Showing Posts For LobsterEntropy.1238:
I think making a really old internet joke an integral part of a class, and namely a part of the class that involves shouting the joke at maximum volume was kind of a mistake.
Also, my sylvari loves to inform me when he’s taking damage: “Death… stalks me…”
Am I the only one really disappointed with the voice acting?
in Audio
Posted by: LobsterEntropy.1238
It’s always a little bit awkward when you’re about to write a post criticizing the writing and voice acting of the game only to see that the game’s lead writer is watching the thread. Even so, I’m going to agree with everyone else- ambient dialogue is great (if a bit repetitious in LA) and story writing and voice acting is generally quite terrible. I stopped playing my personal story at around level 66 (I think that’s what it says on the right hand side of my screen forever) because the actual missions aren’t fun on the gameplay side and the story stopped being worthwhile right around the time Tybalt threw his life away in the most awkward and needless way possible. I think there’s a moment that perfectly shows the dichotomy between the awkward, stilted dialogue scenes and the excellent ambient dialogue: the mission where you meet Destiny’s Edge (I know it’s a fantasy game, but please say that combination of words out loud and try to do so with a straight face. It’s kind of absurd.)
Your character sees a group of children playing around and in about 30 seconds to a minute, you’ve pretty much learned the entire backstory for their group in a really enjoyable, charming way. The conversation flows naturally and the kid VO is excellent. I really enjoyed standing there and watching them (a bit creepy, I guess) and liked that the game didn’t take away control of my character. It trusted me to pay attention if I was interested and move on if I wasn’t. Great. Then you meet Destiny’s Edge and it all goes to hell. The characters awkwardly deliver poorly-written lines while the game engine frantically tries to switch out their models. It doesn’t flow like a conversation, it doesn’t sound natural because of the huge pauses, and it gives the player way too long to actually consider the ridiculous things that these characters are saying. Please, please stop using the cut-away cutscene thing. Trust us as players that we’re going to be willing to pay attention to your story, although, frankly, there are large parts that simply aren’t worth paying any attention to. The whole “Destiny’s Edge acts like spoiled children” subplot that runs through every dungeon rapidly became the subject of many bets amongst my friends, namely, which member was going to act unreasonable and storm off in a huff this time. If I start playing the story again (probably just to get the weapon skin at the end, hooray for skinner boxes) I’ll try to screenshot the most egregious examples of poor writing, because I know there were multiple times where I actually laughed out loud at the fact that a character was actually saying something and expecting the player to take it seriously.
But this thread is theoretically about voice acting, so back on topic: the norn voice acting is the worst, with the asura as the best. Norns sound completely stiff and disinterested (try listening to the way the norn female voice says “new lands? new lands!” First off that’s kind of a dumb line for her to be saying to herself, and second she sounds like she’s reading off of a cue card right before she leaves for lunch.) and there isn’t enough variety in the voices (I’m pretty sure Eir has the same voice actress as my norn female, so there are a lot of times where they sounded identical). The asura actors pretty much sound like they’re having fun and actually putting something into the character. The charr are pretty good too, while the humans and sylvari are a bit stiff but generally fine. I don’t know how many of the sylvari voice actors are actually British, so I hope I’m not being a complete idiot here, but I gotta say a lot of them sound like they’re doing a fake accent (you can really hear it slip during some of the male sylvari’s lines) and it’s kind of distracting. Nolan North delivers his Nolan North-iest performance yet, pretty clearly making no effort to do any voice but, well, the Nolan North likeable hero voice that he does in 90% of his games (not to say he isn’t a great voice actor, since he’s done some amazing stuff [Spec Ops] but a lot of directors seem to just tell him to do the one voice and nothing else). That said, he is still doing a competent job as compared to the borderline atrocious performance by Trahearne’s VA and most of the norns.
Conclusions: ambient dialogue is great, the cutaway conversation scenes highlight the worst parts of the game’s voice acting and writing. Norns are bad, Asuras are great, and Nolan North is playing Nathan Drake with a codpiece.
Part 2, since this got mad long, yo.
If you really, really want to experience the problem with dungeons, go make a level-appropriate alt and gear him with blues and greens from the preceding 10 levels. Then run Sorrow’s Embrace story mode with a PUG. Only then will you experience the pain of endless champions without worthwhile mechanics, multi-stage bosses that take so long you can easily run back from the WP and only see their health bar go down 5%, silver trash mobs that add nothing, and a story so uninteresting and formulaic that the players in my group were actively mocking it after every cutscene. (Seriously, the story in story mode dungeons is basically terrible- “Which member of Destiny’s Edge is going to act like a petty spoiled child this time?”)
On the other hand, the fractal dungeons are a great first step towards dungeons that are actually fun to play. They make use of the cooperative nature of the party for more than just “let’s all add our damage together”. The much-maligned swamp fractal is enjoyable to work on as a team (if you get a group that aren’t going to be dicks about it when someone doesn’t run it fast enough) and the dredge powersuit boss (despite having probably too much HP considering how hard it is) is really exciting because it has the team split up and accomplish different goals, beyond just “nuke this guy”. I’d love to see more of this in future dungeon (re?)designs- bosses with unique mechanics and objectives that are more complex and interesting than just killing a billion trash mobs in a straight line. More jumping puzzles, more regular puzzles, and more fun co-op gameplay (look at other co-op games that have varied team objectives or put players into different roles/places on the map). Again, I still think there’s room for a lot of improvement, but the fact that the fractals use Veterans and not silver mobs is a great sign that you understand how boring it is to fight walking health pools.
Everyone wants a group finder. Add a group finder. gw2lfg.com is actually a pretty good workaround, but I don’t want to have to leave the game to find a group. I understand concerns about splitting the community or losing the conversational aspect that comes from LFGing, but I’ve had chatty groups by using the site and I’ve had silent groups from LFGing. Please make it easier and faster to run dungeons, since I want to be spending my limited free time playing the game and not putting up classified ads.
A final, pie-in-the-sky idea that I’d love to see added to the game: split up the current dungeons into their most interesting encounters. Make those parts fractals, and then let players choose different playlists of fractals from the portal in LA. (So I can run the AC fractal playlist and get AC tokens, or the “mixed bag” playlist and get a potpourri of different fractals and tokens). And then add a “currency” page that stores all my different currencies. Seriously.
A lot of other people have pretty quickly come up with good lists of what the problem with dungeons is. Here’s mine:
1) Poor rewards for time investment, especially the story mode dungeons. I get that you don’t want the old days of people running CM Story for infinite XP, but at least give tokens for first-time completion (or even better, if someone in the party hasn’t done the dungeon before, everyone gets tokens for helping them through it). I’ve spent, at a conservative estimate, 30 hours in fractals thus far (probably much more, but I’m guessing here). I’m still barely even halfway to getting the backpack. What do you define as “minimal grind”? Why do so many things require 250 stacks of ultra-rare materials? (That’s not really dungeon-related, I guess).
2) HP bars everywhere (As an experiment, cut the HP of every mob and every boss by 50%. Play the dungeon. Is it meaningfully less challenging? Or just shorter? There is a difference.)
3) Unbalanced difficulty. Some paths and dungeons are far, far faster and easier than others. Some bosses are insanely difficult and basically require exploits to be defeated, while others (most) are just tedious time sinks without any challenge or interesting mechanics. (Even in the generally excellent fractal dungeons, the jellyfish boss is a great example of a boss that just takes forever to kill without anything interesting about it)
4) Over reliance on RNG. If it drops from the dungeon, we should be able to buy it with tokens. Rolling the dice on opening a chest is fun enough, but I don’t want to be locked out from Ascended rings because I’m not lucky enough (I actually do have a ring, but many of my friends don’t and it’s extremely frustrating for them). Cosmetic items can be a drop, sure, but gameplay-relevant items shouldn’t be locked away like that.
5) Trash mobs. What role do they play in dungeons? Are they there to provide smaller challenges to introduce mechanics and prepare players for the more challenging boss? Or are they filler? I’d argue that they’re filler in the vast majority of the dungeons. They just waste the player’s time and end up being skipped by most players. Even in the fractals, players just run past trash mobs wherever possible (after the ice elemental in Snowblind, the stairs up to the first seal in Colossus). If an enemy can be avoided, players will find a way to avoid them. Rather than just accepting that that’s the way it’s going to be, either make it worthwhile to kill the enemies, or make them unavoidable (and if you’re going to do that, give them interesting mechanics or players will hate you for making them fight past yet more waste-of-time trash).