Guild Wars 2

Finally, we were able to restore the player character’s ability to speak—not just in story instances,

just wonder why we dont talk about that or was it mention in the forum already ?

I guess players, like me are waiting for more…important information, I mean yes it’s a nice touch, we hope it will be well implemented and not something we get sick of in 20 minutes and turn it off. But this is not something we really wanted to know…there are far more important things in HoT players are interested in. And the last weeks blog posts were really bad and time buying in my opinion…dissapointing even.

Akagami.9861:

I guess players, like me are waiting for more…important information, I mean yes it’s a nice touch, we hope it will be well implemented and not something we get sick of in 20 minutes and turn it off. But this is not something we really wanted to know…there are far more important things in HoT players are interested in. And the last weeks blog posts were really bad and time buying in my opinion…dissapointing even.

a million times this.

Akagami.9861:

I guess players, like me are waiting for more…important information, I mean yes it’s a nice touch, we hope it will be well implemented and not something we get sick of in 20 minutes and turn it off. But this is not something we really wanted to know…there are far more important things in HoT players are interested in. And the last weeks blog posts were really bad and time buying in my opinion…dissapointing even.

It’s funny how anet portrays it as such a milestone. In reality, they actually took a step back with the living world deal as said character never used it’s voice.

Anet then fixed it by stepping forward again to land right where they started by giving back character storyline speech within HoT.

Now, if they bring back the nice face-to-face cutscenes we had in the original personal story, we would be back at the beginning, which – to be totally honest – would be a big step forward compared to the LS.

Sometimes you have to take two steps back to move into the right direction again. Immersion in LS1 was pretty much non-existant and LS2 was no big improvement.

As bad as they butchered the personal story (fixes sort of coming) it is still better immersion-wise than the living world. Even though the story and immersion never have been great in GW2.

They pretty much offer a feature that was in the game when launched, removed, then reintroduced in the expansion as a groundbreaking feature. The only difference is your character randomly has a voice not only in cutscenes but in normal gameplay also.

I also don’t consider it a key feature of an expansion and i still don’t consider what they showed so far as being an expansion’s worth of content. It lacks the “meat” of an expansion. Till now they just offered us the “crust” by my expectations of an almost 2 year work they bragged about.

1 class…a few specializations using already existing weapons….1 map with no guarantee of more… no dungeons…. custom skills like gliding and jumping on mushrooms..2 skills they bragged way to much with as if they are groundbreaking and unheard off in other mmos…. a screenshot of 2 frogs that smoked too much weed…. 1 new wvw map….1 new pvp mode…and guild halls in a game where guilds don’t matter as much as being part of a random zerg does but still that’s cool. That’s all we know so far.

No mention of how many maps..no mention of how many dungeons…no mention of rewards in general from events…no mention on how they improved events/raids/semiraids aka marionette-type-boss….no mention of GAME PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT and plans… no mention of wvw rewards for scouting towers ..no player housing guaranteed…etc…

So yes i am not surprised not many give a f about voices.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Now, if they bring back the nice face-to-face cutscenes we had in the original personal story, we would be back at the beginning, which – to be totally honest – would be a big step forward compared to the LS.

Bluh, I wholeheartedly disagree. I thought the face-to-face cutscenes were really jarring and ruined immersion. I don’t think the LS text dialog is any better for immersion, but at least the dialog flows better, so I consider overall a small step forward.

I’m actually pretty excited about the announcement of PC voice acting returning, and share the OP’s surprise that more people aren’t talking about it.

It is funny how people have been complaining about the lack of PC voice since the Living story started. And basically claiming that it would be the most important thing ever to bring back.

But now when they finally add it back in, people complain about that as well.

lordkrall.7241:

It is funny how people have been complaining about the lack of PC voice since the Living story started. And basically claiming that it would be the most important thing ever to bring back.

But now when they finally add it back in, people complain about that as well.

No one is complaining that is back…people were complaining that it was there in the begining and then they took it out. That is called a step back where i’m from.

They just reintroduce this thing, it’s not new and it’s not ground breaking…we had it before they act like it’s some big milestone ground breaking things, but we already HAD it….

Now it’s back in, great…but no one is going to buy an expansion just cause out character has a voice AGAIN.
Also people don’t complain about the fact that it’s reintroduced, they complain about the lack of actual new info HoT related. Cause up until now, they just repeated the same things they said in the first place at PAX, but with some photos and witty remarks.

Ohh and let’s not forget about the best one yet, a tie between a “Up until now…just in case you were paying attention during LS2” and ofc the amazing “Hey guys…we hired someone that writes articles for you…so we will write an article about her just so another week goes by without anything new said…enjoy reading a blog post about a person that is supposed to do blog posts about the actual HoT info the people want”

So yeah, get your facts straight before pointing fingers please.

I think the “new, groundbreaking” part is the fact that there will be PC voice acting in the open world in addition to story instances. Plus, it sounds like they’re making the voice acting race-specific, which is also new if they’re doing it in story instances; once you got past the racial part of the Personal Story, every race’s dialog was the same.

Most of the stuff they mentioned about the voice acting was, in fact, new, and not something we had before that they took out.

If you actually read the article, then it’s painfully obvious what they consider “groundbreaking” is the PC talking during normal gameplay.

They’ve said before, specifically Bobby Stein I believe, during the Living World that due to technical limitations they literally couldn’t give the PC spoken dialogue outside of those face-to-face cinematics, so for them to be able to is groundbreaking – in the context of how they’ve altered the GW2 engine’s coding to allow this.

Groundbreaking in games? No. Groundbreaking in GW? Yes.

Another reason there was no PC voice in the LW was because people hated those face-to-face cinematics (with good reason), and they had to hire 20 voice actor per language rather than one per language – for a free dlc, that would cost them more than its worth.

And the race-specific dialogue is an improvement too, though not really all that groundbreaking.

@Krall nobody is complaining it’s back …..how did you understand that?

glehmann.9586:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Now, if they bring back the nice face-to-face cutscenes we had in the original personal story, we would be back at the beginning, which – to be totally honest – would be a big step forward compared to the LS.

Bluh, I wholeheartedly disagree. I thought the face-to-face cutscenes were really jarring and ruined immersion. I don’t think the LS text dialog is any better for immersion, but at least the dialog flows better, so I consider overall a small step forward.

I’m actually pretty excited about the announcement of PC voice acting returning, and share the OP’s surprise that more people aren’t talking about it.

I didn’t like them at first either because one it interrupted what I was doing and it made the battle scenes less fun I wasn’t free to move and do things while talking to the NPCs and two it caused problems with battle scenes in which the game had to be tricked into either despawning mobs or it had to make you immune (which bugs didn’t always allow) in between cut scenes sometimes which broke immersion for me.

In every other title I’ve played in which npc and player character speech was occurring it was always less jarring and more realistic to carry on a conversion while running through the scenes doing things especially in battle scenes or emergencies. From Star Trek’s adventure zones to WoW’s WoD initial questlines it just makes it more fluid.

If I’m not mistaken I believe that SWTOR is changing how theirs work too from what I’ve read.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Now, if they bring back the nice face-to-face cutscenes we had in the original personal story, we would be back at the beginning, which – to be totally honest – would be a big step forward compared to the LS.

Honestly, I hated those mini-cutscenes because it was impossible to do them well. It was like watching voice actors try to act with absolutely no visual or audio queue on how they’re supposed to react – they just stood there, fidgeting with their default idling animation, and maybe used some emotes to emphasize certain lines… but that was it.

Someone runs off in the middle of the conversation to do something suicidal and what does your character (or whoever person doing the talking at the moment) do?

Would I prefer some Mass Effect quality cut scenes? Yes. But just hopping around the bloody NPCs while they pop up their lines over their heads? How was that a step forward?

It just felt even lazier than the face-to-face cut-scenes. It just offered nothing. Uh-huh. At least in the personal story it feels if there are conversations, compared to the “talking into a random direction” style of the LS.

All I say is going back to face-to-face voice acting would be a step forward in matters of story telling. For sure better than: “Talk to your friends.” as a story step.

Is there space for more improvements? Sure, more than enough.

Rebound.3409:

….1 new pvp mode…

….with one single map for it, cause who heard of pvp game mode having more then one map!