Voice acting and the player
My theory for why they went to the text boxes instead of continuing with cinematics is cost and time. It’s cheaper to do the text boxes and also more time efficient to code over the cinematics. I think there’s even a post about it from when they released LS S2.
there’s several thousand lines of dialogue in the game. for the entire thing to be voice acted would be incredibly expensive and a lot of work and effort that, let’s face it, most people will just skip over beyond their first time through the content.
Quite a lot of RPGs do this, not only MMOs. You’re looking at a lot of voice content when you have different races and different genders doing the same dialog. Some games cover this up better than others though.
It is jarring though to go from a fully voiced scene in which npcs talk to each other to simple text boxes when its the pc and another npc talking… I don’t even remember when the last time we had a cine with the pc talking..
I still find it better than the entire games being voiced by 2 voice actors with no difference cough, but hey, its fully voiced right?!
Besides the complications of having the same voice actors for the male and female version of all the playable species doing all the same lines throughout the living story I believe it may be a choice to let the player feel more like they are part of the story, rather than the story being just for the character they are playing.
By reading what your character is saying you’re more able to put your own voice into the story, rather than hear another person’s voice.
The fact that our characters never talk any more is by far the dumbest thing about the living story.
I suspect it’s simply that they need 10 voice actors to do each line of player dialogue.
I’d like my character to talk again, though.
I also find the text box choices ruining immersion. My character looses ome of its personality without a voice. And while speaking of voices, why not be able to choose, at least from a few different pitches when u start. EVERY single character of the same race and gender sounds EXCACTLY the same – also ruims immersion. And – it also creats confusion ,as I use the random things that are being said to figure out whats going on around me. Ofte its not MY character that I hears though, but somebodeys else… = confusion
voice acting cost money and time so they reduce it to mostly npc heroes like braham. rox .kasmeer,taimi etc.
but i like to see my character say something in big moments like: final battle with scarlet, i was waiting to see my character say something after all that fight with her but he was just standing there like statue and npc heroes were like go finish her off like i am their soldier who does dirty job.
i did not say word in that big moment with scarlet made me feel that story is so general and i could watch it on youtube for 5min rather than playing it.
I mean, i completely understand why our characters no longer talk. 2 different voice actors for each race costs a lot, and takes a whole lot of time.
I think they could simply re-use some of our character’s lines for certain situations. They did so with Trahearne’s “The enemy is here” (or something like that) in the latest LS.
Our characters have literally thousands of lines, so i’m sure there’s a whole bunch of neutral ones that could fit in some situations.
Until now we dont even have different voices for characters and you guys are already thinking of this?