Enough of your GMPC please.

#10 - July 3, 2014, 12:26 p.m.

Zin.1673:

The character is indeed voiced. Did you ever played your personal story ?

Warning: nerdy devspeak ahead!

The player character (PC) hasn’t had new voice recorded since the game launched, so you’ll only hear your character speak in the following circumstances: conditional chatter, in cinematic conversations in the Personal Story, and in painterly “full” cinematics. We retired cinematic conversations with the Living World, so right now the PC can only “talk” through unvoiced dialog trees.

We’re exploring some technical improvements that may allow the PC to speak under new circumstances, but it’s actually a bigger undertaking than one would imagine due to the complexity of player voice implementation (10 possible voices, currently shared lines of dialog that we want to split out, scene timing per language, etc.). That’s about all I can say at the moment.

In short, we’re looking to make the PC speak again, but it’s going to take a bit of time to redo the code and content pipelines to make it work, not to mention updating our tools to allow us to generate PC lines that deviate based on race & gender, prior accomplishments, etc. We’re not ready to announce what those changes will actually be or when they might be deployed, but we’re seriously looking into it.

As always, thanks for playing.

#15 - July 3, 2014, 1:05 p.m.

Thalador.4218:

BobbyStein.2315:

Zin.1673:

The character is indeed voiced. Did you ever played your personal story ?

Warning: nerdy devspeak ahead!

The player character (PC) hasn’t had new voice recorded since the game launched, so you’ll only hear your character speak in the following circumstances: conditional chatter, in cinematic conversations in the Personal Story, and in painterly “full” cinematics. We retired cinematic conversations with the Living World, so right now the PC can only “talk” through unvoiced dialog trees.

We’re exploring some technical improvements that may allow the PC to speak under new circumstances, but it’s actually a bigger undertaking than one would imagine due to the complexity of player voice implementation (10 possible voices, currently shared lines of dialog that we want to split out, scene timing per language, etc.). That’s about all I can say at the moment.

In short, we’re looking to make the PC speak again, but it’s going to take a bit of time to redo the code and content pipelines to make it work, not to mention updating our tools to allow us to generate PC lines that deviate based on race & gender, prior accomplishments, etc. We’re not ready to announce what those changes will actually be or when they might be deployed, but we’re seriously looking into it.

As always, thanks for playing.

Fun fact: SW:ToR had 8 classes with entirely diverging storylines and was and is still fully voiced. With the two genders that means 16 possible voices, with split lines of dialogue (usually 3 choices).

Actually, I’m not saying that you could’ve pulled off something similar as you didn’t have EA’s financial backing (although by not ditching quests for events and cutting down the ridiculous amount of ambivalent dialogue that in 90% of the cases is all about the everyday, boring lives of a zone’s denizens you would’ve had way more resources to concentrate on giving voice to the person who matters the most in an RPG: the PC… my 2 cents). However, I’m still waiting on a branching storyline where my choices matter, I have more than one line of dialogue, and which incidentally also takes my character’s personality, origin, species, and gender into consideration.

For you, the game should be about the PC at the expense of the open world content and ambience. For me, and for Guild Wars 2, it’s about the world as a whole since it’s a cooperative, shared environment. Neither approach is wrong, but we decided to put more of our resources into bringing the world to life. I don’t regret that at all.

#28 - July 3, 2014, 2:43 p.m.

Mister Midnight.9837:

Why does the game have to be open world at the expense of the PC? That’s a complete cop-out.

Actually, it’s the reality of game development. You have limited budget and time to work with, so scope must be adjusted to fit. Features must be prioritized, and sometimes that means cutting content or systems.

http://www.ambysoft.com/artwork/ironTriangle.jpg

#47 - July 3, 2014, 7:58 p.m.

In our MMO environment, we have a few challenges to overcome to make it all about your character:

1) It’s a first-person story that plays out in a third-person manner. Although you watch your PC from a 3rd-person vantage point, we consider your PC to be the first-person protagonist of the story. It’s an odd mix, and the only place I’ve seen this kind of Point-of-View mutation is in video games. You, the player, bring the 1st-person consciousness to the 3rd-person story. That’s immersion, the golden goose of gaming.

The open-world content is there for those who want to make their own story and roleplay their own epic tales from their own imaginations. <3

In the Personal Story and Living World, we direct the story more tightly and give you specific challenges to overcome with specific outcomes if you do.

2) We have hundreds of zillions of bajillions of PCs, each with its own combination of backstory, race, profession, and history. We felt it was important to allow you to customize your PC and in doing so, we gave up some of the opportunity to customize the story to every single PC in the game in every single moment of the game. Instead, we try to bring you moments where you are singled out with customized text in conversations (which you may not even always notice because you don’t see the other options). You bring your own imagination to the table and fill in the gaps where we can’t customize it to you personally every time.

3) Initially, when we created the original body of the game, we were especially careful to never break immersion by using PC dialogue lines that you might feel didn’t fit your PC. We’ve relaxed this with Living World content and it has proven a more positive experience for many, I hope. Our original thought was that you would add the personality to the words when you heard them in your head. We still know you will do that, but we’re now more comfortable with having your PC say things that commit to an idea or a knowledge or a thought that you the player might not have had. Our goal is to increase immersion and make you feel more like it’s your PC’s story.

4) Balancing an effort toward a certain amount of realism with making a positive game experience for you is not as easy as it sounds.

They might have heard your name, but would they put your face with that name in a world where there is no television and no mass printing presses?

5) Our current UI setup for non-spoken dialogue limits the number of words we can use for the PC’s lines. Adjusting the UI is no small feat. We writers must abide by this limitation, but I believe we’re getting better at using the words we have to their best effect.

6) The other practical limitations mentioned by Bobby above.

To be continued…

#48 - July 3, 2014, 7:59 p.m.

In our minds, this is your PC’s story. Just because you can watch your spouse go through their dramas, and you accompany your spouse to the grocery store, doesn’t mean it’s your spouse’s story that you’re living. You’re living your own story, but you’re rarely alone in it. Nor would living your life alone be much fun. Every moment you play in the game, you are living your PC’s life. And the people who surround you are your supporting cast, your friends, your family, and your enemies. And a bunch of strangers who—no matter how famous you are—won’t recognize you on sight but might get excited when you introduce yourself.

With regard to praising the PC, there’s a balance we have to maintain. We’ve had criticism before that we praise the PC too much, and players become immune to it, desensitized. We don’t want that to happen either. We try to choose our moments carefully and really make the praise count.

The whole “Commander” topic is another discussion entirely.

In conclusion, I’ll just say again that we do pay attention to the forums, and thank you for posting your thoughts.

#51 - July 3, 2014, 8:16 p.m.

RyuDragnier.9476:

About those last spoilers Angel, have you thought that maybe you should make it so there are multiple fronts, and that the pact is also hot on the heels of the other elder dragons?

We have lots of conversations here about the many places we could take the story, and ultimately, it comes down to what we think would be the most fun. We can only make so much content, so we have to carefully choose which content we make.

If we split our attention to two storylines, then neither one gets our full attention.

We, like you, want the most bang for your buck!

#143 - July 10, 2014, 8:52 p.m.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Angel McCoy.1832:

We felt it was important to allow you to customize your PC and in doing so, we gave up some of the opportunity to customize the story to every single PC in the game in every single moment of the game. Instead, we try to bring you moments where you are singled out with customized text in conversations (which you may not even always notice because you don’t see the other options).

Okay, this downright sounds contradictory to me. You want to allow customization to the PCs, but part of that is customizing the story. And you give the establishment for these via the biography options (and later choices)! You have shown you can do these.

All I meant above is that we have a limited amount of content we can make each time. We have a huge number of variables for characters. There is absolutely no way we could put in a special dialogue tree for every possible character combination.

The Living World takes you from where the Personal Story dropped you off and carries you forward through your story. The story.

With the Living World, we’re making a story that everyone can enjoy. You don’t have to be a specific race to play certain content anymore, for example. The customization comes in the personalized dialogue you get when it makes sense to the story.

For example, if it makes sense for an asura to have special dialogue just for them, we do that. If you’re talking to a Priory scholar and you’re a member of the Durmand Priory, you may get a special greeting or additional information that others don’t get. And so on.

#144 - July 10, 2014, 9:23 p.m.

Michael Walker.8150:

Angel McCoy.1832:

We have lots of conversations here about the many places we could take the story, and ultimately, it comes down to what we think would be the most fun. We can only make so much content, so we have to carefully choose which content we make.

Hi Angel,
Who is “we”? I got curious the last few days how the interaction between game designers, narrative designer (can you explain what this mean at Arenanet? or have you already somewhere? the search function on these forums is useless), writers and visual/audio artists work for the Living Story Season 2, what have you learned or changed from Living Story 1?

I got a rather incoherent feeling from the first seasons’ storyline and its implementation. the overall feeling of the second season, at least the start, seems way more polished now.

Hi, Michael,
I am just one small member on a very large team that creates the Living World content. Our team changes in size, but there are just a little over twenty people on it at any given time. This includes artists, designers, QA people, project managers, audio engineers, composers, leadership, programmers, and writers. The Living World is very much a team effort. We have a series of meetings as we’re developing each release that start big picture and gradually hone in on exactly what we want to do. We all have our areas of expertise that we bring to the table, but everyone is invited to give opinions and ideas.

My responsibility as narrative designer for the team is to keep the lore in check, to ensure the dialogue for the iconic characters is in voice, and to guide us through the overarching storyline, so that each release keeps us moving toward our final story goals.

We’ve made a lot of changes for Season 2. We’re continually improving our processes with each new release. The most notable being that we no longer have 4 Living World teams, each making their own content; we have 1. This has allowed us to create much more cohesive releases, and I think you’ll find that our story hangs together quite well in Season 2.