People most likely have noticed some off-putting things at some point in their playthroughs, or maybe completely missed it as some of these things are quite easy to miss or just forget about. Especially with the types of gamers who spam through dialogue to just get it over with.
It kind of irked me however that dialogue for the Pirate Queen for example still isn’t voiced. The first time i saw her my initial thought was something along the lines of: “Oh cool, a badass pirate boss lady just sitting there with her guards, let’s hear what she has to say!” Only to be met with simple walls of text. Disappointing, really.
Fast forward a few years and… yeah. Same ol’, same ol’ on that one… disappointing that it wasn’t just a bug or unfinished. I didn’t expect that to be honest, i wasn’t too surprised because the jungle content was new-ish. But this time around… yeah.
Feels like she has been forgotten.
Then there’s Gilzahn for example, the guy you meet at both Sepermeru and a road (Slavetaker’s road i think it’s called) leading into the Unnamed City. He has the exact same dialogue in both of these locations which is a real shame. Seems like a wasted opportunity. With just a split between his purge and cursed city dialogue and 2-3 new sentences indicating he either has seen you before or makes some remarks about his environment you could really add a nice little layer to encountering him.
The way things like these are done really don’t do the rest of the world-building any justice if you ask me. The player can have a nice, fun immersed experience interacting with most NPCs and visiting most places, but of all things these fairly prominently placed, often bumped-into NPCs rip you right out of it with a disappointing eye for detail by whoever designed and/or assigned both written and spoken dialogue.
Which is a shame, because a lot of it IS in fact quite well done. From tablets to some of the other NPC dialogue. There is good work done there.
It just really makes it jarring to bump into those two examples i gave.
Then there is the fact that there is a whole slew of voice lines for NPCs we rarely get to hear on thralls, such as Yog stuff due to culture and map scaling for thralls.
By now it might be a moot suggestion or piece of feedback if you will, one that probably never will receive attention— but if there is any additional written dialogue and voice files floating around for these encounters in the first place… please consider implementing and/or finishing them. Even if it is but a work in progress, still.
I personally also think it could be beneficial to use certain voice actors (the new NPC’s Khitan voice for example, let him do some Exile dialogue while he’s at it!) to put in more voice lines for later use, especially if a thrall voice customization option ever came along. Which, i hope is coming sooner or later…