Guild Wars 2

Glad some folks are enjoying Scarlet’s introduction. There is more to come. As always, thanks for your thoughtful feedback and constructive criticism.

If you’ve experienced some strangeness with the flythrough cinematic during the Queen’s speech, it’s likely related to system specs and graphics settings. Due to the length of the flythrough, lower spec machines may notice the caption timing and lip sync misaligned, graphics anomalies (like Scarlet’s gun floating in the air), or other weirdness.

This shouldn’t affect the painterly cinematic (with Lord Faren and Queen Jennah), as the VO is “baked in” with the movie file.

We apologize for this inconvenience and will be looking at ways to solve this issue in future updates.

skullmount.1758:

You should have gotten some of the staff (possibly CMs/PR people) to do some of the voices. Martin might have made a good Charr.

Martin would make an awesome charr, but he’s not a SAG-AFTRA member.

We adjusted the frequency of when certain PC lines trigger in a previous release.

Kain Francois.4328:

This is why it’s a bad idea to hire bigshot celebrities to voice an MMO.

Honestly, did the marketing team believe whether or not people like Nolan North voices the main character, would decide whether or not people buy the game?

Now because of decisions like that, our playable character has to be mute for most the upcoming updates! <_<

I mean, granted Nolan North is a great voice actor, does anyone actually care enough for it to be a deciding factor?

A couple of things here:

• Marketing had no involvement in casting the player character. This was a design-driven decision.
• The unfortunate side effect of having the player speak with 10 different voices is that it is cost prohibitive, and that the lines are shared. Dialog does not deviate, which means that a charr male PC says the same line as a sylvari female in cinematics in circumstances where any player can talk.

Jornophelanthas.1475:

I think the cause is cost-based. Any line spoken by the player character needs to be voice ten times (5 races x 2 genders). And it is unclear to me whether all ten of the voice actors are even available, since there has been NO addition of player voicing AT ALL since the launch date.

Having said that, I would love more player character voice work, as I am especially fond of the sound of my main character’s voice (male sylvari).

This is partially true. It’s very expensive to voice the player since it costs 10x (or more in some cases, since some actors are paid above scale depending on ability, availability, etc.) for each line recorded. We also have moved away from using cinematic conversations (the two-shot close ups) which were the primary delivery system of PC VO. Outside of the painterly cinematics and PC chatter (the stuff that’s automatically triggered when you’re low on health, suffering from conditions, leveling up, etc.) we don’t have proper control of triggering PC lines. It’s a technical issue that’s partly tied to having multiple PCs in a party.

So, while we can certainly solve these technical hurdles in the future we currently don’t have support for PC lines outside of the conditions listed above. And considering the fact that PC lines are shared across all races and genders, it doesn’t leave a lot of flexibility for making each PC talk differently. We are considering other ways to let players express themselves in the game through choice (actions, unspoken conversations, etc.), though those discussions are ongoing. Will the player speak in the future? Probably, but how and where are still under debate.

Eleri Tezhme.3048:

I’m still in love with the guy who was the Subdirector Blingg. (CITIZENS!)

That’s Jon St. John. He’s really awesome to work with.

Electro.4173:

StinVec.3621:

I thought Hobo-Tron was pretty awesome

…but regarding continuity, any reason why Rox and Braham have no idea who I am anymore? It hasn’t been that long since I saw them last to have to reintroduce myself all over again.

Its kind of a weird disconnect. They know you in the story instance, but then outside they don’t. Not really sure what the deal is there.

It’s a bug. The conversations outside the story instance were written with conditionals that check if the player had completed certain Living World achievements with Braham and/or Rox but were not set up correctly.

Could it be Quaggan Soup?

Critwrench.8432:

No Walking.6349:

It’s like the Jedi Consular male from SWTOR, and the human male in GW2 are the same voice actor. Made me very happy

Nolan North is a lot more people in this game than you’d think.

Actually, Nolan only voices the human male player character in GW2. He did not play any other role in the game.

Glad you enjoyed the interview! I don’t get a chance to talk about work that often, so I’m happy you got something useful out of it.

No worries. Thanks for the feedback!

It’s a bug. They recognize you in the story instance but the conversation logic in the arena versions isn’t triggering correctly. The lines were written but they’re not displaying on interact.

The first bits of the system should be online before the end of the year. It’s a rather big undertaking, so thanks for your patience.

I can empathize with having a busy life and not always being able to fit my gaming schedule in between work, home life, and social commitments. Your comments are not lost on us.

We’re exploring some ideas for the future, including a system that would allow certain bits of Living World content to be accessed independent of the release. Plans and designs have not been solidified yet, so I want to temper your expectations. But if you have any opinions on the matter feel free to let us know. We’re already looking at ways to leave some LW content behind to evolve Tyria and improve the game. This would be one element of it, should we decide to build such a feature.

I mentioned this in another thread, but I’ll post it here for safety. We’re working on a system to direct people through the Living World (and other) content to address many of the issues people have in experiencing a linear narrative in a non-linear setting. This is something we’ve been aware of for a while but we’re now able to talk about since the system is being built. I can’t go into specifics just yet, but the long term plan is to provide players with a central mechanism for tracking content and having a better understanding of the stories in the game.

As always, thanks for the constructive feedback.

Thank you for all the constructive feedback. We’re currently working on a system that will better direct players to (and through) the Living World content, since that’s the biggest challenge we’re faced when trying to present a linear narrative inside of a non-linear environment. It should be online late this year.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Just ask yourselves if you really want to elect a fancy cat with a lead designer in his pocket. We’ll just have double up our support for Kiel on SATURDAY.

Brought to you by the people against smelly animals in office.

This man speaks the truth.

The stories are connected. You’ll find out more later this year.

I’m voting for Kiel. You should, too!

The cinematics team really knocked it out of the park. The June team took some chances with the noir feel, writing style, and design and art choices. Honestly, I wasn’t sure how it would be received. Glad that some folks are “getting” the concept, as it’s not as common in fantasy MMOs.

Thanks for the feedback. We’re experimenting with new characters and story delivery mechanics with each release. Glad that some folks are enjoying what we’re doing as a studio.

The credits list that Inculpatus cedo.9234 posted is way out of date (probably from the Nightfall days if memory serves), so don’t refer to it for GW2-related discussions, please. Many of those folks have change roles or moved on to other companies.

Mia Lunarfang.5826:

Okay, so I understand if you cant or have no desire to implement my suggestions, but I would appreciate a response if possible.

…

I posted this elsewhere, but… whatever.

We don’t have the time to directly respond to every bit of feedback. It’s nothing personal, by the way. We just don’t have the time/bandwidth/free cycles/etc. We read as much as we can in the forums (and at other sources) and reply when we’re able.

We do value all thoughtful suggestions, so thanks to you and everyone else who has been posting here with ideas, concerns, and constructive criticism. We’ll take it into account as we work on future Living World releases.

DiogoSilva.7089:

I’m hoping that, for future living world content, we get the best of both experiences. The tight, focused storytelling and a detailed and fun world experience.

That’s our goal.

Ideally, the in-game story should tell you everything you need to know about the current Living World plot, context, and character motivation through a combination of scenes, clues, and gameplay. Blog posts, interviews, novels, etc. are supplementary.

One of the challenges of weaving a story into open world content is ensuring that players see the right details in the proper order. By nature, dynamic events are designed to be played as you encounter them, which makes story delivery especially challenging in that content type due to its non-linear placement. We’ve been experimenting on different ways to weave the story into the action with each Living World release, sometimes with mixed results.

We used a combination of letters, instanced cinematics, and achievements to tell the Flame & Frost story. While spreading details out among all those different UI elements was not ideal, it was the most effective means of directing people through content with our current tech. We are exploring some options that would streamline this experience, but we’re not ready to discuss the details right now.

There are various bits of story spread throughout the Southsun Cove content. Some are in idle scenes, whereas others are nestled in journals, conversations, or achievement lists (which, due to a bug, did not obscure later events and revealed some spoilers ahead of time). Having a few story cinematics at key moments would have certainly helped players piece together the plot, so in the future we will likely use them in ways similar to the F&F releases.

As always, thanks for the honest feedback. The Living World of GW2 is a new thing for us, so we appreciate your patience, understanding, and suggestions.

Lady Kasmeer Meade is voiced by Janell Cox, who is new to the Guild Wars 2 cast.

Geotherma.2395:

I think this thread is directly relevant to some patch notes

Correct.

There is a walkthrough post that Paul Belz wrote up that should explain the intricacies of the Flame and Frost content in case anything is unclear.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/flameandfrost/A-Guide-to-Flame-Frost-Retribution/first#post1930063

Also, the mails you receive from Rox, Braham, etc. should tell you where to go next.

Thanks for the positive comments.

You’ll find out soon.

Thanks again for all the constructive feedback. It matters.

Tachenon.5270:

Funny that I felt more empathy with those beached whales than I have with the refugees.

Awesome. Our next iconic is a whale.

Brutal Arts.6307:

BobbyStein.2315:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

On a serious question, when you folks get to the next Living Story block you want to work on (after Frost and Flame) may we see something more ambitious as far as changes? Somewhere between the homestead/camps/ranches showing up and the havoc wrought on Lion’s Arch late last year?

Our hope on the Living World teams, provided we get the amount of resources and time required, is to evolve the game with each scheduled update. I can’t be more specific than that right now, but we’re discussing lots of ideas at the moment. I hope to be able to discuss this in more depth once the time is right.

Talk to someone that manages rewards so we can get something other than a Jug Of Karma. These events have been pretty tedious (fedex quests). You probably be able to get alot more people to suck it up and play Frost and Flame: The Fetch Quest if they got something.

It doesn’t even have to be something worth anything. A pos mini/townclothes, hell even a laurel.

I’ll relay this to the teams.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

On a serious question, when you folks get to the next Living Story block you want to work on (after Frost and Flame) may we see something more ambitious as far as changes? Somewhere between the homestead/camps/ranches showing up and the havoc wrought on Lion’s Arch late last year?

Our hope on the Living World teams, provided we get the amount of resources and time required, is to evolve the game with each scheduled update. I can’t be more specific than that right now, but we’re discussing lots of ideas at the moment. I hope to be able to discuss this in more depth once the time is right.

Aelelan.1639:

I don’t think his enumerating what has been released in the two months in 2013 was necessarily to claim “here are all these other things that we did, why don’t you go do these things instead” but rather to say something more along the lines of “these are all the systems that we’ve been working on while also doing the living story and now that they are done we can allot more resources to the living story”.

That was exactly my point. My listing of the contents of the January and February updates was simply to show that we were working on a lot of different things at the time.

Aelelan.1639:

It’s a pretty flawed argument to claim that “because I’m not going to be playing it, then it’s not content” or insinuate that because something isn’t necessarily applicable to you it isn’t a valued addition to the game/doesn’t take up resources in development.

I agree. While I’m very excited for the upcoming Living Story content, there are other things coming that may resonate with different players.

Aelelan.1639:

I’m all for giving feedback on the personal story – I also thought that the content was very over-hyped – but not only is a claim that these additions are somehow not worth adding to the game irrelevant, it’s also just plain incorrect.

It’s pretty clear from all the responses that our messaging was a little confusing to some. I’ll be working on that with the relevant parties.

Wayfinder.8452:

You look forward to hearing WHAT !? There is a 2000 thread about guild missions being crap and you don’t even respond to that.

My team and I are primarily focused on the Living Story aspect of the game right now. We support other teams with writing and VO (WvW, Guild Content, etc.) but don’t have a big hand in their process. Unless the bulk of the constructive feedback on Guild Missions is based around the writing or characters, I don’t really have anything to add to that discussion.

Wayfinder.8452:

Do you seriously believe anyone still takes you seriously?

Some do. Some don’t. I do the best I can but don’t lose sleep over it.

Wayfinder.8452:

The few Reds that I’m believe in are on the Dungeons and Support teams + John Smith, love that guy.

They’re a great bunch and deserve all the support and respect that people are willing to give them. They, like everyone else at ArenaNet, work really hard.

Wayfinder.8452:

Other than that thanks for at least talking to the community, you’re one of the few that actually do that. The January patch was my favorite patch up till now.

You’re welcome.

Conner.4702:

You call it teaser. I call it extremely boring and badly written. Teasers are supposed to grab peoples attention. Not have them running around like headless chickens, because you failed to make a compelling intro.

It helps if you could be more specific in your feedback. Do you mean:

• Badly written (full of grammatical errors, confusing dialog, characters talking “out of voice”)
• Badly designed (lack of logical flow, unclear directions, broken mechanics)
• Badly messaged (“I was expecting more because of how it was promoted”)

Conner.4702:

Let me do it for you.
Step 1: Place some new random crap houses.
Step 2: Burn down one of them.
Step 3: Start rumors about monsters.
Step 4: Burn more of them down.
Step 5: Have people fleeing, while telling horror stories.

What you don’t do is show the enemy before the main event starts as that just completely kills the suspense

Step 1: We placed refugee structures, but new random houses would have been cool.
Step 2: That would have been neat if we had enough time to build an event around the teaser. We didn’t have the time or resources, so we put the refugee structures in.
Step 3: The characters you met in phase one alluded to attacks but did not specify the enemy.
Step 4: See step 2.
Step 5: We’ve done something similar to this, though the characters are scattered around Hoelbrak and the Black Citadel.

TL;DR version – You have some good ideas that, funny enough, we also thought of during the development cycle of the phase 1 and 2 teaser warmups. The reason we didn’t implement more substantial content for the teasers simply came down to a matter of time and resources. All of the members of the Living World team wanted to do more. They just didn’t have the time to build everything they wanted, which would have added to testing time, iteration time, rewriting, localizing, etc.

Anzu.5702:

I honestly like the concept and am looking forward to where it goes. I love the fact that you are trying to re-emerge the player with the lore and beauty of the open world. But I have to disagree with the roll out process which overly hyped lackluster content resulting in unsatisfied customers. And frankly with the bad taste that living story has left in many players mouths, I am not overly optimistic that people will actually check out the next release without just writing it off as another lackluster teaser.

Noted. We’ll try to improve on that.

Fiontar.4695:

Yes, that would have made sense, but they needed to fluff up the teasers to cover for the fact that there really wasn’t much actual content in the January/February patches. They needed to preserve the illusion that they were updating and adding content monthly.

Actually, we’ve been adding a lot of content each month of 2013 but most of it hasn’t been related to the Living Story. That’s because the Living World teams were ramping up design and development while other teams were completing their projects. Here’s what we’ve released in the past two months.

January update contents: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-January-28-2013/first#post1321870

• Flame & Frost teaser events/NPCs
• Dailies/Monthlies
• Achievement tracking UI
• Fractal reconnect
• Guesting
• Orr polish
• PvP map
• Bug fixes
• Skill balance
• Etc.

February update contents: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-February-26-2013/first#post1639231

• Flame & Frost teaser events/NPCs (phase 2)
• Spirit Watch PvP map
• Item preview
• Guild Bounty, Guild Rush, Guild Trek, etc.
• Bug fixes
• Skill balance
• Etc.

In short, January and February were teaser months for the Living Story. March and April will have much more story content. As always, we appreciate your patience and look forward to hearing your thoughts once you’ve had a chance to play the new stuff.

azureai.9764:

Honestly, if this was a teaser, it should have been rolled out quietly. No announcement. Then the players would be going nuts trying to figure out what it all means before getting hit with the real content.

Agreed.

Max Lexandre.6279:

Bobby do you know if you going to keep it this is with soo many teasers and the action only in the end?

Or there is going to be more action in the next Living Stories?

Because we quite don’t need that much of teasers, maybe a mix of teasers and action.

No. The first bits were drawn out due to a very short development window. Future content will be more substantial. Thanks for your patience!

Brutal Arts.6307:

Yargesh.4965:

BobbyStein.2315:

Raine.1394:

The key to understanding the understanding issue is in their recent blog on the Living Story. What they have given us so far are ‘teasers’, not actual content. There is also a reference to developers rolling off other projects now available to expand upon the story. The monthly events had to happen as they are a key value proposition for Anet. So, absent the ability to provide actual content, they occurred as ‘teasers’. I would expect the content to be fleshed out more properly over time and this should make the story more understandable. TLDR: You haven’t been able to get it because there has been nothing to get.

Correct.

So a vague and convoluted answer is the correct way to think about a vague and convoluted piece of content?

Basically the devs were busy so they only had enough time to make 2 weeks of content and stretched it out into two months. Now that they’re done fixing minion AI and solving world hunger (pfffffft) we’ll return to our regularly scheduled hitting things til they die.

What we’ve released so far is teaser content. Our next release, Flame & Frost: The Razing, is where the story and characters ramp up.

Raine.1394:

The key to understanding the understanding issue is in their recent blog on the Living Story. What they have given us so far are ‘teasers’, not actual content. There is also a reference to developers rolling off other projects now available to expand upon the story. The monthly events had to happen as they are a key value proposition for Anet. So, absent the ability to provide actual content, they occurred as ‘teasers’. I would expect the content to be fleshed out more properly over time and this should make the story more understandable. TLDR: You haven’t been able to get it because there has been nothing to get.

Correct.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

…the most famous swordmaster of Kryta, Bongo the One-Eyed! (he trained Lord Faren and Minister Duran)

Never mess with Bongo!

Kingfisher.7213:

CalvinHobbes.3541:

Wait a minute. The writing team wasn’t in charge of the story during development? That could actually explain quite a bit. Is this a new concept to have people other than the writing team develop the story? Or is this the norm within the gaming world? It just seems bizarre to me to have someone other than the writing team developing the story. Sort of like having the janitor doing the coding.

It wasn’t that non-writers did the Personal Story. There were writers dedicated to the Personal Story, just not Bobby’s writing team.

ArenaNet mentioned their writers were broken into two writing teams.

One team consisted of two people, the “Loremasters”. They were responsible for the Personal Story, Dungeons, and Cutscenes. I think they were Jeff Grubb and Ree Soesbee.

The second team (Bobby’s) seemed to have pretty much everyone else. This second team wrote for the remaining elements, e.g. the dialogues in Dynamic Events, dialogues we had with NPC’s, and the background conversations we heard NPC’s have with each other across Tyria.

This is mostly true, though I should clarify. I did have two writers assisting with the dialogue generation/revision on those feature teams. One was assigned to help with dungeons (explorable mode) and the other was embedded on the personal story team. In both cases, they were there to execute on a plan that was already in motion and under the direction of people on those respective teams.

I’d also like to say that the teams that handled those other content types worked really hard and were under some intense deadlines. They did the best they could under the circumstances, so I hope that people keep that in mind when formulating their feedback.

BuddhaKeks.4857:

What do you guys think about the incredible negative feedback you got for Trahearne?

Narrative Designer Scott McGough and I talked about this very topic some time ago. In short, Trahearne was intended to fill a very specific role that, in terms of both gameplay and story, the PC could not fill—an order-neutral character with extensive knowledge about Orr and the magic of undeath who could coordinate a global war effort and make the necessary plans, thus leaving the actual gameplay up to the player. Further, Trahearne’s character design was intentional in that he would be a reluctant hero who, through interacting with the player, evolved into someone who could step up to lead the Pact.

This didn’t resonate well with some players for a variety of reasons. We’re comparing external feedback with our own, since we have plans for Trahearne and other existing characters in future live updates and expansion content. We won’t spoil what we’re discussing, other than to say we’re looking at many different options for his current implementation and beyond.

BuddhaKeks.4857:

Do you use the feedback you got to try improving the writing for future storylines and their characters?

Of course. We want to improve our storytelling and characterization so that it complements the great gameplay that our designers work hard to create.

Focksbot.6798:

Bobby – any chance of knuckling down and getting some major new story content in the game, perhaps with different endings and major events accessible through choices? G2 has all the lore for a great tale but it seems like the writing team were both really stretched in terms of how much ground they had to cover, and also forced to tick a whole bunch of genre boxes to appear to a broad player base. Time to take the gloves off and do something deeper, darker and more complex?

A few things:

• The Writing Team was not in charge of story during GW2 development leading up to ship.
• Now that the game has shipped and we’ve reorganized our staff, the Writing Team is in charge of the story going forward.
• I can’t guarantee that we’ll have the time or resources to fix, change, or build upon the existing personal story as it shipped. That stated, we’ve been reading fan and critic feedback. We have some good ideas on what we could improve, if given the proper time and resources.
• Keep watching as the Living Story develops. Let us know what you think about the writing, character development, and VO.

Thanks for your constructive feedback!