Guild Wars 2

So after doing T4 dailies today, I found that anet have changed the voice of the Mysterious Asura in the Chaos fractal. Long story short, he now has a deeper voice, less distorted and less comical. Please change back. It was the most memorable parts of the fractal. The once maniacal antagonist is now dull and forgettable.

Agreed, the new one is so bad compared to the original.

Agreed. The intonations of the new voice use are less emotional and it seems like the actor didn’t even try. Plz change it back.

I noticed this change too. It actually sounds like the same voice and even the same line recordings, just with different filters applied to make it sound different.

It sounds like someone was trying to make it the most generically evil voice possible for some reason. It was much better before.

He sounds a lot like the mad king with the changes, maybe just a Halloween special, don’t know.

The voice changed agian! As of last patch it’s now a combonation of the deep voice and annother voice (might be the origonal, can’t tell)… I wonder if this is going somewhere?

zerorogue.9410:

The voice changed agian! As of last patch it’s now a combonation of the deep voice and annother voice (might be the origonal, can’t tell)… I wonder if this is going somewhere?

I bet they are experimenting. It’s really the same voice, sped up or slowed down (the same thing happens to Dessa’s voice).

I do believe they have changed some intonations as well. For exemple, the way he says “Ready to meet my latest creation ? No ? TOO BAD !” used to be in a very sarcastic tone. Now, it’s just as if he was half-asleep.

I thought meh another bad change nobody will notice. Thanksfully OP and others noticed and agree, it’s worse. The old one had a inquest/mysterious/science fiction style, new one is just plain annoying without even have a lore connected to why it’s annoying flat.

Thinking about this more, I actually think the change may be intended as a hint of upcoming Fractal content and storyline progression.

I noticed the new change as well. It’s far better than it were. Still not better than the original one tho.

Interesting, but the old voice still was better

CptAurellian.9537:

Interesting, but the old voice still was better

+1

Gaile Gray.6029:

There are some things about the Mysterious Asura that… must remain mysterious at this time. However, James Richter from our Audio or Sound Team provided some information on processing that you might want to know: “Everything from the September VO sessions was reprocessed last week using higher-quality source material. To be clear, these were recordings of the same performances, but with some de-noising removed that was causing things to sound compressed and grainy (which other players had noted in earlier releases!). In addition, there was a bug in the Distorted Intercom process that was causing it to sweep through a much narrower pitch range than intended. So it’s possible that players were accustomed to hearing less pitch variation from this character than they have now, but the current version is more what the sound designers wanted.”

Interesting stuff, eh?

I have to agree with other people in this thread, it was the original lower pitch and grainy distortion that made this Mysterious Asura, mysterious. Actually sounding like he’s hijacked the fractal and overridden Dessa, it was a little sinister. Now it kinda sounds like Dessa left for a coffee and the trainee looking for a laugh has taken over.

Now it sounds like ’not asura, not science fiction, not electronics related, not mysterious, not grubby inquest link voice acting.

Sometimes a wrong gone experiment is better then the original intention. But as ‘maker’, the ‘intender’, you can’t see it, because your vision is the only thing they allow in their brain to not forget it. In conclusion ‘The Intension syndrome’ (my name for this, it seems quite to the point for it), has lowered the potential of this fractal.

The first voice was more annoying, but and here’s the but, when you heard what he said (and you heard he much more clear then new voice), you realized, why he was so ‘grubby’, and mysterious, and you actually laughed with it every time you heared it.

Now maybe the voice is ‘soundwise’ correct (i know from photography, wich i do a lot, that there’s the syndrome to make artificially everything corrected the lens does wrong in photoshop, but usually that makes it look ‘artificial’, and not real). But it is not ‘intriging’, anymore, because of those fixes. It’s just one voice of a thousand, yammering, and ready to be surpressed by the mind.

Conclusion (for me). To much Soundshopping done to the voice (Soundediting).

PS I really really hate static noise. I get ultra fast annoyed by it, and can’t really surpress it in my mind. The old voice, maybe had some static (from my memory), but not in the way that annoys me, it has this ‘science fiction edit’ to the noise, making the static, not annoying, but part of the eletronic machine the asura is using, like a slight distortion of voice, and not a mechanical error of the machine. As such the static (if there was any, i can barely remember it), was ok. In fact, the new voice edit, you hear the ‘speak’ mistakes more from the voice actor (like when they stop a word to early, breathe air at wrong time, interferring the line and making a slight noise with it). The first edit, you could not hear this because of the let’s call it ‘science fiction’ voice edit.

So wathever, the dev can be happy his intension worked, but the end result (from the users, and not the indenter, aka the dev), is not as good.

Seen this al to much in gw2, things that are edited for no apparent reason.

Plz ask in future feedback before ‘pushing true the intension’.

PS sorry for using these weird words, but i like it makes it easier to repeat stuff, then post full sentences explainin non stop.

Ivantreil.3092:

CptAurellian.9537:

Interesting, but the old voice still was better

+1

+2

Gaile Gray.6029:

So it’s possible that players were accustomed to hearing less pitch variation from this character than they have now, but the current version is more what the sound designers wanted.

There was more variation in the original voice, both in pitch and emotion. Much like some of the others, I think the original voice was much better.

Sometimes getting it wrong leads to better results. If the current voice is as intended, please put back the messed up version.

The new version is better than the previous one, but still worse than the original one. Please change back.