Let us skip chats/dialogues during story missions

[SparklingMalibu.6328]

topic!

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Dev response says: 'No'.  

[Danikat.8537]

I can't find the quote now but I remember reading that at least some of them can't be made skippable because the dialogue time is needed for things to load in or move while you're locked into one area and skipping it could cause the story to stall and you'd have to start over.

I think they've tried to balance it out by having some conversations happen while you're moving or fighting so there's not as much 'down time', but that has it's own downsides, especially for people who can't hear the spoken dialogue for various reasons and are then left either trying to read and fight at the same time or waiting until a quiet moment to re-read it all out of context and hope it still makes sense.

[Zephire.8049]

What Danikat said. NPCs have to walk/run to places rather than just spawn in behind the scenes like the OG cutscenes could do and they found letting people skip dialogue with the current style of cutscene resulted in NPCs stalling more often than they already do.

NPCs talking or having to escort an NPC gives other things time to load much in the same way elevators/doors/wall cracks are invisible loading screens in other types of games (if a large game boasts about no loading screens, they simply found a creative way to set them up). Can't skip them much like you can't skip a loading screen—visually they're different but functionally on the back end it's identical. The only way to make them skippable is to go back to OG cutscenes and make story instances small enough so everything loads at once.

[Randulf.7614]

It’s been asked for a lot over the years. As Danikat says, there are technical issues. Unless they can resolve those, they would need to change how story works and return to more static cutscenes for dialogue which wasn’t very popular.

All you can do is ask for change, but given the wealth of feedback, I suspect it’s something they would change if they could

[Solvar.7953]

I personally think the 'technical issues' is a weak excuse.  Sure, there might be some cases where that is true, and reworking/making improvements so that it still works would require a certain amount of dev effort they don't want to.

But there are some cases where the unskippable dialogue is at the end of the instance, when everything is dead and you just have to wait for it to complete before you can get credit & exit.  Nothing is being set up and moved around there.

But even in other cases, there could still be a timer or something which counts down until everything is set up, and you can skip at that point - for a lot of instances, I find it hard to believe it takes minutes to set everything up.

Now it certainly does simplify things not to be able to skip it - less testing to do, etc, but maybe if enough people keep asking for it, Anet will at least add it in where it is simple to do and won't create bugs.

 

[Hotride.2187]

18 hours ago, Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

Dev response says: 'No'.  

You think we'll get a straight answer though?

[kharmin.7683]

48 minutes ago, Hotride.2187 said:

You think we'll get a straight answer though?

How much more straight of an answer do you need more than "no"?

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

1 hour ago, Hotride.2187 said:

You think we'll get a straight answer though?

I have no reason to think the Devs prevaricated when they responded to this issue.  Do you? 

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

20 hours ago, Danikat.8537 said:

I can't find the quote now but I remember reading that at least some of them can't be made skippable because the dialogue time is needed for things to load in or move while you're locked into one area and skipping it could cause the story to stall and you'd have to start over.

I think they've tried to balance it out by having some conversations happen while you're moving or fighting so there's not as much 'down time', but that has it's own downsides, especially for people who can't hear the spoken dialogue for various reasons and are then left either trying to read and fight at the same time or waiting until a quiet moment to re-read it all out of context and hope it still makes sense.

This was definitely the issue. I don't remember the exact wording but it was "because game is actually server side .. and not a client running on your computer, we need time to do alot of things". I think sometimes players forget this isn't a single-player game that can use all kinds of tricks, especially since others can join you in your instances.

Edited May 14, 2023 by SoftFootpaws.9134

[Poormany.4507]

14 hours ago, Solvar.7953 said:

Now it certainly does simplify things not to be able to skip it - less testing to do, etc, but maybe if enough people keep asking for it, Anet will at least add it in where it is simple to do and won't create bugs.

If game development worked this way, we'd have playable Tengu years ago.

I highly doubt Anet's going to change fundamental features like the one proposed this late in the game. Messing with important spaghetti code from 5 years to a decade ago written by devs who no longer work there is just going to introduce more bugs than the  minor QOL feature it will bring. They already recently started letting us exit instances early with optional extra dialogue, and I think that's the best we're going to get in regards to this issue.

Edited May 14, 2023 by Poormany.4507

[SparklingMalibu.6328]

4 hours ago, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

This was definitely the issue. I don't remember the exact wording but it was "because game is actually server side .. and not a client running on your computer, we need time to do alot of things". I think sometimes players forget this isn't a single-player game that can use all kinds of tricks, especially since others can join you in your instances.

How does this make sense though? ( I am an AI scientist who runs Machine Learning models in the cloud so not talking out of my kitten here )

The premise of Server side is to consume messages/intents/requests from client side. Like it already does for  a plethora of game's functions => we press a button => or make a Trading post request and => it sends a message to the server side to 'do something' in return. Why can't we send an intent to the server (technical wording) that we want to skip the cutscene?

Server responds to our client side requests.

Edited May 14, 2023 by SparklingMalibu.6328

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

1 hour ago, SparklingMalibu.6328 said:

How does this make sense though? ( I am an AI scientist who runs Machine Learning models in the cloud so not talking out of my kitten here )

The premise of Server side is to consume messages/intents/requests from client side. Like it already does for  a plethora of game's functions => we press a button => or make a Trading post request and => it sends a message to the server side to 'do something' in return. Why can't we send an intent to the server (technical wording) that we want to skip the cutscene?

Server responds to our client side requests.

Here's one of the Dev responses:  https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Please-allow-us-to-skip-cut-scenes/first#post4604049

There’s a bigger technical issue—during “in game” scenes, the NPCs are moving around and things are happening (gadgets might be activating, props may be animating, etc.) and if you just skipped all that, it could lead to some really bizarre behavior. Trying to manually set a “failsafe” to teleport the NPCs, fire off effects, etc. to replicate what the world state is if the cutscene plays is extremely tedious and error prone.

That’s why the old style “dialogue cutscenes” (and the fancy but rare full blown cinematic sequences, like the Order movies and racial intros) are skippable, because we aren’t doing anything to the world while the dialogue plays, so skipping it doesn’t have any effect. We’ve moved away from those, because the in-game scenes are a lot more satisfying, but there’s a trade off.

Edited May 14, 2023 by Inculpatus cedo.9234

[Hotride.2187]

6 hours ago, Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

I have no reason to think the Devs prevaricated when they responded to this issue.  Do you? 

So where is the straight answer?

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

2 minutes ago, Hotride.2187 said:

So where is the straight answer?

See above? 

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

1 hour ago, SparklingMalibu.6328 said:

How does this make sense though? ( I am an AI scientist who runs Machine Learning models in the cloud so not talking out of my kitten here )

The premise of Server side is to consume messages/intents/requests from client side. Like it already does for  a plethora of game's functions => we press a button => or make a Trading post request and => it sends a message to the server side to 'do something' in return. Why can't we send an intent to the server (technical wording) that we want to skip the cutscene?

Server responds to our client side requests.

You are correct, however..

 

There are five clients involved in a story mission, not one, as this is an online multiplayer game and anyone can come into your party with you and do the story mission just like any other instanced content.

You, the party leader, hit skip on the dialogue. What happens to the other four players?

A. They also automatically skip the dialogue, when maybe they didn't want to. The developers have to set up a "failsafe" scenario in which all the players are moved to fixed locations and states, creating extra development time on top of annoying your lore-loving party members. If the failsafe wasn't set up correctly, it leads to potential bugs in the instance later on.

B. You skip the dialogue and they don't, and now you're all desynced, you all start seeing a slightly different game world and the instance eventually crashes.

 

This only worked with the old "talking heads" cutscenes because nothing was happening in the background. In fact, it can break if some players run ahead in dungeons (where this is allowed), and start another cutscene while a player is still watching an existing cutscene, which can happen on high DPS groups.

 

Furthermore, since most dialogue now happens while moving and fighting, its easily solved by simply turning the dialogue volume slider all the way down.

Edited May 14, 2023 by SoftFootpaws.9134

[SparklingMalibu.6328]

13 hours ago, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

You, the party leader, hit skip on the dialogue. What happens to the other four players?

 

TBh, I've never done the story missions in a party of five so I don't have much experience BUT yes, since you're the party leader it should skip for everyone else who is there for a ride. You as the party leader, the instance opener are in the driver's seat after all!

There could be a voting like in Fractals but WHY should this super niche scenario - story missions in a party of 5- affect the more common, single player doing their story experience? 

the whole client side seems like a weak excuse to me since we do something similar in fractals with a ready check with 5 client sides.

Edited May 15, 2023 by SparklingMalibu.6328

[Solvar.7953]

I will note that one of the things that Anet said they were going to work on in the future is cleaning up old code because it does cause various problems.   So maybe there is a faintest glimmer of hope.

But realistically, Anet pretty much never goes back and fixes old content.  So the best hope might be future content has skipable dialogue.

I think some of the reason it does not is to stretch out the limited content that is currently created - I imagine if it was all skipable, you would get people speedrunning the content and saying 'I completed it in 9 minutes', at which point someone else takes that and says the latest content drop only added 9 minutes of new content.  That said, the non skipable probably only adds 5 minutes.

I also suspect that as creators of the content, they really want everyone to see it, so there is some lack of incentive for them to add a feature that lets people skip content that they worked hard to create.

 

[Hotride.2187]

10 hours ago, Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

See above? 

I see an explanation why there is no skip, from end of 2014. Followed by "we are trying to improve how cutscenes work". I don't see why a) the topic should not be raised again, since its a valid topic and b) where the dev said "no, we won't do that". Or maybe you have a recent dev quote that is more clear?

Trying to shut the topic down with "dev said no", as a player, is just weird to me. Maybe you don't want a skip cutscene button, or you don't care about one, other players (including me) do.

Edited May 15, 2023 by Hotride.2187

[spankyed.4735]

Agree on skip button

[Albadaran.1283]

Well at least make a saving point when those conversations start. So you don't have to start the quest again if connection would be lost during the conversation.

[Kelly.7019]

On 5/13/2023 at 3:21 PM, Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

Dev response says: 'No'.  

no, you must watch all our hard work!

[JTGuevara.9018]

On 5/13/2023 at 2:57 PM, SparklingMalibu.6328 said:

topic!

Can't be done, unfortunately. Some of the story sequences are not cinematic.

 

On 5/13/2023 at 3:26 PM, Danikat.8537 said:

I can't find the quote now but I remember reading that at least some of them can't be made skippable because the dialogue time is needed for things to load in or move while you're locked into one area and skipping it could cause the story to stall and you'd have to start over.

I think they've tried to balance it out by having some conversations happen while you're moving or fighting so there's not as much 'down time', but that has it's own downsides, especially for people who can't hear the spoken dialogue for various reasons and are then left either trying to read and fight at the same time or waiting until a quiet moment to re-read it all out of context and hope it still makes sense.

Basically: they are scripted. Like any program, a script is sequential and is instructed to run to completion. A cinematic, on the other hand, is designed to be skipped since it's basically a video.

[Ashantara.8731]

On 5/13/2023 at 9:26 PM, Danikat.8537 said:

I think they've tried to balance it out by having some conversations happen while you're moving or fighting

...which is plain awful, because I am missing a lot of the dialogue, which is drowned by all the combat noise. Also, the amount of dialogue that's overlapping with other dialogue these days is crazy.

They really should go back to the old cut scene-style dialogue which could easily be skipped.