Guild Wars 2

Normally, I find ANet’s small-scale writing— incidental NPC dialogues, character conversations with NPCs, etc.— to be really high-quality, one of the things I like most about the game; and everyone I’ve spoken with about the game agrees. That’s why I found it really odd that the character’s options for responding to the refugees from Lion’s Arch, a place many players have become very emotionally connected to, are really very cold and distant in many cases. Kae Mayumi says, “I spent six years building my store. It’s all gone;” and my only available reaction is, “Good-bye.”

Also, many people have noted that the Charm/Dignity/Ferocity personality types are highly underused. So why not use them to provide different ways of responding to the poor miserable NPCs in the various refugee camps? Complimenting their resilience with Charm, inspiring them with a bit of Dignified motivational speechifying, using Ferocity to appeal to their fighting spirit?

I understand that in a huge Living Story event like this, there’s a lot of dialogue to write and little things like this are not the highest priority, but it’s also the little things that make a Living Story feel real, complete, that really integrate it with the existing fabric of the game’s narrative. Having the ability to respond more sympathetically to the refugees, especially if that ties in with your character’s personality type, would be a relatively small effort with huge returns in adding cohesiveness and immersion.

Heck, enough players are emotionally involved in the fate of these characters (note the thread about Raisin-Face, and I’ve personally spoken to many people who are interested in the fate of Trader Jikk) that it might serve as an interesting base for the creation of a Collaborative Writing thing similar to the Collaborative Development project but on a much smaller and more concrete scale. If there’s any way for players to contribute along these lines in a way that doesn’t create problems with copyright and suchlike unpleasant realities, I’d put all my Charm and Ferocity (and what little Dignity I can muster) into pulling it off, because I’d hate to see one of the facets of this game that so many people love suffer due to an event that’s so ambitious in other ways.

They’ve talked about it before but adding in multiple dialogue options for different personalities, races, choices etc. actually takes up a decent amount of resources.

Ah, I thought dialogue would take up relatively little space and effort; then again, I majored in English and only took Computer Science 101, so…

That said, even slightly less-mean-sounding generic responses would add a lot, I think.

“I spent six years building my store. It’s all gone.”
- Don’t worry too much about your store, your life is more important and you are still alive.
- You can build it up again!
- I’m sorry for your loss…
- Good-bye.

And a few more, could be easily added to the possible answers. Yes i’d take a lot of time but honestly i don’t think it could take more than just 1 person making up and adding all kind of possible answers to the scripts. Something generic is ok, but usually even if it has 0 impact in the reaction of the NPCs, we feel better if we give an answer that we feel ours.

Just my point of view as a proffesional novel writer. (Ironically, my english sucks).

Not to mention all the supported languages it would have to be translated into.
3 responses x supported languages = a lot of extra work.

However, things like this are what separate an awesome experience from one that you don’t even notice. It’s the difference between a AA game and a AAA game. At this time I consider GW2 a AA game. They have enough money, just not enough people working on the various parts yet to get that extra A.

I think the thing is that when it says “Goodbye” they’re literally using the same dialogue string as every other dialogue option that says Goodbye – which means only one piece of code.

If they were to add in lengthier responses those responses would have to be making some kind of direct mention to that NPC’s dialogue, which means every single end dialogue option has to be different. So that is a LOT more text in game and a lot more code.

I agree that it would be great to have this, but I can see why they aren’t going to do it. It would also be great if the response text line wasn’t so tiny, it’s actually really easy to just not pay attention to it even when our character does have a longer response.

I wish they’d remove the dialogue input entirely. It’s awfully immersion breaking unless you happen to be a diplomatic human.

I guess I just figure that if they’re gonna add extra lines of dialogue somewhere, here would definitely be a good place. The dialogues with the speed boost NPCs within Lion’s Arch really don’t have to be two responses long, for example— in fact, both gameplay- and fluff-wise, it really makes more sense for an NPC to yell at you “Here, take a speed boost, now go save people!” than for your character to have a little conversation about it and justify his/er reasoning while Aetherblades zap you or Toxic Courtiers layer torment on you the whole time. I can understand the need for a bit more conversation for the Vigil/Priory/Whispers boost vendors, because that involves deciding whether or not to spend silver, but the speed boosts are free (I think?) and they’re also, well, all about speed.

That’s just an example, but maybe what really needs to happen is better prioritization of responses depending on which characters one’s likely to pay the most attention to. Especially right after doing the event for the first time, people were going around talking to all the NPCs in the refugee camps trying to glean information about the story, with enough time to actually focus on the responses; whereas the speed boost conversation is just a means to an end under a time limit— something you click through quickly, not something you pay attention to. (Then again, maybe it was more efficient to code the speed boost conversation that way because other ones like it in other cities are also two-step-or-more conversations? I’m not sure.)