Guild Wars 2

I just started playing GW2 in the last month or so, late to the party.

I am impressed with GW2 as a whole. I like the dynamics, the setup, the environment, the professions, the TP, basically the whole thing. I’ve played almost every MMO since Ultima Online, and this is my favorite one so far. That makes this next part frustrating.

I tried many different combinations of professions, races, and storylines to find one that “fit” into the world. I’d make a character, dream up a personality, and immediately get it squashed by the first cut-scene and delete it, because I knew it’d be that jarring from that point forward.

I have four or five very bland humans that are generic enough to make me avoid aggravation during the personal stories. I feel pigeon-holed into one personality and in some cases, one or two appearances. Wow, it should not be like that at all.

My opinion is that it’s too much effort, honestly, to go back and revoice/change it up/expand on the cutscenes. What I would like is simply more choices. A choice to turn off the VA/cutscenes and read text (text bubbles in the world if you’re feeling particularly generous, but even the story log would be fine). A choice to avoid the personal story entirely at the least — I want to choose to hide the green text if I’m not going to do it because I feel frustratingly forced into it. Then I could have a bland character to go through the story, and a unique and lively character with whom I could pretend it doesn’t exist. Hard to do when you can’t customize the UI.

I’ll keep playing the game, I dig it overall. I’m just a little annoyed that I feel like the driver of a robot instead of stepping into my character’s shoes.

One of the things that gets me in cutscene dialogue is the fact that they talk among each other, instead of with each other. In real dialogue, one person doesn’t start when the other finishes. There is inevitably some interrupting, some elevated tone, some personality in the voice acting. It feels almost like two voice actors were brought into the sound booth on two different days, given their own dialogue along with the other person’s, and told to just speak their part. There is no verbal interaction.

Another fault with the system is that there is no physical interactions. The characters don’t really talk with their hands, they don’t walk around or refer to their environment when they talk, they aren’t IN the scene. Yes, the current cutscene system looks artsy and painterly and whatnot. But it just doesn’t connect. I’m sure that the dialogue may flow better if the system were reworked, and some may even argue that a rework of the system would make up for some of the dialogue, or somehow make it work altogether.

There are also no options in cutscene dialogue. Why not? Why not have my character choose what order he wants to be a part of inside the cutscene while he’s talking to all of them, instead of running off to Logan?

And instead of posting a third time, I might as well say – With ArenaNet working so hard to make the game so “Epic,” why would the story and dialogue be anything less than “epic?”

The biggest problem I have with dialogues is that my character(human) is in permanent “Lawful good paladin” mode. She always respect her elders, bakes cookies for orphans, saves kittens from trees and does all other super heroic stuff. She have almost no personality whatsoever. The only time I managed to get something different was during the quest from missing sister arc where some evil soldier traps me in a cave with ettins. After the fight my hero as usual went on about justice, fair trials and other boring things untill I talked with the evil guy again. I had an unpredictable personality and that opened up a dialogue option that was something along the lines of “Noone here to protect you. Now you will die for killing my sister!” and I actually killed him. That was the best part of the story for me so far.

EndlessDreamer.6780:

I believe the issue is with the genre of higher fantasy that you have the expectations of epicness.

The Norn are all stoic hunters, the humans all heroic, the Charr all powerful, Asura are all genius inventors, etc.

However by constantly applying this same trope to every set of dialogue, you create a feeling of staleness.

Completely agree with your points, you pointed out the problem perfectly. Moreover, this “always good and heroic” attitude is also reflected in your character. There’s no way you could make your character be even a little bit bad or moral ambiguous in this game. You’re gonna be a great hero, point, end of the story.

I don’t if I notice this because, after a long time passion for fantasy, I expect an evolution of the contents, or because GW2 is so good in some aspects that suddenly being average on another aspect strikes me as odd…

Ogare.2751:

The biggest problem I have with dialogues is that my character(human) is in permanent “Lawful good paladin” mode. She always respect her elders, bakes cookies for orphans, saves kittens from trees and does all other super heroic stuff. She have almost no personality whatsoever.

This sums up one of my biggest problems overall. I love GW2 and can look past the bland VO and writing because I just enjoy it how it is. But what I do not like about Personal Story is that it didn’t live up to what I would think a Personal Story actually is.

I almost wish GW2 did not have VOs for Personal Story so we could actually choose what our character is like. I feel more emotionally connected to my Skyrim character rather than my GW2 character even though my Skyrim character is nothing but grunts and wails. It’s because ANet has already chosen my character(s) for me – his voice, manner of speaking, personality.

My Guardian is supposed to be rough, no-nonsense, hate-everything guy whose brash outer shell just textures his true devotion to justice and saving innocents. Here, my mini Nolan spouts goody-goody, ever-agreeable nonsense in his cheery, hero voice. It was particularly jarring because it contrasted completely with the character I imagined my guardian to be. The voice, personality, everything was off. I wish that Personal Story was simply just text-only so we could at least choose our character’s voice and forge our own story. Our real personal story.

My second problem is that we never really have a choice of what to do. It all ends up in killing stuff. For example my Ele is supposed to be a charming roguish person who talks his way out of everything. When I try to choose options that seem diplomatic rather than violent, I usually just end up killing stuff anyway regardless of how I chose. I think one of the best examples of the violence-vs-non violence options (though there should be more ofc) is the Legion event in the tavern just outside of Black Citadel, where you have to talk the legions out of fighting each other. You have to choose an option that best fits their legion’s description to calm them down and show them that the brawl is below them. Otherwise, if you don’t want to talk to them, you can choose to fight them instead and show them arguing is pointless. Both lead to the same wanted outcome. That was something I enjoyed because I had a choice on how to accomplish it using knowledge rather than my fists.

The Priory wind puzzle, although I do not like jumping puzzles, was the most memorable of the personal stories simply because it was different from the usual “KILL EVERYTHING.” Anyway, furthering this, with the choices we are given they never make a lasting impact on anything. Anything we do just disappears. Our allies we made disappear. I was hoping to see more of quaggans in my story after I chose them for my racial empathy but I did not see any quaggans anywhere after that arc was complete.

I won’t end this without props though. I found Caladbolg arc to be good. We saw weaknesses in character which are rarely present otherwise. Also, even though the writing was cheesy at first, I enjoyed the human story of finding your parents and it was touching. I loved all the mentors, they were all enjoyable though Sieran and why she was my authority and allowed to have the title of “Magister” is questionable. Lastly I like Zojja a lot.

Edit: This isn’t to say I don’t like the personal stories. I actually like them a lot, up until the dreaded Claw Island. I may have to strangle Deputy Mira for having the worst voice acting in the game.

Garrus.9803:

If you came into this game expecting Mass Effect quality dialogue you’re going to be disappointed. But if you take it for what it is it’s good.

After WoW I took what games I could find that had a story I could follow, nevermind the writing of the voiceacting and conversation therein.

I would agree with those who said Trahearne is terrible. Overall I feel like he COULD have been an interesting character. But his line delivery is terrible and his writing could have been better. Especially for someone who is as close to a main character as GW2 gets.
Everything he says comes across with all the emotion of a tree stump (pun intended). He’s difficult to like because he rarely shows emotion through voice acting, and his lines are generally bland.
I also feel weird about that first part of the personal story. I played a female charr in the blood legion, and I liked my warband and what I had built as a Charr. I feel like that was mostly forgotten and I just stepped out of being a part of the Charr, and became a ‘generic heroine.’ The character model is the only thing that reminds me I am a Charr.

To be honest, I think a lot of the posts in this thread are about personal preference, rather than the storytelling itself.
There are people out there who loved Tybalt’s voice acting (and the character himself) and then there are people like me, who didn’t. Tybalt sounded extremely incompetent in my opinion, and this made me feel like he didn’t belong in the Order of Whispers. On the other hand, I loved Traeharne. I found him original in an aloof kind of way, and I loved his voice acting as I took it as a trait of his; I thought it matched his being a necromancer pretty well. Asking for Traeharne to become friendly and to say things with more emotion would be like me asking for Tybalt to become more discreet and guarded, as I found his enthusiasm out of place.

But yes, I agree with the op. The scripting of the dialogues itself in general seems to be quite monotone, with very rare outbursts of humor and an almost absent sense of tragedy. It puzzles me, as I find that this is not the case for the dialogues in the open world; most of those are really well-written and entertaining! ><

What I would like to add/expand on is that while I like some of the characters in the Personal Story, a lot of them only appear for a grand total of 5 quests (if not less). When most of the characters you meet are cameos with 10 lines, it really is no wonder that players don’t care for them – and that those characters do not feel fully fleshed out.

I feel that adding side-stories that involve them would do wonders.

There are only two npcs players really get to interact with for any lenght of time, aside from the heroes of Destiny’s Edge. They’re your Order’s mentor and Traeharne, who, indeed, seem to be the ones that left the biggest impression on the majority here.

I also mostly agree with Bluejay.

bluejay.6739:

The pacing is terrible. As an example, in Tybalt’s case, in about 5 dialogs totaling maybe two paragraphs of text he moves from a complete unknown to being your best friend of all time. I felt like my character wanted to look him in the face and say “Dude, I don’t know you that well…”

And there are lots of really goofy spots in the story line.

When Tybalt sacrifices himself… seriously, ONE PERSON is going to do anything to delay an entire army of undead, numerous undead ships full of more undead, and a dragon? Unless he is the most powerful being on this planet he would be eaten in 1 second and do nothing to aid in your escape. This plot line was not well thought out.

The real dialogue gems in this game are from talking with NPCS. The non cutscene dialogue.

You’ll miss out on a lot of great stuff if you don’t bother to talk with characters out in the world and in instances and such.

Kiayin.3427:

To be honest, I think a lot of the posts in this thread are about personal preference, rather than the storytelling itself.
There are people out there who loved Tybalt’s voice acting (and the character himself) and then there are people like me, who didn’t. Tybalt sounded extremely incompetent in my opinion, and this made me feel like he didn’t belong in the Order of Whispers. On the other hand, I loved Traeharne. I found him original in an aloof kind of way, and I loved his voice acting as I took it as a trait of his; I thought it matched his being a necromancer pretty well. Asking for Traeharne to become friendly and to say things with more emotion would be like me asking for Tybalt to become more discreet and guarded, as I found his enthusiasm out of place.

I’m not saying I want Trahearne to be more friendly or “emotional” I’m saying his line delivery needed emotion/human inflection. There’s a difference between acting and just reading a script. Trahearne has moments when he questions himself and his place as a leader, where he expresses passion and interest in Orr and its corruption, and the delivery falls flat and feels out of place/insincere. It’s probably a result of both writing and voice actor problems.
These are also problems with many other NPCs, but as Trahearne is a major character, I would have expected him to be more well written and well acted. There’s a difference between a character being believably aloof and being a character who is just bored all the time. A “like-able” character is not necessarily a character who is friendly. Jerk characters are “like-able”, characters/villains you hate are “like-able”, any character that evokes real emotion in a person is “like-able.” They are in essence ‘characters.’ Trahearne, is not a character, his VA delivers his all his lines with the same enthusiasm of someone picking at their finger nails. He’s more of a plot device with a character model.
Also bad fake british/english accents have never ever helped anyone in my opinion.
***After looking about the forum, I suppose my post should really be in the we hate Trahearne thread. But most of my complaints with him are about his voice acting.

I am the kind of player who read the books ingame, who talks no random NPCs for lore’s sake, who collect books in Elder Scrolls games. I love to follow the lore, to think about what is said, to put pieces of dialogue together and understand the game worlds by doing it.

Gw2 story line? Well, after day 2, I just skip. The main story is the worst Ive ever seen. The voice acting is the most terrible since Sega’s Altered Beast (which was awesome for it’s time). Sometimes I feel the voice was recorded from google translator. Schwarzenegger would do better playing Shakespeare.

The personal story lacks epicness. Even collecting boar poop in WoW had more of an epic feeling.

The "quests’ itselves are also terrible. In addition to all the bugs, the fights are extremely boring.

GW had a great story and lore. Prophecies had one of the best stories Ive seen in a MMO. Factions and Nightfall (and even EotN) were also awesome. The characters meant something. GW2 is just epic boredom. Heroic ennui. It seems people who made GW were fired or have unlearned everything.

“Oh, we wanna make people feel that they are part of the world, they can change things, they blablabla”. When I remember the old interviews from PAX before the release of the game, I think: where the hell is the game they said they were making?

The emotion of 90% of voice acting is so terrible that even if the story was good (and most of it is terrible) it wouldnt feel like it. “Actors” read (yes, they read, they dont act) “look, we are being attacked by a giant flamming badas dragon” with the same emotion they would read “hey, honey, we need to buy more milk, this was the last bottle”.

I’ll throw in my 2c

I think this is what happens when you try to do too much at once with choices. This is a problem BioWare is having too, with their branching story lines arcs.

If you have so many combinations of outcomes, keeping it all fitting together without making one out of place is more work than just making one really good story.

I recommend, moving forward, that the story not have these choices but to make the story blend between personal, regional, and worldly affairs.

Personal being friends, family, and romance. The cool thing about the Zhaitan arc is that you are now a rock star. Now is a good time to show the good / bad part of fame and glory in the character’s personal life.

Regional is your race’s affairs. While fighting Zhaitan took precedence over everything, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for your character to just stop doing anything about local affairs. Here we could touch on some of the culture, like their religions, politics, particular new individuals, etc.

Worldly are the main conflict of the Elder Dragons, your Order, and threats that attack more than just a specific region, like the Molten Alliance has. These are the main point of the story, but there ought to be a progression in this journey toward the resolution of this conflict using the other parts.

I also recommend that your home zone be given some kind of between quest banter talking about you, what’s happening in the region, the world, etc. between familiar characters. Maybe Agent Ihan goes to the bar and a server tries to say they recognize him, and he flirts with her, convincing her he’s nobility haha. Or Quinn talks with Riot Alice about how he’s thinking about seeing what they can do for the kingdom, with her freaking out about helping the government.

The VO work could use more… emotion. Of course, it’s easy to have emotion if the story is great, and I think that will take care of itself with the right approach.

People forget… the VO work in GW1 wasn’t particularly spectacular, but finding out Vizier Khilbron was playing you, Shiro, and the “holy crap the whole world is blowing up” feeling you got from Nightfall, made it all good in the end.

So to sum suggestion up:

Linear story focusing on quality over choice
Personal, Regional, and World focus
Personal Zone a hotspot between quests

In terms of improvement, the writing has been done and produced and its really not possible to go back and completely change everything.

However, I think the writing might be more appreciated if the cut-scenes gave us more than two people spitting out lines at each-other.

I have gone into a lot of detail on the history of Guild Wars cutscenes and a possible (and fiscally plausible) future for the Guild Wars 2 Personal Story in an another forum post, so I’ll save my spiel.

Basically:

• Guild Wars 2 cinematics are currently worse than they have ever been in Guild Wars’s history.
• The lack of visual narrative in Guild Wars 2 cutscenes makes every single character feel hollow and lifeless.
• The lack of visual narrative also takes away from the tone and pace of the story, making it feel boring, long and drawn out.

Don’t believe me? Here’s an example of a shooting script for the first human cut-scene after the run-in with the earth elemental using the pre-existing dialogue:
——————————————————
INT. TAVERN – DAY
Player opens his eyes. He finds himself in a bedroom with Priestess of Dwayna looking over him. Player rubs his eyes and sits up.
PLAYER
Where am I? What happened?
The priestess gently lays Player back down onto the bed.
PRIESTESS
You were injured when the elemental exploded,
She places a rag on Player’s head.
PRIESTESS (CONT’D)
Captain Thackary brought you here personally.
Priestess carefully undresses the bandage on Player’s arm
PRIESTESS (CONT’D)
You’ve been out for three days…
Player rubs his head and rests his head down on the pillow
PRIESTESS
You had lots of visitors. Villagers you rescued, Some seraph,
Player winces at the pain as she dabs some magical healing paste on his wound.
PRIESTESS
(Trying to remember)
…and a nervous, shady-looking character who came by every day but wouldn’t give his name…
Player smiles to himself and props himself up on his elbows.
PLAYER
That’d be my friend Quinn.
(Pointing to the next room.)
You might want to check your supply cabinets… I’ll find out what he wanted once I’m fully recovered.
Priestess pulls the rag from Player’s head
PLAYER
(Stretching for the first time in 3 days.)
What should I do now?
FTB
——————————————-
Okay, so there, in my poorly written shooting script, you can already see that these characters now have some life in them. They aren’t just animatronic robots repeating sound files in sequence any more, they interact with each other and with the environment in ways that make them actually seem human and, therefore, are more able to identify with. Therein lies the problem with the Personal Story, in my personal opinion.

From what I’ve heard the new dungeon has a no cutscene approach, and that ought to be the way they do personal story moving forward imo.

If you’re seeing the story play out in motion, that makes it more action-oriented, which GW is all about. Cutscenes are only good if they’re done with a lot of animation, facial expressions, attention to detail, etc.

They’d have to add more emotes, which is fine because people love them. AI for movement would have to be updated, but that AI would translate into better dungeons too, so it’s a two birds one boulder thing.

Admittedly, I haven’t read through all 5 pages. However, I am in the same boat with many here: the voice acting and script writing is dreadful. As a writing major I also have issues with the general storyline, but that’s for another thread.

I’ve been with Guild Wars since the month before Factions was released, and have enjoyed their storylines and voice acting all through out. It was a great disappointment to hear these flat, robotic characters say their lines as if a string on their back was pulled.

I know Anet prides themselves in being artists, and all of them wanting things done to perfection, but the writing for this game lends me to believe Anet forgot writing is an art as well.

I still trust they will seek to learn from mistakes and fix things as best they can. My only thought here is if they fix the current voice acting and writing, I currently can’t go back and play through my story a second time to enjoy any changes.

The storyline sometimes has some logical flaws stemming from bad dialogue.

For example, the very first thing you do as a Norn is kill the wurm Issormir. This gains you the title of Slayer and you get referred to by this title. But when you think about it, this makes no sense. Why? Because Knut Whitebear brought the wurm there to be killed.

Knut Whitebear: By my own hand, I have brought the mighty wurm, Issormir. He waits above, in the plateau, for one such as you to challenge him.

Now really, he somehow managed (and it implies singlehandedly) to get that giant wurm up there in the plateau for someone else to kill. Now THAT is an accomplishment. He had to track it down, then either capture it and get it up there or enrage it enough that it followed him clear up there and get away safely. No easy task either way.

What it made me feel like is a kitten whose mother has caught and brought a mouse over to it so it can learn how to kill something. It does NOT make me feel like the mighty Slayer. To be referred to as Slayer for killing an animal someone else captured and essentially left staked out for me to kill feels condescending.

They needed someone to go thru the storyline with a red pen and a critical mind, looking for logical flaws and cleaning up the dialogue. The lines from Knut should have been removed and lines telling how that wurm was terrorizing the area added and how it needed to be killed. Then killing it would have earned me the title of Slayer.

For me personally, i would like to see more combat dialog. For instance, when im playing as a sylvari guardian, i always hear “This rose has thorns. Here they are!”. after a while, it get really annoying. I would like to see more dialog that involves what an enemy is doing or what is happening in the environment (i know this would be an extremely hard thing to do but lets face it, its arena net that is working on it and they are AMAZING!). an example of the environment dialog would be like if there were say a harpy flying into the air then diving at the player, the player’s character would yell “Its diving!” or something like that. an environment dialog would be something like a player yelling “trebuche!” when one is fire(this might be in but im just giving an example). thanks for reading!

I would like to say first, that I am for the most part happy (or at least not unhappy as such) with the voice acting and dialogue. Most is okay, some of it is rather excellent. Much of it is sort of cheesy, but I’ve come to accept this as GW2’s overall style, so it’s okay. Sorry if the rest of this post comes across as whiny!

So, first, my character’s personality.
During character creation I chose one of the three personality types (overcome obstacles with charm/dignity/ferocity) and it was my expectation that this would impact how my character reacts during personal story instances, at least on the level of how she expresses something. I realise now that there is far too much spoken dialogue in the game to record all player character lines six or more times (3 personalities X 2 genders, and later on X 5 races). But it was a small disappointment that my friend’s “charming rogue” sounds just as stuck-up as my “dignified engineer”.

Secondly, during character creation I picked the “sister” path. Then when I finally found and freed my sister, the emotional impact was… zero.
Deb: “Cool, you rescued me.”
Me: “Yeah, see you around I guess.”
(Unfairly paraphrased by me as I don’t remember the exact wording.)
Having a sister in real life… this is not how I expected it to go down. I didn’t so much expect her to show up in future story mode instances (although that would have been amazing), but at least in this one instance, there should have been tears of relief or similar.

Aethgar.1784:

Actually, a second. The name of the sister.
My human male noble is Ascalonian. I went with a Saxon name: Ahrwit. It combines terms relating to honour with a suffix for cunning.
So having Ahrwit blather about “Debs” kind of.. bugged me. I treat that section as not ‘me’.
<.<

I had a same problem.

quickthorn.4918:

ZetaStriker.9142:

Sieran was great, as was Zojja during the opening acts of the Asura story.

I liked Sieran as well. She wasn’t presented to us as ‘here is the great heroine’ but as someone who was flawed – but flawed in an entertaining way.

Which is why Tybalt and Elli(TOUUURNAMENT ANOUNCEMENTS!) were my favorite people in the personal story.

I will add that the Living Story cut-scenes are dramatically better than the Personal Story cut-scenes. Though they still suffer from a lack of interaction between the characters, themselves and the environment, and though the painful one-shot poorly-composed camera moves have returned from Guild Wars 1, there has been a dramatic improvement and I find myself way more interested and immersed in the story. Playing through the end of Flame and Frost gave me a whole new feeling of closeness to Tyria. I’m glad this has improved but, if you want the player-base to grow and solidify, you have to improve the content the new players will be experiencing. Nobody likes to hear “oh, it gets better later.” Everyone sees the beginning of the Personal Story. Not everyone trucks through all the way to see the Living Story Content. (i.e. most of my friends!)

keeganrms.6301:

I will add that the Living Story cut-scenes are dramatically better than the Personal Story cut-scenes. Though they still suffer from a lack of interaction between the characters, themselves and the environment, and though the painful one-shot poorly-composed camera moves have returned from Guild Wars 1, there has been a dramatic improvement and I find myself way more interested and immersed in the story.

I agree. It was refreshing to be able to FINALLY see everyone in the scene at once and not have it limited to 2 on the screen at a time. However, the camera work was terrible. Having the Camera stay in ONE shot and having it circle around everyone felt cheap.

I do feel like ANet are testing and learning with this so that’s always a good sign. I’m grateful for these monthly events as they seem to be helping ANet with their story-telling and presentation. Hope they’ve learned enough by the time the first expansion comes around. Maybe we’ll see actual cutting to different shots and close ups on characters?

+1 to Living Story cutscenes being better. Just that bit of immersion that makes the stereotypical plot lines work better. The actual dialogue isn’t better overall, but being a part of the scene helps smooth that over. And I didn’t notice any specific lines as bad as some parts of the lines in the main story. Better immersion + no absolute clunkers = much smoother story.

I may be a minority, but I like the campy dialogue.

Sometimes the campy dialog will break the immersion, or the narrative of a given situation.

One example is the “secret message” decryption mission from Flame & Frost.

The setup of this mission is finding messages sent by an undercover agent. The agent is established as a rare source for information and his dead drops are very limited. You would expect such a person to make every message count. But instead part of his messages are wasted on bad food and “I need a vacation”. Basically comic relief posts.

Another example is the Flame & Frost dungeon. A lot of rather depressing topics. Weapons plants, people enslaved, letters of dead people to their children, a dark unhappy environment of dust, dirt and lava. And then Molten Firestorm appears and we are back in zany luchador territory.

This will happen often in the game. There is a specific setup, but the game cannot hold the mood and will eventually break the narrative along with it.

I like everything about this game except personal story. Absolute rubbish. TERRIBLE writing, bland voice acting and bad story line overall. A couple leaps of logic or believability in there too. Writers should all go play Baldur’s Gate (a bit old I know) to see how’s it done.

Lord Vem.8649:

I like everything about this game except personal story. Absolute rubbish. TERRIBLE writing, bland voice acting and bad story line overall. A couple leaps of logic or believability in there too. Writers should all go play Baldur’s Gate (a bit old I know) to see how’s it done.

To clarify: Baldur’s Gate, or Baldur’s Gate II? >_>

I’m also assuming you mean the computer games, and not the PS2 rendition. :p

I have read this thread and really enjoyed the maturity with which people have approached this subject. That, everyone at ArenaNet, shows that you still have fans, and that they care. Goodwill is so important, and you haven’t lost it yet.

I also enjoyed some of the wacky examples and quotes of different people. Even though in some ways the Personal Story was a disaster, the fact we got so many ripsnorters ie. “can’t help but laugh, over and over again – note to self, need to stop laughing” helps us put the bad stuff in perspective. It also ironically enabled us to be more analytical and “constructively” (rather than destructively) critical, and still manage to have the wisecracks.

Well, the over-arching story has been decided for GW2 vanilla. But here’s my suggestions for going forward in GW2:

- Ditch the stilted one on one dialogue scenes. Have everything happen in speech bubbles as the action is happening, maybe with some neat camera angles (as long as they focus on, add drama or pathos and don’t take away the interest from what’s happening).

- If you want to, although this is more controversial, ditch all the spoken dialogue in the story missions, and use speech bubbles and informative camera angles and poses of the various characters. I know it might seem a bit over the top, but ditching the spoken dialogue in the story missions might allow players to relate with their character and the other characters better, and “fill in a few blanks” like in any really interesting over-arching story.

- Whether or not you take on the previous point, at least remove the player character’s voice speaking lines. They can still say the same thing, but in a speech bubble only.

- Either revoice all of the Trahearne VA parts, or have Trahearne use speech bubbles, the text of which is already quite moving and inspiring, it’s just that the wooden voice acting overshadows it.

- Put in new personal story quest instances (these ones can have the story characters have voice acting, but not for the player character) that fit in between the existing missions that you do for members of your personal story. This would apply whether or not they survive to the end of the main quest line. These personal quests must be completed before going on to the next story mission (a bit like the “travel to the next important location, learn lore and help the locals” sections in GW1, especially Prophecies). Personal story characters could also show up in later missions after the first chapter, perhaps helping our character become a member of an Order, or in or related to Orr itself (like the Charr Warband or Asuran Krewe support that has been suggested by others in this thread).

- Use this personal quest to shows how the personal story member interacts with the player character and other characters, their motivations, some tender, strong, funny or crazy moments that make that character and their relationships with the player character (dependent on the context of the situation the characters are in and what kind of person they are). Make use of all that wonderful work you’ve done for events and regular NPCs throughout the world!

- Also, perhaps have some personal soulbound effects that are given by story characters and have unique gameplay effects (ie. are useful in some way) and that you take on your travels away from your homeland to remind you of people you have helped and remember fondly.

- Add in “setting scene” extra storyboard information as suggested in https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/story/The-dialogue-oh-lord-the-dialogue/1943583 – that simple change can make the characters seem more human in story missions (meaning any of the five races).

- Have all the story characters have their stories continued, as long as they are alive and even after their death. Have some caring moments – the heroes of Tyria have big hearts, ALL the five races do. And when you defeat Zhaitan, give a short “Epilogue: After Zhaitan” about where the story characters are at (customized based on your story and choices) when you have been away in Orr (or even if they’ve helped in Orr), but in a generally compassionate way (that has good and bad bits but the good generally outweighs the bad).

- Have the player character recognize ALL of the sacrifices made by your side, not just story characters that died.

- Add some cool new well-thought out and designed features like Guild Layouts/Halls (forgot what they were called in GW1). Also allow certain Guild bonuses to apply in Story Missions.

These are just a few suggestions. If you included an overhaul of the main campaign something like the above with some well-designed and balanced Guild additions, it could make for a decent reboot of the original GW2 game, a bit like how “The Witcher” got an Enhanced Edition that learned from the initial release.

I wish you all the best!

Best regards,
Steven.

I found this interesting post and finaly! I´m not alone.

When I heard about personal story in GW 2 I was thrilled. When I saw how personal story is told, um, I got back to earth and when I played through whole personal story I was disappointed.

Why:

1) your personaly story have zero impact on what´s going on. You are still nameless “hero” running around like thousands others. For example I saved that hospital. Those poor children were burned but when I entered my home instance again about 3-4 quests later, there was nothing reminding I chose hospital. Both building were just fine like nothing happened.

2) 2D dialog scenes. Well, sometimes it had nice artwork, scenery. That´s all. It just bored me so I clicked SKIP as soon as I got the chance. It´s passive and everyone is so naive, always cheerful, supportive, eager for great fights to save the whole world but without touch of realism. Most importantly, it´s all passive watching 2D images in movement.

3) Home instance. The only thing that could make difference between nameless hero and good feeling from personal story failed. Who knows what you did? Where are statues of your glory? None ending cutscene in your home instance after Fort Trinity? “I got back home from saving whole world”. The only one who is there on square is merchant selling food for few coppers. No record what you did on your way to defeat master dragon? With what weapon did I slay the dragon minions or the master boss? No kids running around you gossiping? No tales inside houses? No tapestries?
Thank you that we can see what we did in hero panel but who else can see that? Ah, only me.

4) I miss plot changes, sudden surprises, evil characters pretending to be good while using world saving for its own benefit, most importantly humor, characters I could love/hate/don´t understand them and ask what those rats are up to, schemers, more action from allies (Order of whispers infiltrated some base and you can decide whether go with Trahearne the traditional way or be witness of something else with the Order).

I enjoy GW 2 almost every day. Doing dailies, trying to save money, learn more about skills, etc. But personal story is something I skipped from some point. I was looking forward to experience it but it lost my attention very, very soon. And it´s pity.
On the other hand. Star Wars TOR completely hooked me. The personal story (dark side) was the best I´ve experienced in any game ever.
GW2 best MMO gameplay, 2/10 personal story. SWTOR 2/10 (thanks to skills that could push enemies from cliff, etc.) gameplay, 10/10 personal story. What now? Please copy their lines, converstaion and plot making styles and adjust them to fit GW2 universe

Have a nice day

There is nothing inherently wrong with the dialog, it is just a bit out dated. Reminds me of the writing in Star Trek and in the old westerns. But that isn’t bad.

Just like everything else, there are good points, and bad points, but we should instead focus on more important immersion breaking aspects, like the fact that all female humans look like teenagers. And that there are no old men.

I do usually cite Mass Effect and/or Dragon Age in these discussions, but for good reason. You need that emotion if you’re ever to tell a great story. In real life we may have relatively similar tones and feelings of good etc. That’s real life though. Fantasy is where we go to explore the infinite spectrum. It’s all about being able to delve into a piece of thought that compromises our emotions.

None of that is in the Guild Wars 2 story. The idea and concepts are epic, but the telling of the story is not. The characters all seemingly share a tiny section of what should be an infinite spectrum.

Furthermore, the lack of animations seems to hinder any favorable odds that dialog may currently have. There should be sitting, jumping, diving and rolling! Even more subtle interactions, such as pats on the back or pushing/shoving, are better than just standing still and nodding a head or pointing a finger.

If we are forced to tolerate cutscene dialogue, it would be nice if our character personality actually affected the dialogue text and voice inflections.

Before I start, some of what I could say can already be found in previous posts but the more posts about said suggestions will help Arenanet better understand what some of us want.

My main issue with the story is that it was too easy to differentiate good and evil. Your hero against an ancient evil plain and simple. I know the focus of Guild Wars 2 is elder dragons but complicating the narrative would really help it be interesting and not some fairy tale story. There needs to be more characters like Kudu but on a larger scale. Kudu was not in anyway related to the dragons but he was somehow a pain for Destiny’s Edge. Yet, me killing Kudu almost had no impact on the story whatsoever and he had two dungeon storymodes to his name. The concept of Kudu was right but the way he was presented and used was weak and a failure.

I agree with other players that the need for a grey area when it comes to personalities needs to be present. Flawed characters provide something we can relate to and makes the story interesting. Make my character have to make choices that I do not want to ever have to make and make it actually have a realistic impact on how the story unfolds. Make characters that have neutral personalities by having their beliefs fall in between the lines of good and evil. Make evil characters that are liked or are cunning and make you hate them more and more.

P.S. The Southsun events after Flame and Frost had me excited when I first saw it on my client screen. I did not know what to expect with the new Southsun story and hoped for something good. It turned out to be boring, non-challenging content that did not have any complexity at all. To make it worse we were basically told it was Canach that was causing the “oh so mysterious” wildlife rampages instead of actually having to find out through the story. This lead to Canach being a boring boss fight and all his plans foiled. I wanted to give feedback on the living story to say that it is not memorable or enjoyable. The living story comes with easy 1-day content and dull storytelling and action.

I agree with many people in here, the VO tends to be really bad at times. Today I’ve played the mission “Battle for Claw Island” (which was a pretty bad experience – tons of mobs chasing you around and horribly useless NPCs) and heard Deputy Mira say something like “Ah, my eyes!”. I must say it sounded more like “Meh, my eyes. Whatever. I’m taking a nap.” Also, sometimes Trahearne sounds like somebody forced him to live.
But, of course, VO tends to be pretty good – most actors voicing charrs in the Charr storyline do their job really well.

I dont really have a problem with the conversations content, instead the coversation itself.
Cutscenes supposed to show the “SCENE” between 2 parts. Not a “wall of audio”…

I pesonally loved gw1s cutscenes. They show my character in action, talking and interacting with the world…I FELT MY CHARACTER PART OF THE STORY . Not like in Gw2, that says this, but actually its not like that.

My only problem was my own Character’s Dialogs… often saying things that didn’t match the personality progression I either Started with, or was working towards. …Just the completely out of character platitudes & exposition that Ben Yahtzee often spends more time than he should Ranting about.

The voice acting is really bad – it’s uninspired and it seems as if the voice actors just wanted to get their paychecks.
The world doesn’t seem real – the characters in the personal story never sleep, or eat, or make love, or concern themselves about down to earth things – they are always worried about the main plot which makes them unrealistic.
There is no individualism in the races – why is there no Charr pacifist, or an Asuran dyslexic, or a Norn who has lost all his battles and is an outcast from society? Somebody who isn’t a hero or a villain , but a real being.
And, lastly, you don’t feel that your story is making any real impact on the world. If that is impossible or too expensive/time consuming to do, then maybe the stories should be more personal, about your family or background.. or maybe about your race instead of the huge menace which doesn’t seem so menacing if you have dragon bash festivals and what not.

I’d like to see more characters that are not black or white, but grey. Characters that care for their interests or goals…i may give You the stupid example, but i like characters like Orochimaru from Naruto, we know he is evil etc., but we don’t know his true intentions, we don’t know what sits in his crazy head, mysterious crazy man. He likes when there is an action in the world, when something moves, he don’t like static times, he likes to watch what results some action will bring etc. Very well crafted character.

Also i’d like to see more darker stories, some hard decision to be made, decision that might turn wrong in the future (i like The Witcher series touch in this area). Heroes make mistakes too. For instance we see how some creatures attack a guy and try to kill him, we can skip it or help this guy, but we don’t know him, then it turns out that he is an evil oune and decimates orphanage, because he looked for sth and we got this info later in the game from some npc. If we knew he was a bad guy, would we help him? We can take the path to track him down and kill him or say “whatever” and move along

I know that GW2 wants to innovate and stuff, but it is good to take good inspirations from other games, novels, or tv shows, especially when they have good crafted story and characters.

I think that only ArenaNet have balls to let us craft our characters as we want and i hope They will give us more freedom to do so. I don’t want to be oh so brigthy hero, i want to have some sense of evilness inside my character, maybe i’d like to detach from this group Trahearne leads and work on my own, care about my business or even cooperate with evil characters to achieve some goals. I want some decision that are not good or bad, rather evil or less evil

It kinds of bothered me that humans are gigantic cheeseballs in this one. It’s like they tried to make it a bit more interesting at times, with the main character being angry and threatening to bring down the whole city if the gang was not brought to justice, but there are only a couple of moments like this. The main human character feels like the 60s Superman – bland and corky. I would’ve imagined that a street urchin turned gangster would be a little rougher around the edges.

I have an example of how I think some dialogue can be improved

Original

Thora Griffonbane: Hail, Hero! Are you here to take part in this year’s Great Hunt?
Character Name: Of course I am! Just tell me what needs to be done and stand clear.
Thora Griffonbane: Hunt down three of the wildest animals you can find and take trophies from your kills. Present only the finest to Ido the Tanner to prove your worth.
Thora Griffonbane: Whoever has the best trophies, and whose bravery is the greatest, will be invited to join the Great Hunt.
Thora Griffonbane: Knut Whitebear has said this season’s event will be one of the most dangerous, so be ready. I’ve even heard the renowed Eir Stegalkin might attend.
Character Name: I look forward to impressing them both—after I’ve earned my place in the hunt.

Modified

Thora Griffonbane: Hail! Taking part in the Great Hunt?
Character Name: Of course! Tell me what to do and stand clear.
Thora Griffonbane: Hunt down three of the wildest animals and take trophies. Present the finest to Ido the Tanner.
Thora Griffonbane: The trophies that prove the greatest bravery will join the Great Hunt.
Thora Griffonbane: Knut Whitebear has said this event will be the most dangerous, so be ready. I’ve heard Eir Stegalkin might attend.
Character Name: I’ll show them what I’m made of—once I’ve earned my place.

The modified version probably needs a few iterations but I think its better. I think dialogue should be more concise with the VO carrying more, kinda like Tybalts dialogue really.

The above example just has too much useless fluff, trying to pass on information in a forceful way or being too descriptive. In order for it to feel more natural it needs to avoid this. Avoiding this also allows for a Voice actor to give more personality to the character if the director allows. It must also be pointed out that both characters in this dialogue are stiff with seemingly the exact same stale personality.

This is all IMO btw, I’ve done a bit of writing so I have a little insight but I may be wrong

You know I was skimming over this thread and this was the first thread ever I actually saw someone related to area net post on. that fact that he took an interest in this thread is a real relief to me. It just shows me that someone cares about the experience.

I just want to point out it’s not just the writer here. A good actor can make even a bad script believable and touching. I think if you took on the mindset that “I want what I write to win their hearts and minds” than you’re not going to write something bad. I’m convinced some real effort is going to be put into it based on what I just saw here.

I think you’re major problem is you’re voice actors. They aren’t into it and you can feel it, they are just reading from a script. The way the story is revealed is this cinema (if you can call it that)

You have two or more players with your character talking to each other side by side and the most they every do is shake their fist. Writing is a form of communicating right. You goal is communicate the story ina believable and suspenseful way correct. 10% of communication is words the other 90% is in body language. This isn’t a failure on the writers part.

This is a failure of two departments withing arenanet not committed to the same goal.
The graphics lead, head editor, needs to get with however is doing cgi’s put your voice actors in suits, and have them ACT OUT the scenes. Than convert that captured data into a cgi. This is the most effective technique in the animated industry right now, and it creates LIVING animated cgi’s with REAL body language. good writers don’t write stories, they paint them.

I liked the dialogue and thought it was well done compared to some other MMOs.

However, I find it very strange that you think the Charr, of all the races, has decent dialogue options. They are the most monotonous, forced, and inflexible in terms of voice acting…actually quite horrid.

Human is good and it’s bad. It is what it is.

The Sylvari and Asura were both very well done.

The Norn, from what little experience I had with them, just annoyed me. I liked their voice acting but didn’t like what they talked about frequently.