Onomatopoeia: the use of a word to replace a sound.
Now the creators of CoX are catering to ever comic book geek out there. Instead of sounds for powers you now will have colorful words!!!!!!!!!! (for the non-geek they are the "POW" and "Ka-Boom" type words)
They researched and found that the people that have been building computers actually forget about speakers and headsets. They want to make sure that everyone gets a full gaming experience. You no longer have to listen to the game.
They made sure to make room on your hard drive by removing all sounds from in game. For those of you that wish not to have the Visual Sounds you will have the option to disable the effect.
A note from Positron himself on the new Visual Sounds
QUOTE
“I have always been an advocate of using the theater of the mind,” said Matt “Positron” Miller, Lead Designer on the titles. “When you read a book, you give the characters their own voices, and when you watch a movie based on that book you can’t help but be disappointed when what your mind came up with was better. That’s the way this system works. Whatever sounds we put into the game can’t compare to what you can imagine with your own mind, so why even try?”
It's DEFINITELY an April Fools. If you read the whole article, it says at the bottom that in order to save users room on their hard drives, they'd be removing the ingame sounds to make room for the visual sounds. :)
There's a part of me that wonders if this joke was inspired by Champions Online and its "comic book shaded" animation. Perhaps on some level this is the CoX developers way of asking, "Do you really want a video game to totally look like a comic book? We didn't think so."
