Showing Posts For chicobo.7891:
Because those 2:30 appear to be the chosen sweet spot for all intervals in GW2 (gameplay design wise). You have no dialogs which take longer than 2:30, and most fights in open world (except for champions) also don’t take much longer.
You will rarely be in the same situation for more than 2:30, so it wouldn’t make any sense to add any characteristic tunes beyond that point.
That has a drawback, of course. You will never have any “continuous” background music or longer themes. Thats why (just an example, but one of the best!) Valve used a different concept for Portal 2, instead of just stitching together various songs for different situations, they used ONE single theme, but assigned each partition of the track to different entities / conditions which could be present in the scene. So you always had the same main theme, but it sounded completely different, based on what type of scene you were in.
I think that answered my question pretty well! I didn’t think about that actually but you’re right in that battles don’t last very long. I still kinda wish some tracks might’ve been longer for out of battle situations since typically I find myself staying out of battle for times longer than the ‘sweet spot’ (especially when crafting).
Shriketalon’s posts are chock full of wonderful ideas! I feel that bringing the characters back to their homelands is an especially important idea because as the personal story goes on, you lose more and more of your unique ‘identity’ that you had so chosen. Races and orders don’t matter at the very end of it all, which while I understand was meant to be in the name of unity against a common foe, kind of damages some of the unique touches chosen by your race, profession, and personality.
I recently got my hands on the wonderful 4 disc soundtrack for this game and the music is pretty spectacular and immersive, but I noticed the peculiar trait that most songs have a running time of 2:30 (two minutes, thirty seconds), give or take 15 seconds. I have my music interval length set all the way to max anyway but I’m curious as to why this particular run time was chosen as a ‘sweet spot’ for the music composition. Any insight on this would be appreciated!
I felt pretty detached from the story having played it from start to nearly finish (I need a party for the final dungeon) and I find voice acting to be one major contributor to this, but I can’t exactly find it as a primary cause for that. To stay on the focus on voice acting for this thread, I agree there is major repetition issues and a general lack of emotion in most of the characters’ voices whether they are a player or NPC.
I feel the voice acting problems might be caused by stretching out the same voice actors across multiple characters, which contributes to the repetition complaint. The same voice actor will have the same accent or voice for multiple characters. This makes many characters – especially of the same race – run together and not feel very unique which then puts strain on having to make awesome writing for their dialogue to make them stand out which is not always the case. I feel this may have been out of necessity for the developers and VAs as you can only make so many different voices for so many characters in such a large MMO and because of that I’m not really sure how one can address this issue (even if we could retroactively redo the voice acting which isn’t possible anyway). Having an ensemble cast perform hundreds and hundreds of lines for a video game can be very costly! Makes you wonder the expenses of, say, Skyrim’s voice acting.
One possible way to fix this a little in the future is to make the voice acting for the player characters unique and not reusable among NPCs. For example as a human male, I sometimes hear ‘my own voice’ from enemies. Another mentioned suggestion in this thread is to reduce the repetition of the background dialogue, especially in crowded cities where players might idle to do things like crafting or trading. This can also be accomplished by fixing up dialogue triggers and other technical bits that make a conversation start. But I think the problem as a whole is just a result of the game’s production and limitations due to the scale of it being an MMO so I’m somewhat in a loss as to what else can be done.
I sent one report ingame but I’ll also crosspost it here too in case anyone else has been experiencing this as well.
The location in Brisban Wildlands – Seraph Observer’s Waypoint – is constantly camped by bandits, killing all of the NPCs nearby. The waypoint is never listed as contested at any time and there doesn’t appear to be any events around it. Killing the bandits will make more spawn, over and over. They will infinitely respawn and usually within about 5-7 seconds from each other. If any of the NPCs are revived, they’ll just keep coming to make sure those NPCs are eventually down and then they simply idle at the camp until someone draws near.
The fact that bandits camp so close to the waypoint can be a concern to anyone unawares but it could also be an exploit as well, as one can just keep killing swarms of enemies without end to stack up on loot and experience. I got a whole level just fighting these guys one time!