Guild Wars 2

I just wanted to know, why the female sylvari are using so many "combat" sounds of the female humans. With "combat" sound I mean the sounds characters make, while attacking, dying, jumping ect..
There is one sound collection for each race and gender (example: humans, ascalon ghosts, human risen are using the same sounds). Usually the sound sets are completely different, but the sylvari women are using many sounds of the human women. For instance there is only one sylvari dying sound out of four. If the character gets knocked down there is one human sound or if he is crippled there are 2 human sounds. Even if a sylvari woman jumps with Jump Shot, she screams like a human.

I’m just curious, why the sylvari sounds aren’t individual. It worked out with all other races and genders. And I cannot believe, that Jennifer Hale couldn’t perform the sounds herself.

I’d swear my Male Asura Engineer has a single Female Norn guttural sound accidentally cross-linked. He has one grunt I am certain is pulling from the wrong set.

Cody Crichton.7516:

Sylvari females have and always have had their own vocal (guttural) set.

Each of the sounds for guttural types used between the various races are recorded by different actors but with similar deliveries—hence there is some stylistic resemblance between sylvari female and human female within a given action. Especially so between human and sylvari because they also share sound cue timings since they’re animated so similarly. But each player type definitely has a unique set of sounds.

That’s what I thought too — about the different actors — therefore I always repored it as a sound bug. But after a while, I wanted to “check” it myself. That’s why I extracted the audio files. After a bit of “searching” I found the “guttural” sound sets. Being extracted in one “line-up”, it was easy to listen to all of them for all races. And please believe me Cody, as I reached the sylvari set, there were some files from the human set (again) (including the above-mentioned sounds).
Besides the sylvari do sound different than the humans. Higher in tone. I don’t now, if Jennifer Hale and April Stewart performed the vocal sets themselves, but they sure sound different.

If you say, Cody, that every actor performed a whole set, than some sylvari sounds are simply not in the game. Or let’s just say, I did not find them, where they had to be and they won’t activate.

Cody Crichton.7516:

Nike.2631:

I’d swear my Male Asura Engineer has a single Female Norn guttural sound accidentally cross-linked. He has one grunt I am certain is pulling from the wrong set.

If you can find a reliable way to get that mismatched sound to play, like a specific skill or action, then do tell. Something like that should definitely be fixed.

For me this seems to happen when I’m talking to a merchant. Very, very rarely I’ll hear some other gender or race apart from myself say the “good bye” or “thank you” dialogue.

At first I thought maybe this was a cool new thing and the shopkeeper was bidding me good bye…

But when this happened to me recently, I was talking to the mystic forge lady in WvW and the sound was a male human.

I was on my male charr (though I do also play a male human). Not sure if there was a male human around me. /shrug

(Also, in WvW, the garrison mystic forge is still using the halloween mystic gorge skin. )

One of the grunts my female human makes while jumping sounds rather unnatural to me. It is a guttural sound that may be from a wrong audio set. (It sounds more like a shortened, higher-pitched (female?) version of the grawl grunt. Either that, or the soundbyte is garbled or cut off at an unusual point, making it sound weird.)

For some reason, I most often hear it while doing the Urmaug’s Secret jumping puzzle with my female human (while jumping up the steep rock wall), and never while doing e.g. the Troll’s End jumping puzzle. Therefore, my suggestion for reproducing it is to perform the Urmaug’s Secret jumping puzzle a few times with a human female character.

(Just to be clear, my human female can perform different grunt sounds while jumping. The one I hear most often in Troll’s End is unmistakably by the same voice actor who does the human female’s voice. The other one that I most often hear in Urmaug’s Secret is the one I suspect may be bugged.)

This has never changed since the game launched.

Cody Crichton.7516:

Nike.2631:

I’d swear my Male Asura Engineer has a single Female Norn guttural sound accidentally cross-linked. He has one grunt I am certain is pulling from the wrong set.

If you can find a reliable way to get that mismatched sound to play, like a specific skill or action, then do tell. Something like that should definitely be fixed.

I will experiment and get back to you .

Cody Crichton.7516:

Nike.2631:

I’d swear my Male Asura Engineer has a single Female Norn guttural sound accidentally cross-linked. He has one grunt I am certain is pulling from the wrong set.

If you can find a reliable way to get that mismatched sound to play, like a specific skill or action, then do tell. Something like that should definitely be fixed.

Just noticed this when my male Asura had weakness applied on him.

Cody Crichton.7516:

Nike.2631:

I’d swear my Male Asura Engineer has a single Female Norn guttural sound accidentally cross-linked. He has one grunt I am certain is pulling from the wrong set.

If you can find a reliable way to get that mismatched sound to play, like a specific skill or action, then do tell. Something like that should definitely be fixed.

Further research on my Asuran Male Engineer:

The sound that I believe is Claudia Christian/Female Norn is part of the set that can be triggered by jumping – jumping up and down in place will eventually produce it.

Its one of 3 “Hmmm” sounds (as opposed to the he-uut, yea-aah, aaah, and other jumping noises ). The highest pitched Hmmm sounds like the Asuran male voice actor. The suspect one is one of the two deeper pitches.

Sorry I can’t be more precise. I’m not sure I have the technical language to lead you to it more exactly…

Thanks for looking into it. I’m glad they are in there – they do break up the bounding and leaping. That said, my female Norn Warrior isn’t terribly ladylike and the one ‘hmmm’ that pings my recognition is much lower pitch than most of the Asuran sounds, as one would expect from about 11 times the resonant body cavity volume . It may be false recognition on my part… but my ear is usually pretty good at picking out familiar voices without visual cues (decades of anime watching ).

Out of curiosity, are the three Asuran male ‘hmm’ sounds separate recordings or a tone shift of a single take? Its quite fascinating the processes you must go through to build the acoustic ambiance of the world and individual characters.

Can I get in on this?

My manly Charr necromancer sounds like my feminine human engineer when dodging or hit. Male Charr sounds very girly. The effect is disconcerting.

Could you please check to make sure all is well in this regard?