Guild Wars Mini-Interview #19
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 850
Q: We have seen the outstanding images and graphics Guild Wars has to offer, but what will we hear in the game? The epic composition of Jeremy Soule at the log-on screen is familiar to us now, but considering the important contribution to game immersion will there be more environmental sounds including voice-overs for NPCs?
A: First of all, I love the music that Jeremy Soule created for Guild Wars, too. I've heard the opening piece a hundred times, but I never tire of it. Good game music is like that, isn't it? All of Tyria is filled with ambient sounds, too. You can almost hear someone singing, (The hills are alive with the sounds of. crickets?) Well, anyway, there are natural sounds like splashing water, rain, and wind, and then living sounds like birds and bugs, the lonely howl of a wolf, and the voices of many other creatures.
As for voice-overs: Guild Wars has professionally-recorded voice acting for a full range of combat sounds battle cries, death wails, etc. which accompany the clanking of armour, the thrumming of arrows and the casting of spells. But I don't believe that Guild Wars will have in-game verbal storytelling. Frankly, I'm glad about that. I like immersive gaming, and feel that it's quite easy to skip over written text when it appears, and to ignore the story we've already read a dozen times. But spoken words are less easy to ignore, and can be a bit disrupting. Honestly, if I heard one more time about (a soul in search of answers,) I was going to start praying for town kill. ;-)
