Voiceovers, Dialogue, and Atmosphere in Guild Wars 2
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MMOs and CORPGs have relied on text bubbles for years to establish mood, develop characters, and create ambience throughout hundreds of hours of play time. They denote who is saying what at which moment in time. If you're not looking directly at the (speaker) or eyeing your chat log, you could completely miss the information.A couple of sound clips are embedded in the piece, as well.
We've learned through experience that text bubbles fail miserably without audio.
They remind you that you're playing a game, that your characters are lifeless, soulless, and silent. In a fight, word balloons serve as little more than protest signs that taunt your enemies. This isn't news to anyone who plays video games. What is news is that we're crossing that proverbial picket line into the 21st century and giving our characters voices. Entire cities of them.
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Early on during Guild Wars 2 development, we discussed how much voice we wanted in the game. Everyone agreed that simply recording cinematics wasn't enough, but how much would we need to immerse players in our world? We thought about the kinds of experiences we'd had in our favorite audio-heavy games like Grand Theft Auto IV, and we started paying attention to all the different ways that they employed voice-over to not only tell an engaging tale, but to literally surround you with sound. We talked about our planned content types, how we wanted to use audio in combat scenarios, and the different ways that we could both entertain and educate players about our world. We made a decision that, quite frankly, questioned our sanity.
We're voicing the equivalent of more than 60 feature-length films.
