Okay, so.
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I'm not too fond of the variation in the GameSpeak
Having the fixed "Hello" and "Follow me" never felt repetitive to me. It was simple and efficient, it was a tool. In stressful situation you did not have to wonder if whatever Abe said was what you wanted him to say or if you pressed a wrong button. I like to have total control on my characters, if I want him to say "Hello", Abe has to say "Hello" and not some random greeting.
Also the way the game is designed it's better to have lines of the exact same length otherwise you'll risk up ending in frustrating situations where the random line Abe spews is one of the long ones and you are loosing valuable time in a time critical puzzle.
An other point is that this simple GameSpeak is one of the elements that people remember the most about the games. How many times did I not have to describe Oddworld as the game where the aliens go "Hello, Hello, Follow Me, Ok" and have people replying "oooh now I remember that game". By adding variation in the GameSpeak you will loose the "unique" and "memorable" aspect of it.
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I think that modern incarnations of GameSpeak need to have variation. This goes for New ‘n’ Tasty and any future Oddworld games that use the mechanic.
The reason I think this is because that’s exactly how real human speech works. People aren’t robots that always use the exact same terms when interacting; we change our tone, our wording, our pace, everything. It’s dependent on the situation, our mood, etc.
Abe’s Oddysee used a single phrase for each command because of (I’m guessing) the limitations of the tech at the time. Multiple audio files would fill up extra space on the disc, and putting in code to randomize the audio would have been difficult to pull off in-engine with everything else going on.
This had the side-effect of creating a very recognizable, nostalgic game mechanic, you’re right about that. But I take issue with the idea that expanding on this now would alienate people looking out for nostalgia – I think keeping the original lines
and also having new, diverse dialogue would add depth and realism to the game without people throwing up their hands and saying “they changed the audio, this is terrible!”. The original game will always be memorable for its Gamespeak, but I think most people playing NnT would understand why there was new dialogue.
Your concerns about how the audio clips’ length could interfere with gameplay aspects is an interesting point, and one I hadn’t thought of. However, I think there are some easy ways to mitigate this. The first would be to limit the maximum length of these audio clips and then ensure that the puzzles can still be solved with that length in mind. The second would be to be aware of when certain puzzles rely on short Gamespeak times and specifically code these events to only use shorter Gamespeak clips. I think the first of these would work on its own, but the two together would be a great solution.