A wish: Cutscenes in Living Story

#1 - Feb. 4, 2014, 9:49 a.m.

Dear Anet,

The living story you have provided us so far has its ups and downs, but I feel as though I can speak for the majority of people here when I say that the last two updates, especially the latest one is the best so far and has intrigued many players including me:) I see people discussing the current flow of story both in and outside the game, and it feels like you finally “nailed it”.

I talked before about how you present your story, and while it’s definitely getting better, it can get even better. For starters, we are visual creatures, and as such it is very important that all the crucial story elements and its characters are presented in a memorable, visual fashion.

It would be really, really good if we could get proper cut scenes in the future LS updates. Maybe even GW1- style cutscenes. Although they weren’t perfect…I feel as though they told a story better then GW2. Cutscenes in GW2 are really lacking, and when we do get one, it often felt like they were done real fast, with weird camera angles etc.

Cinematic cut scenes is something this game would much benefit from. Or keep the concept art ones, maybe that is even better.

Or, if it’s too much trouble, can we have at least regular cutscenes? I’m tired of seeing everything like a spectator while the NPC-s are talking there. I want to see Rox, Kasmeer, Bro-ham and Majory talk in this fashion:

Look! The character on the right is wearing her armor. How cool would that be? Is something like this being worked on?

Cheers

Matthew Oswald

#13 - Feb. 13, 2014, 1:43 p.m.

We are at the beginning stages of overhauling our cinematic tools. It’s still very early on, so you wont see anything big for quite some time…In the meantime, you should see a gradual improvement in the quality of cut-scenes as the cinematic and writing team strengthen our collaboration efforts.

I should add that custom animations take up a substantial amount of dev resources that aren’t dedicated to cinematics.

The GW1 cinematics team was created for machinama and traditional 3D animation…whereas the GW2 team was built around animating concept art (motion graphics work)

The cinematics that you see in the personal story where 2 characters talk to each other on a stage-like environment have been…retired.

Cinematics/cut-scenes are an important part of our game. We are constantly striving to make them better and push the limits of our current tools in the process.

Matthew Oswald

#19 - Feb. 13, 2014, 3:39 p.m.

CharrGirl.7896:
Matthew Oswald.3082:
+
The cinematics that you see in the personal story where 2 characters talk to each other on a stage-like environment have been…retired.

This makes me a sad panda Care to explain why?

1. Dev resources for the the team that handled the 2 person cinematics were moved onto other teams after launch. I think it was about 3-4 people. We no longer have the resources to support those types of cinematics. Every gesture and expression is hand placed for each line. Even with a library of additive animation, it still took a lot of time to make one.

2. Personally, I was never a fan of the presentation. I think it breaks immersion and takes you out of the moment.

3. We could never paint enough background art for every scenario. You could experience a cinematic at night, next to a cave, but the background is a happy Divinity’s Reach.

4. Line timing was always an issue. There would always be a pause as new characters came in to speak.

5. Technical limitations prevented us from having more than 2 characters on screen at a time. This made for some pretty painful scenes…Characters would pop on screen and jump from left or right breaking an imaginary 180 degree rule.

Sometimes cutting a broken feature is better than leaving it in with issues. By cutting it, it forces us to develop better tools and presentations. Nothing will get better by ignoring something that a large portion of fans dislike. -I know some fans liked them

Hopefully our future solution will include the gestures, expressions, and additive technology from the 2 character cinematics, but play out in the game world with proper camera cuts and lip sync.

Matthew Oswald

#30 - Feb. 13, 2014, 4:37 p.m.

Latinkuro.9420:
Matthew Oswald.3082:
We are at the beginning stages of overhauling our cinematic tools. It’s still very early on, so you wont see anything big for quite some time…In the meantime, you should see a gradual improvement in the quality of cut-scenes as the cinematic and writing team strengthen our collaboration efforts.

I should add that custom animations take up a substantial amount of dev resources that aren’t dedicated to cinematics.

The GW1 cinematics team was created for machinama and traditional 3D animation…whereas the GW2 team was built around animating concept art (motion graphics work)

The cinematics that you see in the personal story where 2 characters talk to each other on a stage-like environment have been…retired.

Cinematics/cut-scenes are an important part of our game. We are constantly striving to make them better and push the limits of our current tools in the process.

is this change just for newly developed content, or do you plan to update the old personal story cinematics as well ?
what about dungeon cinematics ?

I don’t think it would be a wise investment to go back and redo some of the old cinematics. There will be plenty of new story content needing cinematic moments.

If there is time, I’d love to have the option to take a polish pass on old stuff.

BobbyStein

#46 - Feb. 13, 2014, 7:44 p.m.

JayMack.8295:
Redball.7236:
I’ll be disappointed if this means our characters are going to remain mute from now on.

Bobby mentioned the reason our characters are mute at the moment is more of a technical problem they’re trying to overcome.

Here’s his post:

BobbyStein.2315:
Nike.2631:
BobbyStein.2315:
What people don’t understand is that we wrote and voiced a lot of these moments throughout the year. Some scenes and story instances were cut or never implemented in the final releases, which is why this particular story instance was longer than the typical one and filled with lots of exposition.

I sincerely hope that over course of the year there was an opportunity to get the Hero Voice Actors back into studio and allow the players to be more engaged in the climax of the arc than as mute witnesses.

Scavenge some clips from the existing Personal Story library if you have to, but please don’t leave us completely silent in the face of these world altering events!

Funny that you mention player voice. I’ve had a few meetings recently about that. I can’t go into details but I will say that it’s on the list of things we’re looking to address. The current issue is more of a tech one and less of a “we don’t want the player to talk” decision.

I’m guessing he means there’s no current way implemented for our characters to talk (i.e. like the living world characters do) in the open world outside of these one-to-one cinematics (other than audio cues from skills/conditions/etc). Hopefully once that technical hurdle is overcome, our characters will be a lot more vocal.

That’s mostly correct. Right now, the only time your character speaks “in the world” is when certain conditions are met, such as when you’re low on health, you level up, close a conversation with a merchant, etc.