Guild Wars 2

The first episode of season 3 is missing FaceFX lip sync animations for many of its dialogue lines. While a seemingly random selection of dialogue lines in the first instance – “Eir’s Memorial in Hoelbrak” – as well as the second instance in Rata Novus – have FaceFX lip sync generated, the vast majority do not, and instead rely on the standard ‘lip flap’ system. While I would normally assume that this is intended behaviour (i.e. the conscious decision not to use FaceFX lip sync for this content), the fact that a few random lines of dialogue have proper lip sync and some do not, seemingly at random, leads me to believe that this is, in fact, a developmental oversight.

The random nature of the lip sync in the new content can be easily observed in the Eir memorial instance. During the sequence in which the player character toasts to Eir, one random line of player dialogue, mid-way through the sequence of dialogue lines, uses FaceFX lip sync, immediately before and immediately after an extensive sequence of lines relying entirely on lip flaps. (Tested on a male charr player character, therefore I can only be certain that the issue is 100% reproducible in this dialogue sequence on male charr PCs due to the difference in dialogue and VO – the issue is, however, present in Rytlock’s dialogue, Knut’s dialogue, Rox’s dialogue, Taimi’s dialogue in Rata Novus, and the vast majority if not all of the dialogue in the later story instances).

On a more subjective note, this greatly hurts the immersion in this content and is rather distracting. It’s also a notable departure from the consistent use of FaceFX lip sync observed in Heart of Thorns and the three raid wings, which greatly improved the immersion and visual fidelity of that content. I’m assuming that the living world team simply forgot to generate the lip sync on these dialogue lines, leading to this issue – either way, I figured I should report it so it can be investigated and addressed.

Lexander.4579:

is it just me or charr voices sound totally fine?

human voices could use some work and diversity though

They’re not revoicing the male charr because they didn’t like the old voice – they’re revoicing him because the actor, Ron Yuan, is no longer available to record due to scheduling issues.

Donari.5237:

Aww. That’s missing the deep growl/snarl component that makes player charr sound kin to Rytlock. He sounds more like the Whispers charr from early charr PS.

It certainly is noticeably different. Perhaps it will fall more into line with some players’ head canon for their characters, but the loss of the growling rasp saddens me as Yuan’s interpretation is just right for my revenant. Otoh I don’t actually play my rev at this point.

It is certainly noticeably different, and yes, the voice does kind of remind me of Korukhan the Blacksmith from early Whispers story (voiced by Neil Kaplan, a really awesome voice actor, for what it’s worth), although the wing 3 male charr doesn’t really sound like Neil. I’m still trying to figure out who I think’s voicing these wing 3 lines – I tend to be overly nerdy about voice actors and can normally name the most prolific game voice actors just from hearing their voice, but I’m drawing a blank here. It sounds kind of like it might be a heavily pitch-shifted Matthew Mercer, but he’s been the male norn since launch… it also sounds a little bit like Sam Riegel at points, but Sam Riegel plays Braham and a whole bucketload of NPCs throughout the game, and I assume that, if they have to replace the male charr VA for some reason, they’re not going to add insult to injury by replacing him with one of their most prolific and recognisable NPC voice actors. Some part of me thinks the new voice might be Lex Lang or Peter Jessop, since the writers did mention on Twitter that they’d added them to the voice cast a few months ago. I guess we’ll wait and see.

All of this said – I do still hope, perhaps in vain, that the ‘news’ Bobby was referring to is that Ron Yuan is being temporarily replaced as the male charr due to some scheduling issue, rather than him being replaced outright. My charr thief has been my main ever since the very first minute of headstart and I’ve grown attached to his voice.

Still – if ArenaNet are replacing the male charr VA I think it’s safe to assume that they’ve essentially had no other choice to do so. Their commitment to voice continuity in GW2 went so far as to get Felicia Day back into the studio to record somewhere around 10 lines for the final episode of season 2 and the penultimate Heart of Thorns story step – and she’s no doubt an incredibly hard – and expensive – actress to get a hold of.

Ron Yuan, we have to remember, is an actor who happens to do voice work. His entire acting career isn’t built around voice work the way Nolan North or Matthew Mercer’s careers are. He does on-screen acting work for films shot both in the US and in China and he himself is a filmmaker. It does seem – sadly – quite plausible that ArenaNet just couldn’t book sessions with him for Stronghold of the Faithful – in which case they may book a session with him once he is available again… or they may simply recast the male charr, permanently, to someone for whom voice acting is at the forefront of their career, since careers in game voiceover tend to live or die based upon how available you make yourself and how easy it is to book consistent sessions with you.

…if ArenaNet are truly going to recast the male charr, though, they really do need to go out of their way to handle it properly. It’s a fairly big transition that is going to irritate or bemuse quite a few people who main a male charr, and it’s also going to cause a lot of jarring moments depending on how they do it – imagine, for example, your character yelling out story dialogue in the ‘new’ voice while receiving a boon and yelling out in Ron Yuan’s old charr voice, or, vice-versa, imagine going back to ‘old’ content and suddenly hearing your charr speak with Ron Yuan’s voice for a story step/map event before receiving a boon and suddenly hearing rerecorded versions of Ron Yuan’s old lines.

Bobby Stein, one of the writing leads on GW2 and the main guy in charge of writing/voiceover stuff on raids, responded to this issue on the Guild Wars 2 subreddit, here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4sr997/has_the_voice_actor_for_the_male_charr_player/d5c5vlu?context=3

Given that he’s pointing us to some news that’ll be coming out soon rather than just saying “don’t worry, guys, it’s still Ron Yuan”… I’m assuming it is the case that the male charr has been recast.

Assuming he has been recast, it doesn’t entirely surprise me – Ron Yuan is an actor, as far as I can tell, whose main preserve is film acting. He also dabbles in filmmaking and seems to work both in the US and in China. I imagine it might be somewhere between difficult and impossible to arrange VO sessions with him on a basis that’s regular enough for living world releases. I imagine if ArenaNet were limiting player VO to the core game and expansions, leaving the PC silent in living world stuff, they probably would have been able to stick with Ron Yuan.

It’s a real shame, because I loved my male charr’s voice and got very accustomed to it over the past better-part-of-four-years – Ron did a great job with it – but if he simply isn’t available consistently enough for live content, I guess that’s the way it is.

If he has been recast, though, I hope ArenaNet will do it properly – by which I mean going back and rerecording all the existing male charr VO with the new actor. It would be absolutely abysmal if we ended up with a situation whereby all the PC voices remain consistent from the opening cutscene all the way to LW season 3 except the male charr, meaning anyone who plays a male charr essentially has to endure their character’s voice switching between two different actors depending on what content they’re playing.

If ArenaNet have had to make the decision to recast the male charr, I really hope they’ve done it right – ensuring that the new actor is just as good as Ron Yuan while also being available consistently enough to prevent them from having to recast it again – and also ensuring that all the Ron Yuan dialogue, as good as it is, gets replaced to ensure consistency. I love ArenaNet, I love Bobby and I love the writing team and the audio team, but anything less would be a real kick in the teeth to anyone who plays male charr and is also interested in the story/narrative.

I was pleased to see Korukhan the Blacksmith, the charismatic Order of Whispers representative from the charr personal story, make a reappearance in Tangled Depths. However, his voice acting sounds completely different from in the original game. I’m glad ArenaNet went out of their way to bring back personal story characters with all-too-little screen-time for HoT, and with characters like Ceera in Auric Basin it really worked, but if you’re going to bring back an old character – especially a character whose charisma came largely from their voice acting – you really have to bring back the original voice actor for it. I really hope Anet will record his lines with his original VA when they next have him in the studio.

Anyone else notice this? I guess it’s a fairly niche concern and many won’t care, but I really liked him in the personal story and was didappointed with his wrongly-voicrd appearance in HoT.

One issue I noticed:

At the end of Forging the Pact, Trahearne used to (before the personal story changes in the feature pack) have a short, unvoiced (text box) dialogue with you where he discussed what your next assignment would be based upon your greatest fear. That was removed with the feature pack, and it hasn’t been restored in the restoration update. This means that you finish Forging the Pact and then randomly get sent off to your greatest fear arc with no real explanation for why you’re going where you’re going or meeting with who you’re meeting. Just one thing I thought Bobby and co might be able to take a look at.

I’m also experiencing this bug.

To be clear, this is the cutscene with the Mender that is supposed to play as soon as you are ejected from the tutorial instance and appear in the main game world in Astorea. It simply does not play after the loading screen and you are instead immediately presented with the ‘personal story step complete’ notification and reward.

And no, I’m not using the streaming client.

My DxDiag is attached to this post.

BobbyStein.2315:

Ltomato.8649:

Additionally, the “Master of Arah” achievement is being updated to only require completion of story mode paths.

Is that supposed to be “explorable mode paths” instead of “story mode paths”?

You’re correct. I made the adjustment.

Question: While I recognise that you are not making major changes to the Arah dungeon or the Zhaitan encounter in this update, could you please ensure that you are careful with Zhaitan’s health pool specifically? I say this because, when a change was made previously to Zhaitan’s health, it introduced a bug (which is still present in the game) where Zhaitan did not have the time to execute one of his attacks before he was killed, since the cannons simply dealt too much damage. Now that the step is being revised to be soloable, could you please take a look at his health pool and just make sure he stays alive long enough to actually execute his attacks? (The attack in question involves him swinging towards the ship and spawning Tendrils of Zhaitan on the ship to attack players).

Thanks very much for this!

BobbyStein.2315:

BrettM.9062:

Unfortunately, I thought it was safe to CHOOSE my fear, as long as I didn’t go beyond that. So my latest character did Light in the Darkness before stopping. (A couple of months before this thread existed.) I really hope there’s some wiggle room on that. If not, I’m going to have to think about re-rolling the character, but I’d really rather avoid that and the loss of all his exotic gear and such.

It is safe to choose your greatest fear in A Light in the Darkness. If you’ve completed that story step it just means that you won’t see the update to that particular step, but you’ll be able to play the My Greatest Fear bits when they go live (as long as you don’t complete Forging the Pact).

I have a forum post that’s just about ready to go with all the major details and player scenarios. It’s going through review now and will hopefully go live by the end of the month.

I realise you probably have already found this when looking over the feature pack’s changes to the affected story, but just to be absolutely sure this doesn’t slip through: there are some dialogue lines that were made silent (ie lost their voice acting) in the later story steps as of the patch. Specifically, and I’m sorry I can’t be more specific (it’s hard to remember the details!):

• Some of Trahearne’s dialogue in the Battle of Fort Trinity that previously related to the greatest fear plot you had expeienced – I believe the affected dialogue was right at the end, before the completion of the step, but don’t quote me on that

• Some of the dialogue in the Romke’s Final Voyage step

And possibly some others that I’m not aware of. Just making absolutely sure you guys are able to completely clean up the issues.

Thanks very much for your openness on this issue. I think I can speak for all of us by saying that I’m very pleased that you’re going through and correcting these issues.

The painterly cutscenes, for instance, the cutscenes that play when you first create your character, no longer have working audio – at least, the music certainly doesn’t play. Instead, the login/character selection screen music continues to play throughout. This is incredibly disconcerting and really ruins the mood in comparison to before the bug was introduced.

ArenaNet: I love you guys. Please fix.

BobbyStein.2315:

Lady Elvea.2847:

BobbyStein.2315:

Lasur Arkinshade.4107:

BobbyStein.2315:

Konig Des Todes.2086:

(Sorry for double post, this is unrelated to above)

There’s still a story issue that hasn’t been addressed yet: Personal Story and Dungeon Story Mode relations.

Currently, you’ll get a “introduction” by the Herald at level 25. At level 30, you get a letter about Ascalonian Catacombs story. However, at level 40 you have the Destiny’s Edge meeting in which Eir talks about going to Ascalon Catacombs indirectly. And at level 50, you get a letter from your iconic talking about events at AC, TA (level 40 dungeon), and CM (level 50 dungeon).

IMO, the “easiest solution” if the changes to levels of the Personal Story remains unchanged (something I personally don’t mind, though I’m unsure about the “locked until level” part) would be to raise the dungeon levels. Make AC story level 45, TA level 50, and CM level 55 – leave the rest as is, and raise explorable to an appropriate story level+5.

My “preferred solution” would having all explorables at level 80 (makes cross-dungeon balancing easier), have AC story at 50 and each subsequent story dungeon 5 levels higher (TA=55; CM=60; SE=65; rest as is)

Whatever the solution, just figured I’d bring this up on the topic of Personal Story fixes.

I’ll add this to the list of things to investigate. It might just be an issue of changing when we’re triggering the sending of those mails (or how they’re worded).

Could you clarify, for absolute certainly: will the story steps that were re-ordered be returned to their original order (in addition to the restoration of the Greatest Fear arc)? And will the story instance entrances be returned to their original locations, rather than the current airship ‘airdrop’ thing that currently occurs at Fort Trinity?

Yes, the story steps will be restored to their original order. We’re looking into removing the airdrop step as part of the fixes as well.

THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU

In other news, do you know when we can expect this update to go live? Will people be grandfathered into the fix again, or will all players get it regardless of their story step?

My fiance recently started playing and I’d like to know at exactly which point I should advise him to put his PS on hold, and how long for.

He’s excited about the game, so please let it be soon!

My advice to people who are interested in playing the restored Personal Story (which will include the Greatest Fear steps, original chapter 8 ordering, and various minor text and VO updates) is to not complete A Light in the Darkness (in chapter 6). That way you’ll be able to play the restored content in its entirety when it goes live.

We’re currently discussing release dates and will share that information when we’re able. Thanks again for all your great suggestions and patience.

Again, we’re very happy that you’re going back and fixing this. The changes to the personal story really decimated the narrative.

I hope that you’ve looked into removing the airdrop thing and relocating the entrances for each story step back to where they were before the feature pack, and I hope you discovered that it was feasible to do. The narrative flowed much better and made much more sense when you traversed Orr on foot to reach each step – it makes much less sense to just be airdropped there.

As an aside, if you are going to rerecord any more of Trahearne’s dialogue, I’d suggest rerecording (but not rewriting) the dialogue right before he starts cleansing Orr in The Source of Orr. The way the lines are written is beautiful, but I feel that his delivery didn’t necessarily seem to carry the appropriate emotional gravity. (Also, there are still some VA bugs from launch that it’d be nice to see fixed, like the Gixx line where he refers to “Priory Arcanists” as “Priory anarchists”, but I suspect those fixes may (or may not) be outside the scope of what you’re doing at this stage.

Thanks very much for working to restore the story, anyway. I realise it’s probably a lot of work to undo the damage, but we certainly appreciate it.

BobbyStein.2315:

Konig Des Todes.2086:

(Sorry for double post, this is unrelated to above)

There’s still a story issue that hasn’t been addressed yet: Personal Story and Dungeon Story Mode relations.

Currently, you’ll get a “introduction” by the Herald at level 25. At level 30, you get a letter about Ascalonian Catacombs story. However, at level 40 you have the Destiny’s Edge meeting in which Eir talks about going to Ascalon Catacombs indirectly. And at level 50, you get a letter from your iconic talking about events at AC, TA (level 40 dungeon), and CM (level 50 dungeon).

IMO, the “easiest solution” if the changes to levels of the Personal Story remains unchanged (something I personally don’t mind, though I’m unsure about the “locked until level” part) would be to raise the dungeon levels. Make AC story level 45, TA level 50, and CM level 55 – leave the rest as is, and raise explorable to an appropriate story level+5.

My “preferred solution” would having all explorables at level 80 (makes cross-dungeon balancing easier), have AC story at 50 and each subsequent story dungeon 5 levels higher (TA=55; CM=60; SE=65; rest as is)

Whatever the solution, just figured I’d bring this up on the topic of Personal Story fixes.

I’ll add this to the list of things to investigate. It might just be an issue of changing when we’re triggering the sending of those mails (or how they’re worded).

Could you clarify, for absolute certainly: will the story steps that were re-ordered be returned to their original order (in addition to the restoration of the Greatest Fear arc)? And will the story instance entrances be returned to their original locations, rather than the current airship ‘airdrop’ thing that currently occurs at Fort Trinity?

Silvia.9130:

Tbh I find the gem store updates we had lately so puny even there, that it truly looks like they lost interest even in that. Such meaningless items…no new armors in ages, no new custom features in a while either.

I don’t mind the gem store being neglected, I don’t even mind the living world having huge hiatuses, as long as the reason is that they’re working on a huge background project with way more content than the living world etc could ever deliver.

Luckily, from what they’ve said, that’s exactly what they’re doing. There’s only a skeleton crew working on the gem store and living world at the moment – about 20 people on living world and probably less on the gem store.

I’m 99% sure it’s Jon St John. He voices a very, very high proportion of the characters in season 2 so far, including Jantzen, Canach, most random male asura, all those ‘gruff male’ voices, the Master of Peace, etc.

geogyf.5087:

“The Vaults of The Priory”

It’s ‘Legacy of the Gods’ from the GW: Eye of the North soundtrack.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Vyetta.3976:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Malkavian.4516:

Hi Chris, I was fortunate enough to check the instance in question that I mentioned to you about and it seems that the Greatest Fear portion of the story A Light in the Darkness is kept intact. No removals, no nothing. It was only modified on the Story Journal itself, which I still think sucks but nonetheless, I can confirm that the PS was not cut in anyway, shape or form.

Awesome Malkavian I really appreciate the info. Leah is looking into it and we will update when we have more info.

chris

Unfortunately the event is still scrambled or totally missing for most of us, please don’t ignore it thank you so much, it feels so much better to feel this getting some acknowledgement

We are absolutely not going to ignore it FYI.

we will have more info soon.

chris

While you are getting info on this, will we also be getting info on the changes in the order of the Orr personal story steps? As you may have seen on the forums, the story no longer makes sense with the re-ordering and many continuity issues and other pacing problems have been introduced. Just to hear that you are aware of these issues also would be a major reassurance for those of us who love the story of Tyria as much as ArenaNet seem to!

Thanks for your communication, Chris.

The reordering of the story steps is the worst crime. The story at least still makes sense without the greatest fear arcs (even though it’s much better with the greatest fear arcs in)… but to reorder the core plot points of the personal story? To cleanse Orr and kill the Sovereign Eye, then go into a quest where we DISCOVER THAT EYES OF ZHAITAN EXIST? Absolutely terrible change.

ColinJohanson.2394:

SkiTz.4590:

Colin, just clear up one thing – There is 0% chance EU/NA GW2 gets a VIP system?

We’re absolutely not bringing the China VIP system to NA/EU, correct.

Is there any chance we could get a statement from the developers on the changes made to the late-game personal story in the feature pack? Specifically the removal of the ‘greatest fear’ story arcs entirely and the reorganisation of key plot points that introduce numerous continuity errors and break pacing.

I am honestly completely befuddled at who made the decision to cut this part of the story and needlessly reorganise the Orr plot. I mean… why? Did whoever make that decision not have any grasp on the concept that stories tend to have a logical progression of events and plot points? The whole idea of a story is that you follow it from beginning to end and because of that you get an enriching experience that makes chronological sense.

It should have been obvious to anyone at ArenaNet that mercilessly and carelessly rearranging the key plot points of the personal story will result in continuity errors and broken pacing… but they did it anyway.

This is worse than what George Lucas did with Star Wars. At least he didn’t have the Death Star get blown up before Luke meets Han Solo.

Rhodonita.6831:

My thief is currently working on the fears-storyline and finished “Striking Off the Chains” yesterday, so it´s still possible to do it. But I also noticed that there is no mention of those quests in the story tab, she only has “Forging the pact” mentioned.

Jeffrey Vaughn confirmed on the forums that if you were already on those parts of the story before the patch you are able to finish them – they’ve been removed from the sequence of story quests for any new players or people not there yet. They are also deleted from the journal.

Y’know, I could live with the removal of the greatest fears sections of the story. I’d mourn them, they were really good, but I could perhaps live with it. However, the nonsense rearrangement of the Orr storyline is absolutely abhorrent and we must not stop complaining until ArenaNet fix it. Whatever possessed them to put the climactic penultimate part of the Orr story arc at the start and butcher the story in the process, I have absolutely no clue, and new players are going to miss out on what was actually (in my opinion) quite a beautiful and engaging story on launch. (I know, liking the PS isn’t the most popular opinion, but whatever anyone thinks of the PS, these changes have objectively made it worse).

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

From the update notes:

Chapter 7 is now focused on helping Trahearne cleanse Orr.
Chapter 8 is now focused on defeating Zhaitan.

Please, I beg you, revert these changes. They break the story and continuity of the game. They are objectively – not subjectively, but objectively – bad. The story objectively has ceased to make canonical sense as of these changes. There are continuity issues galore, and the personal story’s final chapters have become a disorganised, convoluted and error-ridden mess. There is no justification for these changes, at all. Please do not let these parts of the game become ruined.

For a feature pack that has supposedly focused so much on the new player experience, it seems extremely unfortunate that it has simultaneously destroyed the climactic final chapters of the story for new players.

Thia.4891:

I cried when I heard they had cut this. I refuse to log in until the PS is fixed, and I will continue to talk about it on the forums until I get an answer from the devs. I mean, what even possessed them to get rid of it?

They also rearranged the core plot steps towards the end. Now you do the Source of Orr and kill the Sovereign Eye early on, then you go to the Temple of Abaddon and discover that Eyes of Zhaitan exist…

…

They screwed up the personal story in Orr in yet more ways, sadly not just removing the greatest fear storylines.

These changes are an utter disgrace. They need to be reverted ASAP. There is literally NO good reason for them to have been made. ArenaNet have taken a sledgehammer to something that wasn’t broken, and now the Orr storyline is a complete mess.

We need the Greatest Fear story arcs back, we need the story steps back in their original order, and we need it fast.

Malchior.5042:

Xhyros.1340:

After the Battle of Fort Trinity, I had the final two steps of the Apatia storyline. They still happen apparently, it’s just not listed in the journal anymore.

See, no cause for alarm. It’s probably just a bug that they’re unlisted.

The reorganisation of the story steps is still completely baffling and destroys the whole pacing and tone of the story arc.

Why did ArenaNet do this? Are they making changes for the sake of making changes now?

dekou.6012:

Jornophelanthas.1475:

This is a psychological difference, not an actual difference.

Oh wait, there is an actual difference. Traditional expansions cost money to buy.

Yeah, there’s also another actual difference. Factions doubled the size of GW1’s world in one year. LS has given us two smallish maps in two years.

Sure, you can say “an expansion would give new skills and new maps, but so does the LS”, but you can’t just ignore the quantity of those maps and skills. LS isn’t even remotely comparable to an expansion quantity wise.

Also, expansions tend to have vast in-game rewards in terms of armour skins, weapons skins etc. With the living world the vast majority of new armour and weapon skins have been put in the gem store or the Black Lion ticket system.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Thread explosion! Thanks for all the (rapid) responses. There seems to be a fairly consistent feeling that yes, these fights can be more engaging without becoming as difficult as the jungle wurm.

I like some of the ideas being presented, feel free to keep the discussion going. It’s also helpful to hear not only what’s working but why it’s working for you.

On the topic of using siege weapons as a role mechanic in these fights, is that something we want to see more of? I often worry that siege weapons can be just as boring as standing in the safe corner pressing the same attack. Do you feel that they can also cause some contention between players?

I think it may be good to use the siege weapons as spectacle rather than a player-controlled game mechanic, similarly to how the megalaser operates in the Tequatl fight. That is to say, have the players collectively do something in order to enable the siege weapon to auto-fire (or be fired by an NPC). For the Shatterer event (for example), what if ammunition stockpiles appeared in different locations at certain points throughout the fight, and once the ammo has all been brought to <insert siege weapon here> it fired a huge blast at the Shatterer, perhaps to bring him down from his flying phase and deal extremely heavy damage?

That kind of thing I think is the best use of siege weapons in these kinds of open world fights, at least until there is some sort of system in place to prevent griefing them and the frustration that ensues.

BobbyStein.2315:

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I’d rather not see that, to be honest.

…

These tour guides give humans part of that sense of knowing their history and heritage that the other races don’t show. The other major cities do have a number of NPCs that give a history of the place or the race, but they’re not nearly as showing off the good work. The only way to improve the tours was to make them occur constantly – without player triggering – so that they become more obvious.

This is why in my post above, I only listed the bigger human settlements, because it feels like a good way to give something that humans have going for them, that the other races cannot do the same or better at.

If tour guides were added to other races’ capitals, the only thing I ask is that they’re human historians and scholars so as to show that humanity even has the history of the lands of other races – and even the history of those races, whether or not the other races have them too. There is a need to cease the dropping of human standing in GW2, as we’ve seen them with very little going for them.

If they weren’t presented as tours for other racial cities but instead shown with characters walking and talking about their surroundings (perhaps independent of player participation) it could get the information across while also differentiating the feel of the different races. Thoughts?

I think that’d be a great way to flesh out the details of the city and communicate the little-known bits of lore to people while also adding additional activity and bustle to them. It seems like a nice solution.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Is this Living Story? I don’t see any personal story steps named “Party Politics.”

Yes, Jeffrey, Party Politics is a living world season two story step. :P

OmaiGodman.2098:

Didn’t Trahearne already have a few spoken lines in the latest LS release? Or was that recycled material?

I believe there was one, where he shouts “The enemy is here, defend yourselves!” or something along those lines, but as far as I’m aware that was reused from the base game.

timmyf.1490:

Could this be simpler? Remember when Southsun had those Magic Find buffs? What if there was just an NPC – Nicholas-style – who moved between zones every day. He gives you a buff with +MF EXP Karma Coin only within the zone.

This would mean lots of people in the open world, though just within the zone of the day. Still, it’d mean you can do some open world content with better rewards.

For that to get people away from zerging the popular farming events it’d have to be an astronomically powerful buff.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

The intent of the Renown Heart system was originally to help players find event content. They also provide a decent method for us to give the player some context and awareness of what’s going on in the area. There are probably a few issues in that design which we could discuss. We could also let it suffice to say that hearts do not make the best repeatable content the game has to offer.

On the topic of keeping players engaged with open world content, I think this goal may be for more approachable from a different angle. Consider Dry Top, which has no hearts. Players on that map are participating in events all the time, largely on the premise that each event contributes to both map-level and personal-level goals. This gives me the notion that with a little help at the system level, events can and should be the bulk of repeatable open world content in Tyria.

I’d be very interested in hearing your thoughts on that.

First, I think we need to establish the biggest problem with the event reward structure, so that we know exactly what problems we are solving.

From my perspective, the biggest problem with the event reward structure is that it inherently works against the intended gameplay. We all collectively want a system that encourages people to do events all around the world, including those that are harder, more involved, more out of the way or off the beaten path, and including those in zones of all levels. However, the current events system rewards higher completion payouts in higher level zones.

Equally importantly, many players are motivated to do open world content by item loot. Some open world content is very generous with this, which is why we end up with huge champion and karma trains running around places like Orr and Frostgorge, while other events don’t reward this as much.

I think the core problem is that the current event reward system doesn’t give you any real incentive to do anything other than what is the most farmable, and it’s not really going to be possible to equalise the loot and rewards of every single event within the current structure. If people are going to get bucketloads of champion boxes, loot bags and crafting materials from slaughtering Risen spawns en masse at the most farmable Orr events, it’s no surprise that people aren’t gravitating to places like the Harathi Hinterlands as much as they should.

What we need, and I am honestly not sure how best to achieve this, is a reward structure that inherently rewards people more for playing the widest variety of events throughout the game, and for playing them as intended (ie not intentionally failing the events for more champion spawns or whatever).

The first idea that comes to mind is something similar to what you did with hearts and map completion or what a lot of other MMOs do with quests and loremaster-esque achievements: An achievement with some meaningful reward (likely a title) for completing events in a particular zone. What if there was an achievement for completing every event in Queensdale that gave you the title “Queen’s Protector” or an achievement for completing every event in Brisban Wildlands that gave you the title “Tamer of the Wildlands”? Something like that I imagine would encourage people to do those events – even if it only works once, which is why we’d need some sort of more comprehensive reward structure overhaul for the long term.

The living world is far from a solid model of content release. It forces the developers to design content in a modular way such that it can be released in chunks – Dry Top is small, claustrophobic and linear because ArenaNet had to design it in such a way that it could be split into separate releases. So far the living world has delivered content at a snail’s pace in comparison to what an expansion would provide.

Luckily, the living world team is only 20 people. This allows ArenaNet to focus the bulk of their resources towards other, bigger projects. While they haven’t come out and said it, it’s clear they’re working on an expansion or something similar behind the scenes – because living world is a great method of stopgap content release, but it’s by no means enough to carry Guild Wars 2 forever.

BobbyStein.2315:

Good morning! Allow me to clarify a few things:

• Felicia Day is still a cast member of Guild Wars 2. We have no plans to recast Zojja with another actor.
• It’s entirely possible that Zojja could show up in a future release. It all depends on what story we’re currently telling and which characters have an active role in it.

Thanks much.

Thanks very much for the clarification, and I am very happy that you’ve chosen to keep Felicia Day as Zojja.

Since it seems to be somewhat-related to the topic of the thread, I have to ask, given the fact that Trahearne is coming back into the story…

Can we expect Matthew Brenher to return as Trahearne? While a lot of people criticised his voice acting on launch, I honestly really liked it and hope to see the return of his distinctive voice. Much of it seems to have been an issue with voice direction, rather than a lack of acting talent or what-have-you.

Thanks, Bobby!

I think that something like this would be useful, largely due to the fact that it constitutes acknowledgement from the developers, which is one of the things that people often feel we’d like more of (in my experience). Oftentimes it’s hard to know whether or not the developers are even aware of certain issues, and that’s what results in community uproar like we saw recently. This would be a small step in the right direction.

I hate to say this, but I honestly am not in favour of a new VA for Zojja. While I realise they’ve had trouble getting Felicia Day back since launch, the fact of the matter is that a huge amount of Zojja’s character came from Felicia Day’s performance. Changing the voice actor would be fundamentally changing the character. I don’t believe Tara Strong or any other voice actress could do Felicia Day’s performance as Zojja justice.

Also, and this may be slightly digressing, but Zojja can easily come back in an expansion – with Felicia Day’s voice – since ArenaNet will have a much longer development cycle in which to book her and get her to a recording session. I’d rather them not arbitrarily change her voice actor so they can shoehorn her into the LW updates. So far we haven’t really had much need for her in them anyway.

I am skeptical about the voice acting criticisms of Trahearne. His voice actor, Matthew Brehner, is actually fairly established and has been in a fair few things where his performance was significantly better. What is likely is that he was given inadequate voice direction. He can’t act his lines as though he is in a battlefield if he was never told the context.

I hope they haven’t changed his voice actor (his voice and accent are actually quite distinctive, and Trahearne is one of the actual British voice actors the sylvari have, which is great – American actors doing fake British accents tends to end unconvincingly), I just hope they have put more effort and thought into voice-directing him.

While the Bria event did sometimes bug out (as have many events in GW2), I have successfully completed it multiple times over the past 2 years. The claim that the Bria event was ‘bugged’ and that revisiting it and tying it into the LW is ‘insulting’ appears to me to be deriving offense from, well… nothing. It’s ludicrous.

With that said, I do think the crown fragments thing was extremely poorly done. Fragments of the crown of Ascalon that are to be used in a ritual to attempt to cleanse the Foefire, of all things, and they are dumped in rubble piles in random places in Ascalon? What? It makes no sense and feels thematically… awful.

How much post-processing goes into the charr voices? It’s clear that many of them are pitch-shifted and have some snarl sound effects layered in – how much work and how many effects go into this process?

Zaxares.5419:

Why would the fact that something is tradable diminish its prestige? If you earned it yourself, you KNOW you got it the “hard way”. Why do you care what some random stranger thinks about how you got it? Get rewards because YOU think it’s cool or that it looks good on you, not because other people think it’s cool. Public opinion changes all the time, but at the end of the day, it’s you who has to live with the choice.

As an example, back in GW1 I earned my Legendary Survivor title on my Paragon by taking him through all 3 campaigns, both Normal Mode and Hard Mode. Then, Eye of the North came out, and the title got trivialised by Fronis dungeon runs. Was I upset? Heck no. I had the satisfaction of knowing that I got it the hard way, and nobody can ever take that away from me. I don’t care if someone looked at me and says that I probably just did Fronis runs; I don’t have to prove anything to him. I got the title for my own satisfaction, not to show it off to strangers.

And besides, even if someone did just farm the gold and buy the item, they still had to put in a lot of work to get it. (Maybe more. If you did Fractals level 21 for the first time and got a lucky Fractal skin drop, does that mean you earned the skin more than the guy who had to farm for 100+ hours to get the gold to buy it from you?) Is that work somehow worth less than yours? Even if they just opened their wallet and bought gems to trade for gold, they’re still giving up something of value.

I wholeheartedly disagree. Having things to show off your accomplishments to other players (in a non-chest-thumping sort of way) is a fundamental design concept that has been part of MMORPGs since they were first conceived.

Zaxares.5419:

FenrirSlakt.3692:

Zaxares.5419:

I don’t mind if there are rewards only available through the toughest content… As long as other players can acquire the same reward through other means. Namely, the TP. Everything should be able to be bought and sold on the TP.

Almost everything can be sold on the TP these days, except for a few things such as Fractal weapons.

Yes, exactly. EVERYTHING should be tradable; Fractal weapons, LS back skins, SAB TM skins, crafted Ascended gear etc.

No. Please, no. We need less tradable rewards, not more. Tradable rewards have many inherent problems:

• Lack of prestige. If a reward is tradable it no longer signifies an accomplishment, it signifies that you either accomplished something or chickened out and farmed the gold/paid the real money to get the gold for it.

• Leads players to seek out uninteresting reward loops. Seriously, grinding gold isn’t interesting, Being presented with a challenge and having a reward associated with defeating that challenge is interesting.

Also, I don’t see what your problem is with rewards being accessible only through difficult content. If we were, say, gating high stats behind something like the wurm I’d see your point. But why shouldn’t people who accomplish things get something to signify that accomplishment?

From the blog post, it appears that the following will happen:

• PvE skins previously obtainable through PvP will now work in PvE as well
• With the removal of glory these skins will be available through gold
• Therefore, people can now use gold to gain access to the most prestigious armour skins in the game (dungeon skins and the like) for the whole game.

This, as far as I’m concerned, would be a very bad move and, if this is the idea you guys have in mind, I urge you to reconsider and implement safeguards to prevent this from happening. Let rewards previously accomplishment-based remain accomplishment-based.

It’s called ‘The Sun Beyond the Peaks’ from the Guild Wars: Eye of the North soundtrack.

It played even before the recent patches but only during specific circumstances. For example, if you died at the Gates of Arah, it would play.

Shpongle.6025:

Arena always punishes hardcore players and makes them leave the game, like in GW1 when everything was made easy. I think this content is great for casual players

I’m not entirely sure what you’re trying to say with that statement. That ArenaNet always makes the game too easy for hardcore players, causing them to leave the game and you to be happy?

Edmo.7159:

Matthew Oswald.3082:

Thanks for the nice comments guys.

Here are some “behind the scenes” facts about this cinematic:

The cinematic was built as a prototype for the new video playback technology.

It was made over a year ago, and we planned to launch it with the original Fractal release. Unfortunately, the tech didn’t get implemented in time and we missed the release window. It was decided that we sit on the cinematic trailer until there was a big update to the Fractals.

The 3D character models are (pre)rendered in-engine with our model viewer and matched up with cameras in Maya and After Effects.

While I have special place in my heart for the original GW2 in-engine cinematics (such as the Dugneon Catacombs flashback…a cinematic that I reworked 4 times over the course of development) These new types of pre-rendered videos allow us to work faster, increase the quality, and they perform better on more peoples machines.

There are some pretty exciting cinematics coming in the future…I hope you guys will receive them as well as the Fractals piece.

Thanks again!

I do not understand how it is new… they have the same style of our characters introduction.

You mean that this technology is new regarding to the way you set up the scene? More easy and fast to create?

I never understood the reason to use static characters on the living story scenes… (Marjory’s journal, Queen Speech, etc) They would be much more amazing with these movements and also would be nice if it had our character on it like in the introduction scene.

It is new. If you observe closely it is in a distinctly different style, and there’s a reason for it. As he explained, the new cutscenes are being pre-made in software like After Effects then played back as pre-rendered video files in-game, whereas the painterly intro cutscenes were rendered in-engine in real-time using special tech that ArenaNet created.

So… I guess there’s no chance we’ll be seeing more of the original painterly cutscenes?

While I love the new style of cinematics too, I think the original painterly cutscene style has a certain very special charm and I’d hate to see it entirely forsaken in favour of pre-rendered cutscenes, even if they are awesome in their own way.

A mix of both would be best, but I understand if resource and time constraints prevent it.

My favourite and least favourite releases:

Favourite: Bazaar of the Four Winds, close second, Lost Shores (though it was before the Living World initiative really existed in its current form)

The reason I like Bazaar of the Four Winds so much is because it felt like the most substantial of GW2’s releases so far. It added a new (if temporary) area with its own unique atmosphere and music. It gave a tantalising bit of follow-up and resolution to some characters and factions from GW1 (Glint, Brotherhood of the Dwarf, etc). It also had the same trappings as the areas from the initial release of GW2 – ambient conversations and the like, which are a great boon to immersion and atmosphere-building. The only problem with this was the very limited amount of voice variety – if you’re going to do ambient conversations and so many of them, you need more than a couple of voice actors. (It felt like there were about three voice actors there – one for males and one for females, plus one to play kids. That’s so few that it becomes incredibly obvious incredibly quickly that you have a limited amount of actors for a release).

Also, the reason I gave Lost Shores a mention was because it gave me the feeling – moreso than any other GW2 update – that I was banding together with other players to defend Tyria. I think this mainly derived from its use of one-time events. While I realise people will jump on me for daring to suggest that one-time events are a good thing, I think they can be phenomenally good if used sparingly. The problem is when the entire release centres on one-time events, which Lost Shores more or less did. That left a bitter taste in the mouth of people who weren’t there, but I don’t think it’s a reason to completely stop doing one-time events.

Least favourite: Dragon Bash

The main reason I consider Dragon Bash so poor is beacuse it felt uninspired. The story stuff was very cool (the instances and the tracking down of suspects), but the open world achievements felt like they had gone way too far towards the ‘press F on lots of things’ paradigm. They felt uninspired.

On paper I can understand how smashing pinatas, firing fireworks and taking part in the festivities would be fun, but in practice, in a game where most non-combat interactions boil down to pressing the ‘F’ key, it ended up feeling more like boring filler and less like actual content.

The PvP minigame, Dragon Ball, was a bit better but suffered from massive polish issues (no music, just silence, the announcer from outside not actually saying anything, etc.), which were compounded by some massive server lag I got at the time, so I suppose it’s not fair for me to pass judgement on that minigame.

Nevertheless, Dragon Bash felt like it simply existed to justify Sky Pirates of Tyria, which, to its credit, was an amazing update.

No, this has nothing to do with you being a ‘casual player’ (a meaningless term). This has to do with you complaining that you took two weeks to actually participate in Halloween.

If your job has you so busy that you can’t muster up a few hours to play Halloween over the course of two weeks, then I think you need to re-evaluate your work/life balance rather than the pacing of the game.

In terms of reward structure, I have the following criticisms to offer:

• Living world reward structure feels like a one-trick pony. There isn’t enough variety in reward acquisition methods.

• We have minor achievement rewards that are either resource nodes in our home instances or small cosmetic items like head/back skins. These are cool in that they show you did something, but they often feel unsatisfying, especially when that’s all we’re getting.

• Too many items are either random drop chance and/or tradeable. This is a problem because it results in two key issues – players feeling unrewarded when they do the content and don’t get any reward, players feeling unmotivated to do the content because they have no guarantee of a reward, and players feeling as though the best option is to simply farm the gold to buy the item on the trading post. This is particularly evident with the Twilight Arbor Aetherpath weapon skins. I would much prefer a system more akin to the dungeon tokens you were using on launch. It provided measurable progress towards an achieveable goal, and obtaining the item proved that it was you who earned it, not someone else who then sold it to you.

• This ties nicely into my second point – it feels like there are not enough rewards to give challenge-focused players something to strive for. All too often the rewards feel like candy handed out simply for being there. That’s great to have, but it’d be nice to have some unique titles/skins/minipets given out as a reward for a truly difficult accomplishment within the living world updates. Liadri was a step in the right direction.

• A complete lack of new armour skins in the living world. Seriously, we haven’t seen a single, full new armour set since the launch of the game outside of the gem store, which is a shame since collecting and mixing and matching new armour sets was a core pillar of GW2’s reward structure on release. It was also one of the most fun parts of GW2’s reward structure on release.

• Too many rewards on the gem store, not enough in-game. I understand you need to push the gem store so that people will feel compelled to spend money to support development, but I feel like you need to carefully evaluate whether you have the balance right. For example, this Halloween you offer us a full weapon set in the Black Lion chests, two new town clothes sets on the gem store, and Halloween fireworks. In-game, we have the same limited selection of skins for three weapon types we had last year, a mask that has almost nothing distinguishing it from the generic masks we had leveling up, and a candy corn elemental. The ‘updated reward’ from the Clocktower is exotic gloves with a generic leveling skin that does not offer any distinguishment at all. I hope you are seeing the imbalance here. The gem store is fine, neglecting in-game rewards for it is not.

So, my suggestions for the future are fairly obvious but I’ll list them down anyway:

• Less random rewards, more guaranteed rewards.

• Less tradeable rewards, more bind-on-pickup rewards to promote a sense of accomplishment, prestige and actually playing the content.

• Less neglected rewards that help distinguish you as a reward for difficult content, such as the Clocktower.

• More varied and interesting reward methods.

• Something more akin to the dungeon token system where appropriate.

• Easing up on tradeable crafting materials as an ingredient for living world rewards.

• A more equal gem store-to-in-game reward balance.

I hope these criticisms and suggestions are helpful, and I’m thankful for this Collaborative Development initiative.

It’s funny, the Tequatl Rising release seems to have introduced a couple of bugs to Arah story.

Namely, this resetting dragons bug, and also a bug where certain AoE indicators don’t appear on the airships (thief cluster bomb/poison cloud on the initial smaller airship, Zhaitan’s final phase poison puddles on the large airship).

Please fix these, ArenaNet!

Sawnic.6795:

I absolutely 100% disagree with unsoulbinding. It completely undermines the purpose of the action.

I completely agree.

If anything I’d suggest tweaks to the soulbinding system, but I would absolutely oppose any way to unsoulbind any item, especially if it makes it tradeable.

Imagine the consequences – what if you could use it to unbind items that are soulbound on acquire? Suddenly you could get prestigious things that only skill can earn – like Arah gear – as a reward for farming gold.

…no, thanks.