Guild Wars 2

Someone smarter than myself has probably already brought this up on the forums in better form, but I’ll go ahead and toss this out there.

Occasionally I cheat on GW2 with other games. (Before you start to worry, it’s cool. GW2 and I have an understood open relationship.) One such game is Smite. In Smite, they have a store much like GW’s gem store. In this store they sell voice packages for the various gods you can play as. The voice packages change the timbre of the respective god’s voice along with what he or she actually says in a given situation.

My buddies and I play GW2 together on Skype and always laugh about how terrible things like “For great justice!” or “I could outrun a centaur!” are. I think it would be cool to have voice packages that could change what your character says and how she/he says it in a given situation. The options are pretty limitless. The robot backpack that says stuff is kind of like this, but not exactly. What do you guys think?

The idea is sound (no pun intended), but to record all those soundbites and then re-record all the personal story for consistency and then all the expac new voice overs and then factor that in for future seasons and expacs…well it wont happen.

Even if it raised enough money, it’s a lot of development time, since it has to be scheduled in when a VA is available, which knocks onto delays in other developments and then scheduled when the studio isn’t being used for new dialogues…etc etc etc

It might seem a small thing and the idea has been suggested many times before and in theory, it’s a fun idea with merit, but realistically it isn’t practical. It’s one reason progressive games like MMO’s stopped giving voices to player characters

Why in the gemstore? We pay for an expansion, that’s the kind of things that must be included.

For shouts, skills and minor NPC interraction, this would be a nice feature.

But recording 10 different actors for every cutscene in-game (past and future) would be a huge undertaking that I can’t ever see happening.

I think the cutsceene voices are a non-issue.

Because personally, I would be perfectly fine with having cutsceene and story dialogue revert back to the “original” voice and my custom voice pack only plays in open world and in combat.

Would it be a little jarring to have one voice in a cutsceene and immediately have another in the the fight after it? Yes it would.

But you know what else is jarring?

Playing in the open world when you constantly hear other people saying the exact same lines as your own character with the exact same voice.

In an MMO, I think the priority should be on things that make our individual characters better able to stand out from each other, so having more players with different voices enhances MY experience even if I’m not the one using it.

The bottom line is that voice pack customization is something I would gladly pay actual money for, even if it didn’t apply to the entire game such as story sequences. And if enough people agree with me there, that’s really the only argument Arenanet needs, after all.

For that matter, we kind of already have such a voicepack in the form of the Job-o-Tron backpeice. It’s a bit annoying since it’s also repetitive and there’s only one of it’s kind so it doesn’t solve the variety problem. But if there were 20 different voice packs and voice changing items, you’d hear specific ones less often so that problem is solved with time as more are added.

As another suggestion, if people are insisting on story and combat voices matching, even then I would pay for the ability to customize lines. Like the same voice actor can do variations on combat lines so you could pay for a “Manical madman” where the character laughs and says cruel taunts in combat, as an example, and then there can be lots of archetypes like a emotionless deadpan person, a pacifistic person (who’s ‘entering combat’ line might be something like ‘we don’t have to do this’) and so forth. If you have more than one of those packs you could perhaps mix and match and customize which lines are triggered by which actions.

Essentially, I would love for my characters to sound more like what I feel represents my own head-cannon personalities for them, and also for there to be more variety in player voices in general. I have little interest in buying outfits, but would spend a fair deal of money for voices. And this is far more important to me than seemlessness between story dialouge and gameplay. Arenanet already dropped that ball when they made every single one of us the Pact Commander.

I’d just be happy if my female human Necro would say ‘centaur’ correctly. Very disappointed when I found out who the voice actress was as well.

Bellatrixa.3546:

I’d just be happy if my female human Necro would say ‘centaur’ correctly. Very disappointed when I found out who the voice actress was as well.

Are you going to petition for “color” to have a U in it as well?

I hear this complaint a fair bit, but it IS correct. Only, it’s correct for a standard US accent.

The human players have an american-sounding accent, so it makes sense that is how it would be said. I imagine if Sylvari players had the same line they’d pronounce it as what you see as the ’correct" pronunciation since they have a more European-sounding ascent to me.

Now, if you want a player to use proper English English, (as in from England, with the appropriate accent and pronunciations) , I’d be in full support of the option. (Also, Australian would be amazing on ranger, if a bit stereotypical) But to say it’s “incorrect” well, you’re just gonna have to get over it.

I’m all in favor of the idea. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will happen, since the costs would far exceed the revenue.

Unintuitively, voice packs are very expensive. There are are a huge number of bits of dialogue, extended scenes, etc. In addition, there’s ongoing QA for a variety of situations. Plus, if ANet keeps with the living story, then they need to find actors who can commit to additional recording sessions. Not to mention, if the actor and/or director misunderstands something, you end up with something like Trahearne channeling Eyore, which isn’t suitable for an epic figure (that voice actor ended up re-recording the old scenes, etc, which imo helped enormously).

In short, I suspect that voice packs would cost more than ANet would get in cash from folks who would be willing to pay for them.

Or… we can have pitch sliders…..
It can’t be that hard to implement… right?

You forgot to mention that Smite only has a default generic voice for every sound you can make and not only do you need to buy the voice pack to hear your character’s voice, but the packs that sound different ALSO need the skin required.

Adding voicepacks without including re-voiced cutscenes would be shoddy workmanship on Anet’s part, and it would be extremely jarring. Yet re-voicing all past, present, and future cutscenes would quickly become prohibitively difficult and expensive. As such, while it’s a nice idea, there’s no way Anet gives it a try.

Sounds like a good idea. However I would worry about the cost of them since it would cost a bit to hire all the actors to say everything (all personal story and future LS stuff as well) if this is what you mean.

Having said that, I would be onboard with this. Not to be racist or anything but so would my black skinned afro wearing alt. Seriously hearing his “white” voice all the time just breaks immersion for me…..

Personally I don’t see them re-doing previous personal stories, but I’d pay if only for combat grunts and dialogue, and future content with a voice of choice.

…Voice of choice… heh, I like that.

Bellatrixa.3546:

I’d just be happy if my female human Necro would say ‘centaur’ correctly. Very disappointed when I found out who the voice actress was as well.

But the question then becomes which is the correct way to say it? Example if you are American it is said “centar”. If you are from pretty much anywhere else in the world you will hear what is in my opinion the correct way to say it “centor”.

See the problem here?

Paulytnz.7619:

Bellatrixa.3546:

I’d just be happy if my female human Necro would say ‘centaur’ correctly. Very disappointed when I found out who the voice actress was as well.

But the question then becomes which is the correct way to say it? Example if you are American it is said “centar”. If you are from pretty much anywhere else in the world you will hear what is in my opinion the correct way to say it “centor”.

See the problem here?

the word centaur is probably pretty difficult in a lot of the non-greek languages…the gree sometimes do weird stuff with their pronunciation that not easy to copy, for people from other languages of the indo-european background. So all the non-greek make it kind of fit their own language…including AE and BE.
please remember, we’ve got already several voice samples, so you can hear your character speak with different voices already, like french [‘sentoX] (voiceless alveolar fricative, nasalized open back unrounded vowel, voiceless alveloar stop, open-mid back rounded vowel, uvular fricative), or Spanish [sen’tau?o] (voicess alveolar fricative,midfront unrounded vowel, alveloar nasalvoicels alveolar stop, open central unrounded vowel, close back rounded vowel, alveloar tap,mid back rounded vowel)or German [tsen’tau?] (voiceles alveolar fricative, midfront unrounded vowel, alveloar nasal, voicelss alveloar stop, open central unrounded vowel, near-close-near-back vowel, near-open central vowal ).
You have already a lot of proper pronounced choices and they all speak the second syllable different, so I’m sure you find one that meets your taste.
the voice over in not bound to the text, so you will stil understand everything even if your monolingual English, as long as you’re able to read.

don’t get me wrong, I’d love some different voices….for example a younger (like in her 20ies) sounding voice for the human female for example would be very nice.
but this would need a lot of time, money and work dedicated something relatively small and I’d like to spend them these resources on other thing in the game before.

Sorting out new voices shouldn’t be that difficult.

As this is a repetition thing there could be new comments recorded by the same voice, just providing alternate versions of the same thing. The Charr specific Battle Roar skill does this already <To Victory, Anger Rising, amongst others>.

Then anet could put in a use your own voice pack option, people could record their own voices and just use them locally to replace the actors. Others could then create voice packs and make them available for download.

Of course, you would be the only one to hear the alternate voices, everyone else would hear the original.

Reminds me, there used to be two children, one charr and a human female talking at the bank in LA. This used to be highly irritating as every couple of minutes they would repeat the same stuff.

Now I miss them being there :/

Bellatrixa.3546:

I’d just be happy if my female human Necro would say ‘centaur’ correctly. Very disappointed when I found out who the voice actress was as well.

female human voice is something I admire, some lines have so much enthusiasm compared to other races/gender. “Save yourselves!!” “Retreat!!” “Agh! I will destroy you all!”, etc.

Five races and two sexes making a total of ten recordings just to have one new voice pack. Couple that with the thousands of required recorded lines in Guild Wars 2 plus the thousands of additional recorded lines for HoT, makes this a very unlikely addition to the Gemstore.

As for dropping cutscene voice for the pack, that is a ridiculous suggestion as Arena Net set a certain standard in quality for their game.

I have to admit I’ve never heard an American say ‘Cent-arr’ (last syllable sounding like a pirate and being elongated), it’s just a quibble because it’s said so often, tends to grate because of the frequency and breaks my immersion. No, I don’t care about colour not being spelt with a ‘u’ -rolls eyes-. I understand what Americanisms are, I can mostly accept them but this one irritates because of the reasons I mentioned (reasons other people have voiced in other threads). The voice acting for the most part I don’t mind and I was surprised to see who did the voice for human females when I IMDBed it. Wondered why the voice sounded so familiar. I find if I imagine my character as having wandered in off South Park, it makes the pronunciation a bit easier on my ears.

It’s cool though, I’m sure there’s a lot of Americans who don’t care for how Sylvari pronounce things in their British accents. I’ve found no irritations with my Ranger’s voice acting so…

As for actually changing voices, I would think a pitch slider wouldn’t be too difficult to add. I’d imagine it’d be easier to apply to new characters though but that would be true for any voice changes. I’m not familiar with GW2’s coding so I can only speculate on that one.

Daharahj.1325:

female human voice is something I admire, some lines have so much enthusiasm compared to other races/gender. “Save yourselves!!” “Retreat!!” “Agh! I will destroy you all!”, etc.

Heh, the other night my Necro yelled out ‘Oh, it’s ON!’ and my boyfriend looked at me worriedly for a second. It’s what I usually yell before a tickle fight with the same vigor

Randulf.7614:

The idea is sound (no pun intended), but to record all those soundbites and then re-record all the personal story for consistency and then all the expac new voice overs and then factor that in for future seasons and expacs…well it wont happen.

Even if it raised enough money, it’s a lot of development time, since it has to be scheduled in when a VA is available, which knocks onto delays in other developments and then scheduled when the studio isn’t being used for new dialogues…etc etc etc

It might seem a small thing and the idea has been suggested many times before and in theory, it’s a fun idea with merit, but realistically it isn’t practical. It’s one reason progressive games like MMO’s stopped giving voices to player characters

PSO 2 wants to have a talk with you, but you’ll only hear Japanese lol. Over 200 voice sets for buying or earning through various means. And Yes! We have pitch sliders for every single one! Sega wasted no expense on their flagship MMO/rpg series. (also, its FTP) Don’t you wish Anet did the same?