[Sept 18] Story, Voice Acting and NPC Chat

The problem for me with the story is that I don't feel like there's an end goal. In Diablo games, I was on a path toward killing Diablo or Baal, and even though not every quest was directly connected to the story, they were necessary for progression, and I knew where to go. In this game, I felt like I was just doing random quests, random quests that took a very long time to complete. In Act 2, it wasn't even clear to me how to complete the act. There needs to be more direction. Yes, open questing is good, but we still need more guidance so we know how to complete the act. It would also be nice to have some shorter, quicker quests thrown in the mix to break up the long journey for the other quests.

I realise this is a beta but after a couple of hours of gameplay I didn't care about the story anymore... Sorry.

I was shipwrecked on some beach, found two dudes in a bunch of ruins and all hell gets loose :)

LE: Something more constructive related to the title of the thread... This is a MMO, right? I can't imagine 100 players next to each other trying to talk to one of the 2-3 quest givers in "town". Actually, both towns look too small for an MMO.

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DarkGreen wrote:

I realise this is a beta but after a couple of hours of gameplay I didn't care about the story anymore... Sorry.

I was shipwrecked on some beach, found two dudes in a bunch of ruins and all hell gets loose :)

LE: Something more constructive related to the title of the thread... This is a MMO, right? I can't imagine 100 players next to each other trying to talk to one of the 2-3 quest givers in "town". Actually, both towns look too small for an MMO.

http://www.pathofexile.com/news/2010-11-29/dev-diary4

oo , yeah can't wait to see the full story !

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yhateful wrote:

Just don't overdo it. Less is indeed more, especially in this genre. What clue do you need? A zombie took a bite out of the first person you met. Its time to hack and slash!

Voice acting will be good though. :)

I couldn't agree with this person more. I wouldn't mind some voice acting for some key scenes like the Allflame battle and maybe NPCs in town. But keep it as minimal as possible. The majority of players will most likely end up skipping the story after seeing it once anyway.

A dev from GGG mentioned in an interview that "players are most accustomed to story being delivered via voice acting".

That statement is true - but only due to the last decade in gaming trends. Call of Duty-esque cinematics driving the story along scene by scene.

A game like Portal/Portal 2 though, delivers story in a much more sublime way. Through the environment. Yes, there are talking heads, but you could remove that. You could remove Glados in Portal 1 and you'd still have an incredible sense of story.

Don't be afraid to tell your story though the environment where you can! You're already doing it so I imagine you're aware of this. But like... The Chamber of Sins. I can only imagine what the hell that place once was - it looks like it had been an opulent palace for the wealthy. Or some kind of mansion.

Put a few choice props throughout a level and players can already begin to imagine what happened in that place and why you're there to do something there. The creative use of furniture, forgotten-corpses, or other props, can tell the player a story through the environment.

Yay voice acting! As long as they dont have Kiwi accents ill be happy :)

So far, what little we know of the story has mostly come from the video trailers in the media section that act as introductions to the character classes. ("Our fore-fathers did this to Wraeclast! They caused the cataclysm! My dreams tell me this." -Templar)

First, do you plan to make more video trailers? One for each class? If not all the classes, are you going to do one for the newest class, the Shadow?

Second, there are a lot of things in the Templar trailer that aren't actually in the game yet. Are the missing things, like the trap-door spider (0:49), The Shadow Abomination (1:41), The Flickering Halls in the Chamber of Sins (0:52, 1:00), and The Bloody Pit (1:02) going to be added once the story and voice acting are added to explain them? Or are those things just ideas that got scrapped and are no longer going to be added?

Woah! Trailers for all the classes would be awesome. In my opinion Templar trailer is just pure wesome.

About the story itself. Well in fact there is no "main" goal in the game but it's still in development. Voice acting should be implemented. This just gives more connection to NPC's and your own characters too. In Diablo 2 Barbar was wild and sturdy and you could feel that also through voice acting.

I would like to see the story like a hard mysterious puzzle. Even if you have finished the game you just can't figure out what everything ment (just like in a good book after many readthroughs). Sure you can understand certain parts but certainly not everything. You just keep wondering what that/those X NPCs/Mobs/Bosses did mean with that and that phrase/sentence/laugh/or some gesture etc. Did that phrase mean something that will be revealed in future (in expansion packs / patches). Many side stories that would reveal something new to the main story would also enrich the main story so that you could see different points view to the situation. So you have to figure out things mainly for yourself.

Also I'd like the idea that every character would have their own unique goal besides the main story (if there is one). Some characters would have good goals, some rather neutral and some sinister.