Showing Posts For Laurreth.9627:
I’ve been looking at packet captures for a short while, and there’s a definite difference in communication quality.
The zone directly south of Lion’s Arch seemed smooth for a change (had massive issues there the previous evenings); served by host 206.127.159.157
Changed back to Lion’s Arch, and the capture log turned colours. Lots of retransmissions and missed packets; served by host 206.127.159.231
It’s pretty much impossible to play PvE (open world or instances) in many areas on Elona’s Reach (EU). Lag spikes are up to several tens of seconds or even until disconnect, lots of rubberbanding, generally an un-fun experience. Tried mostly around 20:00 to 22:00 CEST. Pressing keys mostly just makes action icons flash, sometimes they don’t register at all.
(Germany, T-Com)
To the OP: Is it mostly the cinematic conversation VO that bothers you, or all the writing and VO in the game (ambient, event, etc.)?
The most bothersome thing is the flat delivery in the staged cinematics. When coming out of a heated battle, there’s really some emotionless, well, babbling going on that misses its mark completely. For example in the scene on Claw Islandwhen you're racing back to the dying commander, or when Sieran volunteers to sacrifice herself, you’re being ripped out of gameplay that’s supposed to be very dramatic, but the voice acting does not reflect that even in the slightest. There’s also an Ogre called Lagula that’s voiced by Liz Burnette trying to talk way below her range, which to me sounds just weird. Male ogres get the whole post-processing machinery, but she has to do with that ;-)
There’s also some CSI-grade technobabble writing around the Asura that’s not really to my liking, and some lines are just inane or really far off my sense of humour, but after a few decades of watching TV, I’m inclined to look around that.
The ambient voice is mostly fine to me, although a bit repetitive in parts (several threads about that in the Suggestions forum).
The 2-sides stage may be part of the issue, since the voice acting is all the exposition there is. The backgrounds are too stylised to show context, and the “acting skills” (posing, facial expressions) of the characters in there were so far pretty limited. So unless there’s some solid voice acting matching the context the player has just been ripped out of, there’s no way to feel it.
(edited by Laurreth.9627)
Might as well necro this one.
I’ve been having similar issues with story quest instances (Maeva’s Golems, Claw Island, and whatever the quest after that was). The game would just hang for a few seconds, and then “rubberband” forward. Together with the hordes of NPC enemies around, that killed me more than once.
Server was Elona’s Reach (EU)
One of my biggest griefs with the story quests so far is the quality of the voiceover. It generally feels like sitting through a badly rehearsed middle school theatre piece with people reading straight off the sheet, often completely detached from the situation, and with emotional capacity only comparable to the general acting in The Phantom Menace (read: none whatsoever).
A prime example would be the Durmand quest in Maeva’s house and the subsequent Battle for Claw Island, which has the supporting cast in all kinds of misery, but delivering their dialogue lines in a flat monotone that would lull even the most caffeine addled gamer to a soft sleep. There’s also a tendency to Deliver. Lines. Like. Kirk. With. Every. Word. Being. Its. Own. Sentence. which is naturally not helping, plus the general absence of pacing and dialogue sentences cutting smack in the middle of the action or some “in-game” dialogue that has to be read in the chatlog after the sequence has finished.
It’s sadly not like those two quests were the only cases where that happens. To me, it seems like it just keeps getting worse with every spoken line after the intro sequence, and it’s really one of the factors sucking away all my will to invest time in the game, especially after having spent three quarters of a year in a game that excels in story pacing and voice acting.
Just thought I’d mention it.