Guild Wars 2

Forewarning: This game is extremely fun, I enjoy it and can’t get enough of it, and it’s still one of the best MMO’s ever made. So please remember that, any dev reading this, and know that I appreciate this game a lot, and I take pride in the fact that every gem I buy helps generate income for the fantastic creative team behind this game.

But the personal story is still so kitten it still needs to be criticized and talked about.

Just wanted to give my two cents.

I really loved the plot of this particular story step, it really stepped up the scale of the dragon conflict beyond just “random stuff that happens in mostly uninhabited areas”.

However, a few things still fell so impossibly flat that it was impossible to take seriously.

Voice Acting: Deputy Mira wins worst voice acting of the year award. Every single person on the island she patrols is dead or dying, and the city proper is almost sure to follow after. Does her voice falter? Does she express fear, doubt, shame, rage, or remorse? Does she express any emotion at all? No, she just talks to you like she’s reading off a shopping list. I maintain my stance that although the voice actors themselves are decent to good, they need better direction. They put odd inflections in the things they try to say, as if they have no idea which parts of a line to emphasize due to the context of the statement, which could be ironed out if one of the writers would just tap their shoulder and say “Hey, you’re supposed to be sad here,” instead of just making the VA’s guess. Deputy Mira made the entire tragedy entirely impossible to take seriously.

Dialogue The actual dialogue is atrocious. Most pertinent example: before Seiran sacrifices herself, she spouts some completely random nonsense about friendship. “Player, you taught me that friends can do anything together!” What? How? We grabbed some awful cliche blooddragonravenMAGIC sword, and rescued some quaggan sure, but there was no bonding. There was no moment where we became friends. We just randomly ran around for about 30 seconds total (because these story steps are so very short and so very far between) with her being bubbly and us accomplishing things. At what point did a friendship form? We were never asked to trust one another, or had lengthy conversations, or anything really. We just worked together on a few brief missions. And furthermore, she was exactly the same person in this story step as she was when we first met her. “I was so selfish when I met you, but now I’m not!” Uhhh…. okay? She never acted selfish, and in fact ran out to help everyone and anyone she met. Since the day she showed up. She hasn’t changed whatsoever. So the things she says towards the end of the mission are just random garbage that you think you’d hear out of a particularly saccharine children’s cartoon. And for the record, I am a person who personally believes what others find cheesy and saccharine: things like “friendship is wonderful and important and powerful!” and “we all need to work together to make eachother happy 8D,” but with Seiran it is just atrociously forced, unfounded, and godawful. It derailed any pathos for the events that transpired.

So…. yeah. Seriously.

If you ask me, the plot in this game is fantastic. Strip out the dialogue and VA and horrid conversation-cutscenes, and boil down the major events of any given story arc, and you have a very engaging and interesting story. Then the dialogue comes in, and tends to A) be entirely childish, be information-dry (there are often dearths of within-story explanations for any enemy faction or motivation at any given time…. it seems like a bunch of random events just happening, which could be fixed with some dialogue edits), and C) fail to impart the scope of the damage being caused in the world. Then the VA comes in, and some lines are so horribly delivered (due to the lack of emotion more often than anything else, period)… all in some empty void, with two floating actors. It’s just a train wreck.

I still love the lore! I still love the plot, specifically! But dear goodness, the dialogue/VA are in need of dire, dire help. Still. I just want it to be good x.x, I see so many good intentions from the writers failing so thoroughly, I wish there was some way to patch in a fix.

TheZoobler.8073:

Dialogue The actual dialogue is atrocious. Most pertinent example: before Seiran sacrifices herself, she spouts some completely random nonsense about friendship. “Player, you taught me that friends can do anything together!” What? How? We grabbed some awful cliche blooddragonravenMAGIC sword, and rescued some quaggan sure, but there was no bonding. There was no moment where we became friends. We just randomly ran around for about 30 seconds total (because these story steps are so very short and so very far between) with her being bubbly and us accomplishing things. At what point did a friendship form? We were never asked to trust one another, or had lengthy conversations, or anything really. We just worked together on a few brief missions. And furthermore, she was exactly the same person in this story step as she was when we first met her. “I was so selfish when I met you, but now I’m not!” Uhhh…. okay? She never acted selfish, and in fact ran out to help everyone and anyone she met. Since the day she showed up. She hasn’t changed whatsoever. So the things she says towards the end of the mission are just random garbage that you think you’d hear out of a particularly saccharine children’s cartoon. And for the record, I am a person who personally believes what others find cheesy and saccharine: things like “friendship is wonderful and important and powerful!” and “we all need to work together to make eachother happy 8D,” but with Seiran it is just atrociously forced, unfounded, and godawful. It derailed any pathos for the events that transpired.

Same for me but replace Seiran with Forgal who is probably the most boring and easily forgettable character in Guild Wars 1 or 2. Seiran at least had a bubbly personality.

I like Sieran (I rate the mentors as Tybalt first, her second and Forgal third) but I’m with you that friendship between the NPCs and player characters is not handled at all well. Time and time again, I am told that my character is an NPC’s friend. I recall it happening with Logan, with Trahearne and others.

I would prefer it if the game did not keep on telling the player how they feel – it seems like the kind of basic mistake an amateur might make when writing their first mod and then learn from. A paid writing team should do better than that, although I’m not sure the writing team actually worked on these stories and I believe they have reorganised things now.

They could have had the option of a little roleplay in these cutscenes had they chosen to, even if it ultimately led to the same conclusion. Certainly there would be a cost in terms of more lines to record but I think the overall result would be less jarring. Sometimes I just want my character to give another answer, be the reluctant hero, the cynic or keep things strictly business. The much vaunted personality options all boil down to gung-ho, just with a slightly different overlay.