Guild Wars 2

I could not find a topic regarding the beta story alone, so I thought I’d make one.

My biggest point is that I would like to say that I am super excited that I , the player character, am speaking in this story. You don’t know how happy this makes me. My character has been all but mute for so long.

That said, the timing and pacing of spoken lines is horrible. I’m not talking about the voice acting, I’m talking about the coded time for the lines to be spoken. During all parts of the brief Verdant Brink intro story, people were talking over each other constantly. Here are my suggestions:

1) Make the speaking louder, for everyone. Everyone speaks so quietly. And, for me, if my character is not facing someone head on, I cannot hear them at all. Fix that. Sure, make sound come from 360 degrees and base volume on distance, but start at a high enough volume that I can hear people speaking to me within 1000 ft no problem.

2) Don’t let characters talk over each other. No one should be talking over each other. If they’re saying unimportant dialogue (“Ho, Traveler!”) severely mute it during story dialogue. If they have unique story dialogue to say, do it sequentially. In the Verdant Brink story, everyone was talking over each other every step of the way. It was horrible.

3) Find a way to frame the important scenes. I’d prefer the return of the Personal Story dialogue scenes, but I know they are dead. But, without them, everyone is walking all over the place saying things and if I don’t have the camera on them, I have no idea what they are doing or saying. Find a way to fix this. Either take control of my character and the camera during important scenes and wheel the camera way in and fly it around dramatically to take in the characters talking and the scene. When Braham ran up to the camp yelling about his mother, I missed it because I was still catching up. One of the best lines and best voice acting by Braham to date and I missed it. It should never be that way.

That’s odd, I didn’t hear people talking over each other except on my 4th playthrough when I rapidly triggered the dialogues leading to aiding Laranthir. In fact one of my pet peeves surfaced when Taimi began an asuran aphorism and Braham cut her off: in a RL interruption, the first word of the interruption overlaps the last word of the interrupted sentence. But in game dialogues or bad movies, the actor being interrupted stops mid word, there is a pause, then the next actor’s line begins. Jars me every time, since the person talking shouldn’t know they are going to be interrupted at that point.

For the volume, go into your sound settings and slide “Dialogue” to maximum. It won’t help with Rytlock’s lines in the cinematic, which are too quiet, but you should hear the rest of the dialogues just fine. You might also want to lower the music volume in case that’s drowning out the chatter.

Anyway, I wonder if you had a weird lag or something? Because for me there were distinct pauses between every line.

I personally ignored every word said and skipped cutscenes as I want surprised for release.

However I did notice yes our characters finally finally talk now. This will really make things intresting for sure!

Yes! I really loved that now our characters get to talk, too. Squee!

I agree that the volume is inconsistent. Sometimes, I can hear fine, but other times, it’s really quiet. The first cut scene when you enter was especially hard for me to hear, and I think I’ve only managed to hear about half of it. There weren’t any captions, either (I’m acting under the assumption this will be added later), so I couldn’t just read, like I usually do. I have auditory processing issues, which means I turn captioning on whenever I can, but that’s usually a matter of too much stimulus and losing bits, but this wasn’t that; it was just super quiet.

FWIW, I have my volume cranked pretty high and dialogue is ALWAYS turned to the max, and I still have trouble sometimes because of volume inconsistency.

Otherwise, agreed on all points. (Wait, they’re doing away with the personal storyline-like dialogue? That sucks. I liked that method, but if it means more spoken dialogue overall… okay. But if so then the issues you mention need fixed. I’m curious though, does anyone have a link to where they said they’d be moving away from the personal storyline style and why? TY to anyone who’s able to either link me or just explain.

Nonny.5170:

Otherwise, agreed on all points. (Wait, they’re doing away with the personal storyline-like dialogue? That sucks. I liked that method, but if it means more spoken dialogue overall… okay. But if so then the issues you mention need fixed. I’m curious though, does anyone have a link to where they said they’d be moving away from the personal storyline style and why? TY to anyone who’s able to either link me or just explain.

I don’t have a link, but it has been said that people did not like the old personal story-style dialogue cutscenes and that they would not be doing them from now on. The major complaints is that they were awkward when more than two people were talking and stopped the action for talking.

Those dull two-person PowerPoint slideshows were awful. This is a vast improvement.

Hopefully we’ll see more scenes like what we’re shown here married with the LS’s dialogue interactions with the NPCs.

I liked the personal story cut scenes most of the time, but in certain situations they really did not work.

The worst for me is during the ‘greatest fear’ story arc when Demolitionist Tonn tries to activate a bomb and it doesn’t work. Because you can’t see what he’s doing or anything around him the scene is quite confusing and completely looses any impact. But there are many other situations like that.

I also think the effect of pulling you out of the situation to watch two characters against a generic background reinforces the idea that you’re listening to actors read lines to each other, which makes some of the poor voice acting much more noticeable.

Overall I think this new style is going to be much better, although I agree it needs some work to make sure we don’t miss anything. It’s especially difficult if you can’t hear the dialogue for whatever reason (sound is off, hearing impairment, room is too noisy etc.) because if that’s the case dialogue by anyone who is behind the camera or otherwise off-screen only appears in the chat box and can be hard to follow.