Having played my character’s personal story right up to (but not including) the battle of Zhaitan, I’d like to give some constructive criticism about the story experience as a whole, specifically the sound-effects, voice-overs and music that accompany the visuals.
Missing voice-over’s have been mentioned at length before, so I’m not going to go into those issues – I’m sure the developers are onto it. I found the story incredibly enjoyable, but audio seemed very hit-and-miss at times. It’s almost like the audio and music hasn’t been choreographed properly to go with the visuals. A few examples (I’m keeping it somewhat vague, to avoid major spoilers):
“A Sad Duty” … such a deep part of the story, somewhat spoiled because some cut-scenes doesn’t activate it’s own music track. So, playing out in front of me, a very sad moment indeed … accompanied by a very jolly-sounding music track? Agh no!
“Blast from the past” … when the airship was shot down, there were no sound effects. Also, what was supposed to be a very dramatic moment, turned out somewhat mediocre because of the very “as-a-matter-of-fact” way the voice-overs sounded … almost like “… oh well, there goes the airship, ta ta … moving right along …”.
“The source of Orr” … oh my goodness, such an epic moment. When the instrumental version of “Fear not this night” started to play, I had gooseflesh! But then … boom – music stops abruptly – scene over. Ugh … so badly rounded off this was.
These are just a very few examples of problems that seems to be wide-spread across the entirety of the personal story.
These moments really ought to be aurally choreographed, pre-mixed and then hard-coded into the cut-scenes. When a cut-scene plays out, it should ideally have complete precedence over anything else, such as custom music playlists or lingering in-game music spilling over into the scenes. They are after all, like mini-movies within the game.
I sincerely hope that the wonderful folks at ArenaNet’s audio department will consider polishing these moments in our personal story a bit more. It really cries out for attention. I know that there are many things, perhaps more important things, that requires attention at this time, but hopefully this will make it to “the list” sometime in the not-to-distant future.