Hi,
Was just wondering if anyone has noticed that our player characters haven’t had any spoken dialogue at all for the Living Story. Not sure if there’s a reason behind it but I would like to hear my characters speak a bit more like in the Personal Story cutscenes.
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.
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:
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.
