One – Piken Square
Why the "talking heads" approach to dialogue?
Why?
Because it’s so much easier to have two characters awkwardly stand around waving their arms in ever repeating patterns while spouting predictable dialogue than to spend time and effort animating scenes.
Why put effort into something when you can simplify it and get away with it?
Because 95% of the players just press the skip button as soon as they can, because any story in any MMORPG is pointless and flawed by definition of the genre. If I were them, I would probably not even include that, tbh…
This way we at least get to admire how awesome (or not) our characters look up close. More useful than the actual story.
Never thought about the skipping part. They should definitely add an option to skip them with the non-marionette style too, lest they would be kitten ing off people who are playing their 8th+ character.
Still, I think Pariah hits the nail. More cost efficient, less chance for awkward bugs and because they can.
One – Piken Square
Tom Gore is right. My personal story in Gw2 is no where near as good as in Gw1 . Mainly because I find the Marionette Dialogues very boring and skip them. In Gw1 they added much more video cutscenes and imo they should bring that back.
One of the biggest things they touted before the game came out was the personal story…..and yes, it turned out to be garbage. The story itself is a bit interesting in the beginning, but then quickly turns into mediocrity. Though that is not the main problem.
The biggest mistake here was definitely the “talking heads” approach OP describes. Its the single worst way Anet could have picked as a story telling tool. It completely takes you out of the game world into a very crappy animated marionette show.
Not only that, since they limited themselves to that crappy story telling template, most scenes just came out as uninteresting and hard to follow.
For a good way to do dialogue in an mmo….look no further than SWTOR. The game might have been crappy but their story telling techniques were very effective.
Anet really needs to improve their story telling techniques. It is obvious this is their weakest link right now. Just look at all the stuff with the “living story” stuff. Who knows the hell is going on? I get a cryptic email about something going on. I have to then open my achievement tab to see what I have to do…..and then that’s it lol. A grade school kid could probably match that level of skill……
Hey, at least we have lip flap now! Didn’t used to have that.
You know why they probably used that method?
Time constraints. They probably had this awesome scene put together where they used the terrain and active models to show off . . . and then discovered how much time was needed to be sure it worked with all possible models, armors (we do know there’s still clipping issues!) and so on . . .
That’s really what keeps coming up now and then. They had time issues getting this game ready. Why? I don’t know, probably a case of overreaching what time they had to spend . . .
Seeking assistants for the Asuran Catapult Project. Applicants will be tested for aerodynamics.
The funny thing is, in most cases there would be absolutely zero need for a cutscene (much less a marionette show) at all! A few words exchanged between the hero and an NPC, or even just between a couple of NPCs. These both could be perfectly well done in-game with the speech bubbles. Look at the beginning of the candidate trials! I laughed aloud when the first mate made his “kitten jump” as Kiel said he’s going to return the money to their rightful owners.
If someone would run their character into an awkward place to speak their lines in the conversation, it’s their loss.
One – Piken Square
Because 95% of the players just press the skip button as soon as they can, because any story in any MMORPG is pointless and flawed by definition of the genre. If I were them, I would probably not even include that, tbh…
This way we at least get to admire how awesome (or not) our characters look up close. More useful than the actual story.
That’s pretty silly. There’s a huge portion of the community devoted to role-play and the lore, after all.
Because 95% of the players just press the skip button as soon as they can, because any story in any MMORPG is pointless and flawed by definition of the genre. If I were them, I would probably not even include that, tbh…
This way we at least get to admire how awesome (or not) our characters look up close. More useful than the actual story.
That’s pretty silly. There’s a huge portion of the community devoted to role-play and the lore, after all.
Yes, the personal story is good for those who want to roleplay… until you realise that over the last year or so there’s been millions of other people that have all risen to the rank of commander and have all been the heros who killed Zhaitan once and for all, during an epic battle… which keeps happening several times a day every day and Zhaitan is always there. Additionally, if you are a Sylvari, you’re supposed to be one of the only 2 of your kind who have a Wyld hunt against Zhaitan himself… except in reality every non-npc Sylvari is the same in that matter. And there are thousands upon thousands of Charrs fathered by the same deserter mesmer, half of which helped him escape, while half of them killed him.
Stories in MMOs are unavoidably chock-full of logical inconsistencies, is what I’m trying to say. And GW2 is actually one of the least bad offenders in that matter, but it still can’t escape the fact that all of its story content is 100% irrelevant in the grand scheme of things on merit of being an MMO (aside from providing backstory, ofc). Thus you can roleplay all you want when it comes to the personal story and/or dungeon story, but in reality your character only is what you make them be in the non-instanced world. You are still perfectly able to turn a blind eye on that and suspend disbelief, but it’s still just that – turning a blind eye on all those logical inconsistencies that are part of the story. And as long as those are there, it will never be a story trully worth spending all the recources necessary to make it anything beyond basic.