a downward spiral, Max in MP3 is a violent thug swallowing in self-pity spouting one-liners. Those one-liners sadly often fit the game better than 1's long musings, additionally many lines in 1 come from scenes with background noise. That meant I didn't get to replace many lines, though I got to add many, many lines of additional dialogue. Also, Max has buddies and relations now:
He knows Turtle back from his cop days in the NYPD.
Igor made quite an impression on him. Considering the nature of Max' russian acquaintances, one has to wonder whether Chechnya was the only foreign action Igor saw...
Throughout the game, Max essentially paints every woman he meets as saints, prostitutes or killers (sometimes several choices at the same time). It's easy to see him putting those he's attracted to on a pedestal, like Mercy, Fox and Mouse, which... can get a tad creepy, as seen in the video.
He hates Vinny. It would be bizarre if he didn't.
At some point, he was doublecrossed by Bruce "Skitz" Bonner. Look, I'm grasping at straws here, and if I can make a connection merely by initials, I'll do it :-)
Just like Shepard, he's doesn't think someone who had a psychotic breakdown from the stress of delivering mail can be relied on in a battle situation, so Postie is on his bad list.
Just as he sees some women as saints, others are seen as evil killers for whatever reason, which Sara will find out.
He's the first merc to specifically hate chaotic Buns.
Also, of minor interest, this posts kinda serves as a "I'm still alive and all that, no need to send an extraction team to Bavaria" post. Though I don't have and won't have much time for coding in the future...
[Updated on: Mon, 21 January 2019 23:45]
I know now that it could never work between us, as much as we wanted to, it could never be! Not because you're a rabbit, but because you're black.
If you want, you can donate to me. This will not affect how and what I code, and I will not code specific features in return. I will be thankful though.
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