Any chance of us getting Act 5-10 voice lines for the remaining characters before PoE 2 drops?

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RedHenrik wrote:

I wouldn't say no to a quip after taking out pinnacle bosses for the first time though.

See that's another thing -- it seems what little Exile characterisation there is just ends with the Atlas (other than for Scion, if you know your PoE meta-history: before she became Hot Teacher, Zana was originally a Scion herself, with a very interesting accent). I suppose that's part of why no matter how much they want to endow Mapping with a grounding narrative, I never embraced it. I never felt like my character was at all invested in it beyond the superficial notion of fulfilling Malachai and Maligaro's legacy of using the Reverie Device to physically enter an explore dreamstate (and, of course, physically bring shit back from it).

I honestly think GGG just gave up on that front. By then, they'd learned a few things about their playerbase. One was that a lot of them played with sound off. Another was that most didn't give a fizzlefuck for the lore. Yet another was that they'd stumbled upon a devastatingly addictive gameplay loop that doesn't really NEED characterisation. And yet, and to me this seemed almost a contradiction of those, they went and made the most interesting part of Mapping boring and finite: they gave it a map of its own. Before then, 'Mapping' was almost a perfect ARPG rendition of Lovecraftian 'other worlds' -- no form, no perceivable shape or location, absolutely no respect for Euclidian parameters from one Map to the next. It was proper dreamstate and it was proper brilliant. There were ways to organise it for game purposes that didn't involve something as terribly uninspired as a 2-D map, greatest of tools of the colonial superpowers, but eh there it is. Maybe the abstract nature of Maps as dreams was too much for people. I dunno. Either way, a real tragedy compounded only by their weird (to me) narrative commitment to it. See, the more they add story to the Atlas, the more it detracts from their ACTUAL story, or perhaps more precisely the more it highlights how little actual story the main game has.

And in both cases, it's not even the main character's story, which can be cleverly done (see Diablo 2) but in PoE's case just makes the whole thing feel like plot (things following a script) than story (characters experiencing things happening thus leading to them doing things to make more things happen). The only character with any story at all through the ten act play is Piety. Dialla gets a bit; Sin would if he weren't such a blatant device. The beast does, amusingly: it is alive, tortured, then killed, and then revisited later in its necrotic state in what has to be one of the less subtle metaphors for how quickly GGG ran out of creative juice in Part 2. But look at, say, Nessa: static in town, one-note (here to help others), and then BAM gone, lured away by a giant crab for reasons. That is not story. That is plot. And then in the Atlas, what little I remember of its first iteration (NFI what it's like now), you were a bit player in the Zana Deals With Her Daddy Issues Saga. So while you're right that a quip here and there can enrich this stuff, ultimately due to this feeling of just being dragged through someone else's arc, I'd find it about as profound as a TV-level Marvel one-liner rather than a smart character snapshot a la the acts 1-4 commentary. At best, a smirk; at worst, an eye-roll. I've written lines that elicit both for PoE, so yeah, I'd know how easy it is to fuck that one up.

And beyond ALL that is the simpler reality: voice acting isn't cheap, logistics are a bitch (especially now), and if indeed most of your truly reliable player-supporters don't give a shit about it, why waste the resources when you're already spinning roughly three dozen plates on a variety of bent sticks?

I do wish that I had started playing before 3.0, if only to better appreciate the history of the game.

It was a buuuuumpy fuckin' ride, that's for sure. 3.0 was probably the best time to start though. You came when the game was at its very best I think. Among other things:

• Full ten act structure doing away with the Diablo carryover of difficulty-based campaign repetition with a whole slew of great new boss design and very clever reusage of existing assets;
• All new soundtrack by Kamil Orman-Janowski that tapped into the 'epic' side of the game vs Adgio Hutchings' original more 'ambient'/Matt Uelmen-lite BGM;
• The pantheon system associated with the new 'god' battles;
• Act 5 in general (eaaaasily the best act on every damn level, especially after the bloat of act 4; even Piety's absence is felt through her long-suffering underling Vilenta);
• Addition of a fairly comprehensive in-game 'help' window;
• addition of some of the most useful and balanced support gems in the game's history;
• Harbinger league (probably the most intriguing league gimmick ever with its mind-blowing premise of what Harbingers might actually have been);
• appropriate rework of how we accessed the Lord's Labyrinth's various iterations AND the complexity of each such that the class change into an Ascendancy became a welcome early game gimme;
• DoT rework doing away with double dipping shenanigans;
• Messy pierce chance mechanic replaced with 100% chance to pierce X targets;
and
• much increased monster diversity across all acts.

3.0 was an excellent reboot of sorts, a fresh start, and I don't think you need to have experienced all the growing pains to get there to appreciate that.

Everything points toward it being time for 4.0 - including having the whole campaign voice acted. It feels crazy that there were 7 leagues in the 2.0-2.6 run but 20 leagues (so far) in the 3.0-3.19 run. Wild.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Also I laugh pretty hard whenever someone says they've never 'heard' this game. Talk about missing out on probably its best aspect: great voice acting and a rich, polyphonic soundtrack that punches WAY above its weight. I STILL listen to Kamil's OST. And to this day my partner, designer of the map Acton's Nightmare, laments that the first person to 'finish' her map publicly was, of course, a streamer who completely missed Andrew's awesomely eerie music box tune and how it tied into the theme of the map. Pearls before swine.

I vibe with this so much, especially with the original soundtrack (you can't beat the old Lioneye's Watch or the Solaris/Lunaris temples) plus I often repeat lines from some of the characters who actually felt like they put everything into their lines.

"Of all the worlds you could've conquered, you had to choose mine. Such power wasted on a feeble imagination!"

"Choose wisely, strike quickly, trust completely, and may you find the ending that you deserve!"

Literally all of the banter between the Heist rogues when doing Grand Heists that I'm still finding new ones every league.

And then there's the haunting tone from The Envoy with everything he says.

How could I forget the Arenamaster being a sassy bitch? "Oh however will you match that last incredible performance?"

Anyone who tunes out the music and voice lines is doing the game a disservice. It's the one good thing GGG has been able to manage consistently.

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Tadatsune wrote:

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jsuslak313 wrote:

But tbh i have never heard a single voice actor or any sound in this game for that matter

I feel like you're missing out. Some of the dialogue suffers from poor editing if taken as a whole - standard game stuff like information not being delivered in logical order or quests not being fully explained until after they happen, most likely due to the way the game was edited together, or stuff changing after the lines were recorded, but if you just take the voicework on its own, much of it is absolutely excellent. The game has a plethora of absolutely fantastic side characters - Dialla and Izaro are probably my favorites, but there a whole lot of other great performances here.

I absolutely adore most of the PoE voice lines and music/sounds. When grinding high levels I'll normally have some music on, but really the first few weeks of the league I just listen to PoE. Every time I start as a witch I always send my friend a clip of her berating Doedre because of how good it is.

It's nice to see a lot of people here who appreciate the game's audio and music, and I mean that genuinely. As much as I love the mechanics in general, the audio completes it and in some ways works really well for me as feedback to watch out for something about to happen, etc.

I also hope we get the character lines for the second part of the campaign. What the cynical naysayers seem to forget (or don't know?) is that GGG has delivered on so many things that people were clutching their pearls at never happening - like quality of life for guild stashes for example - for the longest time all we had were premium tabs, and then they got around to adding all the specialized tabs and implemented Ctrl clicking and so on. I could point to like twenty other examples.

Anyways, glad to see others appreciate how good the voice acting and sound design are.

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RedHenrik wrote:

Everything points toward it being time for 4.0 - including having the whole campaign voice acted. It feels crazy that there were 7 leagues in the 2.0-2.6 run but 20 leagues (so far) in the 3.0-3.19 run. Wild.

From what little I know of what PoE 4.0 is going for, there is almost zero chance it'll deploy without full voice acting. One of the great benefits of an all-new campaign is you can employ new voice actors to do the whole thing in one hit. And GGG know that there'll be no expansion of that campaign since it leads straight into the Atlas, whereas with the existing campaign they were kind of adding to it on the fly. They did not know it'd be ten unique acts when it only had 2 or 3. Probably not even when it had 4.

If you look at how Act 4 is structured, it has a redolence of desperation to it, a cramming of several acts' worth of ideas into one big mess -- especially concerning the Godless Three. This is somewhat rectified with Act 9, where the Troublesome Trio get full areas of their own embodying their particular gripes with the world, but after facing several champions of the Sarn Rebellion, two of whom have areas that could be acts unto themselves, negotiating six levels of subterranean descent, AND Piety 2.0, you get to fight them in these tiny, pointless arenas...man, Act 4 is such a mess.

And they had no idea where to go from there so WHAM convenient teleport back to the one place that the Exile seems to genuinely no longer care about: Oriath. Like I said, Act 5 is the best in every way: music, graphics, pacing, setting, quests, voice acting, boss design...the lot. Right down to the Terminator homage upon entry. But it also signified a real shift in trajectory from what came before it, and set the Exile on a path that contradicts their former hapless surge towards aimless power in Wraeclast. This to me is why Acts 6-10 feel so damn long and drawn out: you're essentially following someone else's quest because it happens to have quest rewards. The Exile never really has any agency, but at least in Part 1, that lack of agency serves a logical progression: kicked out of 'home', all but naked and symbolically reborn from the waters, the initial need to 'survive' naturally evolves into the want for 'power'. There is absolutely no motivator beyond that in Part 1. Part 2, though, goes a bit too big for its own good and the Exile's lack of agency becomes too obvious: why would they care about a city-state that exiled them and which they have, by act 3's conclusion, almost explicitly outgrown? As fascinating as Act 5's developments are, at no point do you get the sense that the Exile has in any way truly found their place in them. It's still just 'do this, get reward'. Bottom line.

And that's also why the Atlas is so problematic from a narrative standpoint: you've spent 10 acts using Wraeclast as a sort of training ground, but then learn the 'real' battle is happening in...another dimension? But it involves Wraeclastian characters? Way to go admitting you never once had a clue how to integrate the Exile's journey and Wraeclast as a significant setting we should care about, GGG. I know, let's just piss off to a convenient abstract dimension because it has better loots.

I'm only being half-facetious there. I wish the game had outright said something like that, at least acknowledging that it squandered Wraeclast and all the Exile cares about is that loot. Be it from Wraeclast or some other world. It's about a facile a character motivation gets but hey, it's an ARPG. Do your due diligence and get back to the business of murdering everything in sight. Buuuuut no -- they had to go and make MORE plot for the Atlas. I admire anyone who actually cares about it, because after ten acts of not-story (or 12 acts of the same unfinished story 3 times, or 9 acts...) I was genuinely exhausted. I was ready for what Mapping used to be, which was zero plot dreamscape exploration for loot and murder. As far as an endgame goes, that suffices. Maligaro and Malachai's lore adequately positions Mapping as precisely that.

The Atlas suffers a writing problem very common to fanfic and the DCU, and I suspect MCU's multiverse gambit: it goes hard on the power scale of its major figures but fails to ground it in any way, to the point where nothing really seems to matter. It grasps the awe and wonder of going big but without a horizon to appreciate that scale. I may be wrong: I haven't fully looked into the relationships between The Shaper, The Elder, Maven, whatsisface with the red death shit and those champions with their keeps or whatever. So do please correct me if I'm wrong but I have glanced at their wikis and whatnot and the whole thing just strikes me as aimless content additions with minimal oversight as regards the tone of the game's overall plot, at least as far as Wraeclast is concerned. Better to have no plot at all than a bad one when it comes to aping Lovecraft.

At any rate, all this illustrates is that we SHOULD expect much more narrative coherence from PoE 4.0's new campaign. Full voice acting lends itself to a professional, Triple A look. Like or not, my first impression of the footage of the demo of PoE 4.0 at Exilecon was 'huh, that looks a lot more like Diablo 3 now'. And I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one. Kinda funny given how hard PoE tried to be nothing like D3 back before the tables turned, 2013 or so.

It'll be interesting to hear how the commentary of The Next Generation sounds compared to The Original Seven's amazing one-liners in Part 1. To see if GGG can make lightning strike twice...or if their lurch towards Diablo 3's style of 'RPG' construction and delivery brings with it cartoon-level villainy and MCU-level quippery.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

And they had no idea where to go from there so WHAM convenient teleport back to the one place that the Exile seems to genuinely no longer care about: Oriath. Like I said, Act 5 is the best in every way: music, graphics, pacing, setting, quests, voice acting, boss design...the lot. Right down to the Terminator homage upon entry. But it also signified a real shift in trajectory from what came before it, and set the Exile on a path that contradicts their former hapless surge towards aimless power in Wraeclast. This to me is why Acts 6-10 feel so damn long and drawn out: you're essentially following someone else's quest because it happens to have quest rewards. The Exile never really has any agency, but at least in Part 1, that lack of agency serves a logical progression: kicked out of 'home', all but naked and symbolically reborn from the waters, the initial need to 'survive' naturally evolves into the want for 'power'. There is absolutely no motivator beyond that in Part 1. Part 2, though, goes a bit too big for its own good and the Exile's lack of agency becomes too obvious: why would they care about a city-state that exiled them and which they have, by act 3's conclusion, almost explicitly outgrown? As fascinating as Act 5's developments are, at no point do you get the sense that the Exile has in any way truly found their place in them. It's still just 'do this, get reward'. Bottom line.

This feels especially true for some classes even more than others. I could see the Templar caring about Oriath falling, but I honestly see the Marauder almost celebrating this turn of events. The whole Kitava storyline seems incredibly forced and perpetuates a frankly ridiculous "both sides are problematic" narrative that gets resolved with a pat "and everybody learned to live together" ending. Could have been worse, I suppose. At least Act 5 itself was well designed, as you stated.

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The Atlas suffers a writing problem very common to fanfic and the DCU, and I suspect MCU's multiverse gambit: it goes hard on the power scale of its major figures but fails to ground it in any way, to the point where nothing really seems to matter. It grasps the awe and wonder of going big but without a horizon to appreciate that scale. I may be wrong: I haven't fully looked into the relationships between The Shaper, The Elder, Maven, whatsisface with the red death shit and those champions with their keeps or whatever. So do please correct me if I'm wrong but I have glanced at their wikis and whatnot and the whole thing just strikes me as aimless content additions with minimal oversight as regards the tone of the game's overall plot, at least as far as Wraeclast is concerned. Better to have no plot at all than a bad one when it comes to aping Lovecraft.

When I first got to the Atlas, either in 3.1 or 3.2, I initially thought that the maps were grouped by some theme: temples near one another, or city buildings nearer to the center, and so on. Sadly, it was all completely randomized every league, which ties into your point about the physical representation of the Atlas itself. Why even have a collection of interconnected maps if their links to one another are completely meaningless? I would have loved to see some kind of grouping where the Shaper was lording over the Library, Museum, and Scriptorium, or Baran's influence being felt in the Temple and Courthouse. The Atlas in its current incarnation is devoid of any charm or mystery whatsoever.

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It'll be interesting to hear how the commentary of The Next Generation sounds compared to The Original Seven's amazing one-liners in Part 1. To see if GGG can make lightning strike twice...or if their lurch towards Diablo 3's style of 'RPG' construction and delivery brings with it cartoon-level villainy and MCU-level quippery.

Time will tell. I also hope that GGG avoids these kinds of immersion-breaking pitfalls.