Guild Wars 2

Carzor Stelatis.9435:

synch.2980:

Your character, and it’s voice remain the same, of course, so if that’s a concern then you’re pretty much stuck with rerolling to another race.

The one-voice-per-race thing is a bit silly. With all the voice acting that was recorded for this game, they have a peer speaking in precisely the same accent as a middle class or poor person? [human obviously] Really?

Realise it’s a tiny issue in a huge game but it does bug me slightly :P

It all comes down to resources.

5 playable races x 2 genders = 10 character combinations / 10 voices

Let’s pretend that the PC has 2,000 lines of voiced dialogue in the game. With 10 voices that’s 20,000 lines of VO just for the player. Add one more PC voice per race/gender combination and you just doubled that line count to 40k. Unless you have a limitless budget, those lines have to be taken away from other content.

So while we could have added two voice options for each race/gender combination, it would have resulted in there being no ambient VO or events being silent.

Raindash.2794:

I am playing Sylvari, and I’m getting sick whenever I see those conversation loading and those british accents and stiff dialogues. I usually press Skip to End and do the quest.
I don’t even know what the story is about and making choices is completly random for me.
Should I care? Did I fail and ruin everything?

The personal stories vary by playable race. If you’re not enjoying the one you’re currently playing you may want to roll a new character. Try asura or charr. You may find their tone more to your liking.

Thanks for the feedback on the Living Story portion of Flame and Frost: Prelude. Here’s some context on how it works:

• The Flame and Frost story content progresses over time. You will not see everything today, tomorrow, or even the next day.
• Expect subtle changes at first. Maybe you’ll encounter some familiar characters. Perhaps you’ll be introduced to some new ones. You might see a new structure where there wasn’t one before.
• The Living Story content is initially about the thrill of discovery. We’ll put some markers on your map, maybe send you a letter, or parcel out details through certain characters, but the rest is up to you.
• As the weeks progress, you’ll notice bigger changes in the world. New events may appear. Plots will advance and characters will develop.

As always, we welcome your opinions. This is a new thing we’re trying so we appreciate your patience and input.

Kingfisher.7213:

There was a recent Game Developers’ Conference video, which came out about 4 days ago, where ArenaNet discussed their writing experiences/challenges in Guild Wars 2:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/185077/Video_Crafting_the_25_million_words_of_Guild_Wars_2.php#.UP9nI32YNok

The video is an hour long, and it talks about the writing structures they had, as well as how it will likely change going forward.

ArenaNet mentioned they had two writing teams.

One team consisted of two people, the “Loremasters”, and they were responsible for the Personal Story, Dungeons, and Cutscenes.

The second team seemed to have pretty much everyone else, and they were responsible for writing everything else, e.g. the dialogues in Dynamic Events, dialogues we had with NPC’s, and the background converstations we heard NPC’s have with each other across Tyria.

So it sounds like for the story arcs (Personal Story), it wasn’t lots of different writers doing different bits of the story. It sounds like 2 loremasters were working on it.

The video is interesting to watch because ArenaNet is speaking candidly to fellow peers in their field. They made lots of mistakes, but they learned some lessons from them.

The writing team has reorganized since launch to address some of the challenges Angel and I mentioned in that GDC presentation. Here’s a basic view of the current structure of GW2 writing:

Lead Writer – responsible for overall quality and direction of:

• Narrative Design (formerly Lore & Continuity Design)
• Writing (VO dialogue, non-VO text, UI, etc.)
• Editing (copy editing, script preparation, casting support, etc.)

Svarty.8019:

BobbyStein.2315:

I don’t want Guild Wars 2 to sound like every other fantasy title out there with the standard British accents on every character. So aside from more British accents, what other types of voices would you like to hear?

As a British person, I can tell you that there are a LOT of accents in Britain itself. I wonder if by “standard” British accents you mean either of the ones Americans tend to know; kittenney (Dick van kitten in Mary Poppins), and Posh (the rest of the cast of Mary Poppins) (The filter is stopping my from naming the Dick van kitten accent, but it is a regional accent from London. Oh wow, I can’t even type his name. This censorship is insane). You could also try (and I know I’m lumping a lot of regional variations and/or dialects together here);
Welsh,
Scottish,
Northern Irish,
Geordie,
Scouse,
Northern English,
Midlands,
South-Western English.

By far and away the worst voice acting I have ever heard is Detha in AC saying, “but I have to build them myself”. A completely ridiculous emphasis on the word “build” makes this sound absolutely comical.

I think we’re in agreement that there are many types of British accents—just as there are many types of American ones. I was referring to the common practice and perception that most fantasy games (and films) tend to feature British accents of all types for the cast. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with that, by the way, just that it seems the norm.

We tended to get the best performances from actors who spoke in their native accent. Perhaps it’s a comfort zone thing. There were a few exceptions, though. I thought Jennifer Hale pulled off a great sylvari performance, all things considered. I rather liked Brandon Bales, too. Neither are from England as far as I know. Then again, I’ve never lived overseas so I doubt my ears can detect where our acted British accents sounded “off” as well as you can.

We’ve already made some changes to our casting process since launch, so I’d like to hear your feedback as time goes on and newer performances make it into the game.

Malin.2490:

Personal story/cinematics: HORRIBLE
Ambient scenes and events: AWESOME

I still can’t believe the difference. Possibly two different teams?

Yes. Separate teams handled writing the different content types leading up to ship. That is no longer the case. My team is now responsible for the final output of all text and VO in the game, and I am now fully responsible for the quality. As a result of this change, I am now empowered to take the writing and VO in a direction that’s more consistent with the ambient scenes and events.

Bourbz.8712:

Personally, my biggest concern with the voice acting in this game is the lack of variety of accents. EVERYONE in the game sounds american, and they all speak in AMERCIAN english rather than British english, or just pronounce words how people would pronounce them if they had come from the same part of america. Prime examples are “CenTAR instead of CenTOUR” (thats the main one I can think of off the top of my head because it is said so much) but I have noticed many, many others that could have more diversity to them in order to add to the immersion. (Imagine if every english speaking person in the world said things exactly the same)

That’s not entirely true. We have a number of non-American accents in the game that are delivered by natural speakers. Here’s a small list as an example (but there are more).

• Robin Atkin Downes
• Gideon Emery
• Jane Windsor
• Roberto Medina
• Lin Gallagher
• Jenny Veal
• Etc.

Also, the game is made in America, we write it in American English, and most of our actors live in Los Angeles. That stated, I agree that we could use some more vocal diversity in the game, but I don’t want Guild Wars 2 to sound like every other fantasy title out there with the standard British accents on every character. So aside from more British accents, what other types of voices would you like to hear?

And yes, some of the pronunciations are a little janky. That sometimes happens. We fix what we can, when we can. I’ve also named a clear owner of our pronunciation guide, which should minimize these kinds of gaffes going forward.

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…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.

I hope you’re all comfortable voicing your opinions here. We value your honesty, and read as much of your feedback as we’re able. I can’t be too specific right now, but rest assured that we’re making some changes to how we write, edit, cast, voice, and present story in the game. The past few live releases should hopefully give you a small idea of where we’re headed.

For the record, Nolan doesn’t show up to VO sessions in a codpiece.

ovoToxin.3950:

I doubt they’ll have the time and/or will to re-record all of the story dialogue. However, I would LOVE them to add in the ability to (at least outside of the story dialogues) change your characters voice.

Rewriting and re-recording the entire game would be too time consuming and cost prohibitive, though we have analyzed certain parts of the game to see where we could make some improvements, if given the resources. It’s safest to assume that the current voiced content will remain, and that new additions to the game will reflect a new direction. If that changes, we’ll be sure to let everyone know.

Erasculio is right that adding additional player voices is hugely expensive due to how many lines are assigned to the PC (player character). Whenever the player speaks in shared content, that line must be recorded a total of 10 times (5 playable races x 2 genders). Also, due to how variant lines are used in the game, the contents of the line have to be written exactly the same, which makes it hard to do any meaningful voice or roleplaying differences between characters.

That stated, all ideas are valid. We had discussed finding ways of giving players new voices, or building a pitch slider for those who wanted such a feature. We settled with what we have now due to time and resource constraints, however.

Are your criticisms mostly being leveled at the personal story and cinematic conversations, or also with the ambient scenes and events?

TheZoobler.8073:

The jokes on the Mad King Thorn outfit from the gem shop are simply the worst voice acting in the game, period.

He sounds like a bored office worker.

Shouldn’t the Mad King sound threatening, supernatural, imposing, crazy?

Or are we not using his voice, and instead using our character’s? Because the voice sounded exactly the same on my norn and sylvari, and neither sounded a whole lot like my character.

The voices on the Mad King costumes were purposely different. They’re supposed to sound like novelty masks voiced by people other than the Mad King himself, hence the tinny processing. There are two voices: one male and one female.

MikeRocks.9243:

I really hate that Norn line:

“I pray to the Spirits of the Wild, but they rarely answer.”

Just drives me nuts, really.

We marked those lines for a rewrite because the norn don’t really pray to the spirits. For whatever reason they didn’t get addressed (tools bug? oversight? budget?) so we’re sort of stuck with them for now. We may change some of them the next time the actors come back.

Hermes.7014:

I feel six feet tall!

I think the original version of that line was, “I feel four feet tall!” which I think is funnier. I’m debating changing the line to that the next time Steve Staley comes back for recording.

Masterpyro.4310:

Thanks Bobby!
15char

You’re welcome. Funny story: On Jenny’s first day recording with us, we were in the middle of a marathon VO session. We had three studios running at the same time for weeks on end. As often was the case, the actors went to the wrong location. My first interaction with her was telling her that she was in the wrong place and now late for recording. She was so embarrassed!

She, like many of our voice talent, was really pleasant to work with.

Magoslich.6857:

Overall, the Charr story does a better job of making you feel proud of your race and understanding of why you go off to join an Order than the human one does.

If I recall, the charr story was the third one to be implemented. Human and norn were first and second.

Masterpyro.4310:

Can anyone tell me who the voice actress was for the character Lionguard Lyns that is standing around the middle of LA? She sounds oddly familar and I can’t quite put my finger on who it is. I don’t think its correct but she sounds a ton like Jackie Tyler from Doctor Who.

The actress is Jenny Veal.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2628783/

Focksbot.6798:

I really hope ANet people are reading these, because many of the posters above make very sensible arguments/suggestions, particularly the idea that the personal story should only ever attempt to treat you like a decent adventurer/credit to the team, not as a central figure, because that leads you to ask: “If I’m so gosh-darn important, why can’t I make any of the important choices?”

We’ve been reading this thread since it was created. Some great feedback in here.

Chadramar.8156:

2) There are too many disposable NPCs.

Agreed. This is something that was discussed during development. I know that the personal story team tried to address this during the polish phase leading up to launch. I was in a few meetings where we added additional lines and talked about where the characters should reappear. The iconics got new voiced dialogue, and many of the side characters were reused in different places throughout the game.

I think the main issue is that many characters come and go every 10 levels, so it’s hard for people to really care about them in the long run. That’s something we intend to focus on more in the future.

nogthree.2914:

Jeffrey Vaughn clearly isn’t Tivac, he’s just a cool dude.

INDEED!

ZetaStriker.9142:

Lack of continuity is a big issue as it currently stands. We need some characters to be with us from 1-80, and others can come and go in the storyline. Characters shouldn’t just disappear without explanation.

The Charr warband is a nice start, but we need those elements used across the entirety of the personal storyline. Otherwise, how will we care about them if most of them are only around for 2-3 events? Longevity on NPCs allows us to interact with them, build relationships with them, care about them . . . and through that, care much more strongly about the storylines that involves them as well.

100% agree.

Psylan Oblivion.2170:

Also human storyline with the missing sister.
What happens? You save her, and never see her again? Where does she go? Does my character ever speak to her again? Does go back on duty, drop out of the seraph?
Same with Quinn. I didn’t feel much in common with some of the characters. It’s like they drop out as you progress. I think maybe if they popped in again and helped fight the dragon or something there would be a better connection.

To me it seems like here’s segments of the story.

Human – Quinn, Pete etc.
Order -Tybalt
Trahearne – Dragon. END

What happens to Quinn etc? Perhaps put them in somewhere, to help or do something.

I still love GW2, but the personal story needs some work.

We may address this at some point.

Thanks for all the constructive feedback.

Grakor.3450:

I don’t normally care one way or the other about voice acting in video games, but props to the guy who was voicing the male Charr PCs. He was definitely channeling something during the end of “Thicker than Water.”

That was Ron Yuan. He did a great job.

Golgathoth.3967:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1716744/fullcredits#cast

They hired a lot of professional and very talented voice actors.

That’s true. Also, the imdb list is incomplete. There are more than 100 voice actors who worked with us on GW2.

I think part of the issue some people have with cinematic conversation VO is the presentation. There are some folks who can’t get past the two-shot, stage play view, so that ruins it for them. Also, some of the actors would have benefited from better contextual notes, which is why some of their lines sound “off.”

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.)?

Psientist.4732:

If Mr Stein is still keeping an eye on this thread I’d like to ask:
Was the writing in this game mainly done with a pre-teen/young teen demography in mind? I bet you have some really good writers on your team as well as being one yourself, and I understand the necessity of writing on the same level as the target demography but… please tell me you guys wrote this with crowd pleasing marketing in mind

I prefer a more mature tone where appropriate, which is why the dynamic event and ambient scene dialogue (hopefully) sound that way. My team didn’t set the tone for the personal story, which is why you may notice a difference in voice.

DiogoSilva.7089:

As someone who has only played through with humans, I’m interested on trying charr’s due to the TC’s points. I felt human’s story was a bit bland and unpredictable, it was basically white-and-black politics, which made it quite dry. If you’re going to give political tones to your narrative, you need shades of grey and some kind of humanistic drama and thought-provoking issues, to be any interesting, imo.

I also felt human’s story archs were disjointed from each other, and the characters weren’t given proper time to stick with you and develop. If this is any different for charr’s story, I’ll want to try it out.

Yeah, a little subtlety never hurts.

Try the charr story. You may enjoy your time with your selected warband character, who generally has more screen time and dialogue than most of the human “best friend” characters.

Xfraze.1704:

If the writing team handled the editorial duties, does that include making sure that all of the branches a player could choose tied in logically? Only reason I ask is because on the sylvari side, sometimes it seemed like a choice I made in the previous story step or a few story steps back didn’t actually happen from the perspective of the world/dialogue.

Meeting a character a few quests back, then being reintroduced to that character as if we never met….credit for what my character did being given over to another character, etc.

No. The story team was responsible for its continuity. The writing team merely copy edited cinematic conversations, story dialogue, and other elements of text. If we noticed a logic gap we’d let them know, but it’s sometimes hard to connect the dots when you’re editing stuff in bulk and not seeing it in the context of the game.

The story team did frequent playthroughs, though. I imagine that they fixed almost all of the continuity issues before launch.

Xfraze.1704:

Is there any chance of these issues being reviewed and taken care of later on, or is this a case of “we’re fine with how it is” and then you’ll surreptitiously do better in an expansion?

If a character is saying something out of context, we may be able to fix the issue by editing or cutting that bit of VO, or hooking up the right audio file if we have it in the depot. We have a small backlog of text and VO bugs on the writing team’s plate, some of which involve the personal story. (The writing team generally handles text and VO bugs, regardless of whether we originated the content.) We’ll fix what we can, and we appreciate everyone’s patience.

Greyfeld.7104:

This is going to sound extremely rude to the efforts of your personal story team, but maybe the personal story should be handed over to your general writing team. Because the dialogue for the ambient scenes and dynamic event dialogue was far and away the best dialogue in the game.

We’re in the process of analyzing the final version of the personal story, and looking at ways to improve the writing, voice acting, and overall presentation going forward. My team and/or I will likely be more involved in that regard.

Thanks for the compliments on the ambient and event dialogue. We worked hard on it.

For those of you who are experiencing missing lines in cinematic conversations: are you playing a male or female character?

I’ll have to look it up on Monday, but off the top of my head I think it was Crispin Freeman.

Vzur.7123:

BobbyStein.2315:

We need to adjust the PC chatter frequency so certain lines play less often. It’s on our to-do list.

While you’re at it, how about adding an option to disable it? No offense, I love the game, but I don’t really appreciate hearing these lines ever.

We’ve talked about either implementing a frequency slider or giving people the option to mute player chatter, but it all comes down to programming and UI resources. A few of us wanted it in for ship, but too many higher priority issues needed attention.

Grakor.3450:

I don’t want to be that guy that claims he can do so much better than the writing team Anet already has, so I won’t. That’s essentially the point of this long ramble I’m about to go on. It’s not that I think I can do better, but I think that they can do better, by showing that they already have!

The writing team as an entity didn’t write or design the personal story content. The personal story team, which was made up of many designers (including a lore and continuity designer and one writer from my team) were responsible for generating that. My one embedded writer helped write or revise dialogue in many of the story arcs, but there were a lot of people on that team who contributed voiced and unvoiced text.

The writing team mostly serviced the personal story team in an editorial capacity up through launch. We’d copy edit scripts as they came over, and were involved with voice-over recording sessions (fielding questions from the voice director, providing context, etc.), but we/I didn’t create the characters or plan out the arcs. Thanks for the kind words, but I want to make sure the personal story team gets credit for that. I like to think that the writing team helped polish up the dialogue where we could, but our involvement was mostly supportive.

The writing team was mostly responsible for writing ambient scenes and dynamic event dialogue, and copy editing or revising everything else in the game that came from the other teams generating content (personal story, dungeon, WvW, etc.).

Maximus Delion.8719:

Today’s patch notes say that missing female VO lines were restored. I’m assuming the males are still on the way.

Is anyone noticing a problem with missing male lines?

Greyfeld.7104:

Nonsensicles.5486:

The difference is that on rare occasions you get an inconsequential dialogue option that requires your specific personality type to select. That’s it.

Which is sad, because this system was perfect to set up cutscene dialogue branches, if Anet had been of a mind to do so.

We discussed this earlier in development, but ultimately didn’t have the time or resources to execute on it. It would have required programming resources to allow the CCs to branch, tools support to enable content creation, and a coordinate effort between content design and writing to implement on a meaningful scale. Too many other features took priority.

Perhaps this is something we can consider going forward, as many people want it (including some of us). No promises, though.

UPDATE: We’re actively testing the fix. No ETA on when it will be deployed to the live server, other than “soonish.”

ftskaleem.8342:

I like the sound effects and voices and stuff… I also know that the voices are random from a list… but… I’m getting pretty fed up of hearing some of the key quotes like “seize the moment” or “I can outrun a centaur”…

Some of them I don’t mind though. Suggestion perhaps is to add/change them to something you wouldn’t mind hearing over again like “woosh” or “boost!” so it sounds like a sound effect rather than a memorable quote you may get fed up of…

Just a thought.

We need to adjust the PC chatter frequency so certain lines play less often. It’s on our to-do list.

UPDATE: The Audio and Programming teams have been investigating this issue since it was first reported over the weekend. They’re working on a fix.

UPDATE: The Audio Team and various members of the Programming team have been investigating the issue since the weekend. A fix is being worked on.

OxfordDon.7803:

BobbyStein.2315:

While we’re aware of a handful of missing VO files, you shouldn’t be having widespread issues like this.

Well be that as it may BobbyStein, it is now happening in every story line cutscene for me and the wife too. It began happening after the last patch, simple as that.

If that’s the case, then it might not be an issue of missing files but a new bug that was introduced. I’ll notify some folks and find out more.

Greyfeld.7104:

Ba air.1372:

Also, I will never forget (or forgive) the male Sylvari player pronouncing “sword” as “schword”.

Schword.

Maybe he was trying to say Schwartz. As in, “Use the Schwartz.” xD

That’s EXACTLY what he was doing.

Please submit bug reports if you’re encountering dropped audio in cinematic conversations. While we’re aware of a handful of missing VO files, you shouldn’t be having widespread issues like this. Screenshots or quotes from the text help us immensely.

There are some cinematic conversations that are missing VO files. It helps if you can screenshot the missing line for us, or if you can at least give us the text. They’re easy to fix if we know those details.

Raf.1078:

Its a video game geared to serve as many people as possible. What seems neutral and unimaginative to you may seem heroic to some other percentage of the other estimated 1,999,999 people that purchased the game.

But we all have to make the best of the personal storyline. Because there is no way for Anet to customize the dialogue to fit “everyones” expectations.

It’s true we built a game that we hope appeals to a wide audience, but it does help to understand the tastes of our more vocal players. There’s always room for improvement with what we do, so we’ll be taking this and other feedback into consideration as we continue to evolve GW2 over the years.

This is a neat idea, and one that we briefly talked about when the game was in early development. It reminds me of the chatter presets from Day of Defeat and/or Counter-strike. I’ll bring it up in a meeting. No guarantees, though.

Thanks! I’ll let Nolan know the next time I see him. I’m sure he’ll appreciate the compliments.

CharrGirl.7896:

Aww that is such a shame! I found the voice-over to be amazing it helps with immersion too. Sometimes reading those can be tiresome, but with voice it becomes easier.

Any hopes you will continue with the voiceover for and release those in future updates?

I hope so. No promises or anything, but if we have room in the budget and time to go through all the mails, we may be able to restore the existing voice files and also record the remaining ones. Don’t expect it any time soon, though. Or at all.

CharrGirl.7896:

I just checked again, commoner and street rat in human has them, but not the others.

Can we hope for an official response just to check if this is bug or not?

The original plan was to voice all the personal story mail, but due to time constraints in the production plan we decided to leave them silent. We probably have voice files for the first 10 or 20 levels for many of the storylines, but we unhooked them because we couldn’t guarantee that we’d have them all written and voiced in time. The fact that you’re hearing one or two means that we forgot to remove some files. (It’s a bug.)

The chatter system that handles things like greets and combat VO needs some frequency tweaking. It’s relatively simple to do, and it’s on our radar for polish stuff.

If there are scenes triggering near certain vendor NPCs, we should probably move them farther away.

EndlessDreamer.6780:

I believe the issue is with the genre of higher fantasy that you have the expectations of epicness.

The Norn are all stoic hunters, the humans all heroic, the Charr all powerful, Asura are all genius inventors, etc.

However by constantly applying this same trope to every set of dialogue, you create a feeling of staleness.

After one hundred Norns all talking about glory in the exact same tone of voice, you lose their individuality. The characters become defined by their races instead of colored by them. Yes, a Norn might have been raised in a society that glorifies hunting and power, but would -all- Norn have the same “For glory! They shall sing my songs in the halls of etc etc” sphiel?

Cause currently, they do.

I think ArenaNet has fallen back in to the old trope that everything has to be epic. No character must show weakness. It must all be amazing. They all rise to the occasion and they are all heroes. They never once falter.

Hell, we even miss the one crowning moment of possible moral ambiguity in the series, the defection of Logan.

It’s far too black and white and far too unbelievable. It works in a limited sense, but unfortunately, it reduces the believability of the character as a multi-faceted individual if all of them share it.

So I think a bit more work needs to be done to flesh out your side characters. We don’t want all of them to be simpering cowards, but it’s not bad to hate a NPC. We don’t have to like them all. It’s more believable if there are some we like and some we find insufferable. It also adds to the story immensely if they are redeemed or not redeemed, versus us going in knowing that they are:

A) Either going to be heroes and succeed
B) Going to be Heroes and die trying.

I’ll be completely honest, I really didn’t buy GW2 for the story telling. I love the game mind you, but the NPCs could use some serious work.

All good points. Thanks for your honesty.

Greyfeld.7104:

Sorry. Since this is the Personal Story forum, I just assumed that it was clear I was referring to the Personal Story.

Unfortunately, I feel like I’m not explaining myself very well. Let me see if I can find some specific examples to pick apart. I’ll post again when I have something more concrete.

It helps if we know how the dialogue and VO are being presented (ambient, cinematic conversation, etc.). This is more so I can analyze feedback and compare it to my own observations. We’re striving to improve the quality of the writing and voice-over with each release, and I’m curious if some of the player feedback matches mine.

Greyfeld.7104:

Garrus.9803:

Actually I disagree. I admit that some of the dialogue isn’t that great but overall I think it’s pretty good. Tybalt Leftpaw (an Order of Whispers character) had some of the best dialogue I’ve seen in an MMO. If you came into this game expecting Mass Effect quality dialogue you’re going to be disappointed. But if you take it for what it is it’s good.

If by “Mass Effect quality dialogue,” you mean “dialogue that’s natural and believable,” then yeah, I did.

Nobody TALKS like this. That’s my point. It’s stilted and extremely campy and sounds like something you would expect from amateur hour at your local community theater.

For the record, it’s not the fault of the voice-actors, it’s the script that’s the problem.

In what content is the writing/VO problematic for you? The ambient world stuff? The personal story? The dungeons? They were all handled differently. The more specific examples you give, the better we can understand your feedback. I realize that this post is in the personal story section, but I want to know if your criticism is limited to that.

Thanks!