Making Cassia

Oh I love Sister Cassia,

The right balans between righteous and sassy!

And thank you for sharing this post I love to read about your processes and get a feel of what you work on and what it means to work for GGG.

Well, I guess one way to to get players to engage with league mechanics is to have the NPC sing very annoyingly halfway across the map without end unless they do, haha.

At first I thought it was cute, in a very nerdy kind of way, but after having heard it close to a thousand times... let's just say the dialogue volume will stay at 0 for the rest of the league and that's a shame.

Otherwise great character, very thematic, I like it.

Love Cassia. And Niko, too.

I loved to read this.. very interesting to hear the thought process of designing a character and what you were looking for, especially in cases like this where the actual implementation, unfortunately, fairly widely missed its mark.

This way, we get a counterpoint to the very annoying and quite limited in-game representation of the character and can keep in mind what the actual intent was. The situation in-game is still riddled with issues, partially due to that this character is implemented quite differently from the others so far.

The main issues being:
* Lack of variation in dialogue (even using several takes of the same sound bit would be beneficial to alleviate this eg. "THE BLIGHT IS SPREADING", "The blight, it's spreading" "Wait, the blight, it's spreading!" etc. just for variation.
* The characters clarity of dialogue, which is great in itself but I perceive her to be a lot louder than other dialogue. This might be a normalization quirk or just that her voice cuts through the background more, still, I do like the dialogue sound bits, but I have to choose between having Cassia at a reasonable volume level and not hearing dominus, etc. clearly or hearing the others normally and having her constantly shouting the same sentences at me.
* Cassia having sound bits that possibly should be split between dialogue and ambiance. The humming is a really weird thing for me, it sounds like a sound bit that should be quite muted as she isn't shouting them, but the sound permeates so you clearly hear it 80 in-game yards away which throws the sound balance off for me. Due to this being heard so far away I lean towards this being an ambiance sound since it does in fact more affect the ambiance of the map/game itself, also humming feels more like an ambiance sound than dialogue and feels odd when it is linked to that volume controller.

My more personal issues with this:
* Repetitive chanting, for me, personally I'd love a slider or a selector if you want this to be repeated or not. PoE tends to be a game that is played for many hours due to the grindy nature of it. Which makes sound design difficult, and I've noticed that having a short chant, especially one that lends itself to repetitiveness tends to get stuck in your head in a way that I find a very negative experience in that the annoying part from the game permeates outside the game experience, to when your doing other things or trying to relax afterward. I can see that this would be a lot more balanced if you only met her now and then (disregarding that I personally hope this mechanic doesn't make it into the game). But for a league where it is in every map, it starts wearing you down on a mental level.


Anyways, thanks for the post,

TL;DR
* Check sound normalization against other dialogue
* Variation in sound bits this prominent/frequent is crucial
* Some dialogue borders on ambiance and should be in the ambiance volume slider.

I laughed when she called Piety a whore, then doubled down with "What? She is a whore!"

im not in the mood to read cause of her

plz remove her

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Abdiel_Kavash wrote:

I wish we could keep the NPCs from past leagues around in our hideout, even if they are non-functional if the league doesn't go to core.

you want high templar venarius? for what purpose? he's "somewhere" trying to save wraeclast from demons.. he's not at the exile side on the battle.

sure, lore wise makes no sense but what makes sense with leagues anyway.. I can understand this request regardless...

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Abdiel_Kavash wrote:

I wish we could keep the NPCs from past leagues around in our hideout, even if they are non-functional if the league doesn't go to core.

This, with Cavas.

I like him so much, it always making me sad that we cannot choose his side in Synthesis, he is better than Zana with her shaper obsession.

Will trade only with him if he will be added.

Please this! I was just about to comment the same thing but thought first gonna read through all the comments.

I really liked Cavas and I do like Cassia alot as well and I think it's a waste to not let us have them in our hideout after the leagues end.

Also it would be nice not to just have them like the old hideout masters (Tora, Haku, Vagan etc..) but make them interactable because the voice acting is just lovely and love to hear em talk sometimes.

I love when she sings <3 She is so focussed in his song and she wants so badly to burn the unrighteous... It's quite fun!

Cassia is really interesting character but pretty annoying with singing, sometimes i just wanna stab her instead of fungus, or as a witch to scream back at her :D

Because i mostly play as melee i have problem with lanes if they are on different sides of fungal growth and i have to jump from one side to another, because often i don't have materials to build a tower and when i get them i end up building wrong one. Mechanic is challenging and fun but Cassia could say something like "They are buzzing a new one!" for lightning portal or make her build a random one.