Guild Wars 2

It’s basically time for the monthly topic refresher. It’s still not possible to freely skip dialog, which is just not nice on trying to do achievements.

This actually worked better before the way conversations work was changed, because back in the old 2D visual novel style interface, you could skip lines.

So either: Add a skip button.
Or: Return to the old interface on replays only.

It’s unlikely they will put in a skip button as they’d have to change the way they handle Living Story instances. Returning to the old interface on replays means they’d have to do each LS episode twice, with all the extra costs and time. Possible, but unlikely.

Quote discussing the issues.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

There’s a bigger technical issue—during “in game” scenes, the NPCs are moving around and things are happening (gadgets might be activating, props may be animating, etc.) and if you just skipped all that, it could lead to some really bizarre behavior. Trying to manually set a “failsafe” to teleport the NPCs, fire off effects, etc. to replicate what the world state is if the cutscene plays is extremely tedious and error prone.

That’s why the old style “dialogue cutscenes” (and the fancy but rare full blown l sequences, like the Order movies and racial intros) are skippable, because we aren’t doing anything to the world while the dialogue plays, so skipping it doesn’t have any effect. We’ve moved away from those, because the in-game scenes are a lot more satisfying, but there’s a trade off.

There are so few cinematics with long dialogues in either HoT or S3. And you just cannot skip open world dialogue – without what would no doubt be a lot of time, effort, and bug-ridden fixing.

And for S2, see quote above. Though I’m not sure why they can’t just have the skip cinematic button move all the NPCs to their desired places at the end of the cinematic like in GW1.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

There are so few cinematics with long dialogues in either HoT or S3. And you just cannot skip open world dialogue – without what would no doubt be a lot of time, effort, and bug-ridden fixing.

I dunno, man: while replaying episodes 1 & 2, I’m pretty much able to reply to email, check the TP to add buy orders (using e.g. gw2shinies for suggestions). It’s not about the length, it’s about not really caring that much to hear the same 30 seconds of dialogue for the fifth time. Heck, I can even listen to a full Wooden Potatoes vid, sometimes.

I understand why it’s not likely to change and admittedly it’s a lot better now than it used to be (the dialogue proceeds mostly without my intervention). That doesn’t mean I enjoy the feeling of being stuck while listening to Taimi explain (again) how she’s got the lab reorganized.

It’s not that any single dialogue lasts that long; it’s the totality of so many unskippable elements.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

There are so few cinematics with long dialogues in either HoT or S3. And you just cannot skip open world dialogue – without what would no doubt be a lot of time, effort, and bug-ridden fixing.

And for S2, see quote above. Though I’m not sure why they can’t just have the skip cinematic button move all the NPCs to their desired places at the end of the cinematic like in GW1.

Maybe the cinematics were more like a movie and like a movie you can skip to the end.

In the above quote he describes NPCs moving around and items activating/animating. It might be very difficult to have the ‘selected by player cutoffs’ be random spots in a continuous flow of actions and movements yet have all all items know how to finish all their actions at all times in their activity and smoothly teleport to a end spot.

As we have /gg to die instantly in raid I don’t see how adding /skip or /next to story instances to skip dialog is a big deal.

And for the love of Gods, hire new writers and give more options to LS …