Voice acting is a “hot iron” in video games. Game developers can easily burn the fans of a game with the choice of the voice actors and how the voice acting is actually done. Localization can even do more harm with silly translations and voices that sound very differently than the original English voice actors.
Guild Wars 2 is not so different to other games. There is a huge amount of dialogue for the personal story line cut scenes, there is ambient chatter in the cities and of course we all expect the different races to sound differently. Quite some time ago, Arena.Net released a “behind the scenes” video of the voice recording of the iconic characters, like Rytlock, Caithe, Logan and Zoija. Arena.Net has hired long time professional voice actors, like Kari Wahlgren for that job, as well as Felicia Day, who is mostly known for being adorably geeky on internet web shows and TV (and polarizing the community to a “love it or hate it” faction, too).
After two beta weekends, a lot of people had the chance to hear voice acting in Guild Wars 2. Did you like it so far? Are the Charr sounding like you thought they should sound? Or the Norn, Asura and the few Sylvari we could encounter? Did the “Races of Tyria” blog series, on the official Arena.Net site, feature the tone or accent you expected?
I did a little piece of voice acting myself, to encourage you to do the same as a video response on GWOnline.net’s YouTube page and talk about how you feel about the voice acting so far here on the forum or in a comment down below.
