Guild Wars 2

• The character models are stiff and inexpressive.
• They sever the flow of a dramatic scene, such as when characters stop mid-battle to have a (often long and drawn out) chinwag.
• They limit the ‘role-playing’ element to a possible five characters (one for each race) since all the other nuances of your character are abandoned for the dialogue. Some people will like how their character is portrayed, but many will feel: “This isn’t how I imagine my character to act.”
• Their main use seems to be info-dumping. This is exactly the wrong occasion to utilise precious voice-acting resources. Voicework should be reserved for entertaining character development, not explaining status changes or the political/historical context of an event.
• The dialogue, as I understand it, was not written by professional writers but by the team who developed the personal story aspect. It is, unfortunately, sub-average even by the standards of RPGs, which, even at their best, struggle to attain the heights of well-written books. I understand that it’s very difficult when you’re dealing with multiple paths, but I’m concerned that ArenaNet is far more alive to standards of technical/visual quality than it is to narrative quality. This is disappointing to me as I enjoy the lore of Guild Wars 2, and lots of the incidental dialogue. The games I remember most fondly are nearly always the best written (thinking Planescape Torment, Grim Fandango, both Portals etc).

i don’t think they have to be thrown away altogether, but a lot of times they would’ve worked better as an in-gameplay cutscene (like on the battle of claw island, when that dude is struck down). those are 99% of the time much better mood-setters and let you see the scene in its true scope.

i also think they need A LOT more animations (no one ever looks truly angry in those, for example), and make good use of the ones they have (why is someone that’s dying looks like they used /cower instead of looking like they were downed?).

the “isolated dialogue” scenes should be limited to moments where the only thing that matters is the dialogue, when there is no setting or action going on, like a mission briefing or a some insightful lines at the end (WHICH SHOULD NOT TRIGGER AS SOON AS YOU TAKE THE OBJECTIVE DOWN, it’s obnoxious to see a cutscene cloud your view before you even see the boss fall dead).

I hate to say it but I have to agree here. I know Arenanet worked really hard on these scenes and hand-placed a lot of gestures and expressions to make them enjoyable, but most of the time they do exactly what OP said: break the immersion.

GW2 has an beautiful game engine. Use it to tell the story during a mission. You can even pause the action to do custom camerawork and still preserve immersion (just make sure the minions aren’t beating up Shiro in the background, Factions players will know what I mean).

Save the storyboard animations for major exposition, it’s PERFECT for that, absolutely brilliant. But if it’s just talking heads in the middle of a mission… skip it.