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?
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.
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.
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:
Thanks for your constructive feedback!
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.
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.
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.
