Branching Cinematics In Guild Wars 2 Detailed By ArenaNet

05 Oct 2010 at 21:33:09 by Peter Parrish

A new blog post over at ArenaNet goes into detail about how cinematics have been altered and updated for Guild Wars 2.

Unlike the first game, cinematics will be controlled client-side (ie, on your local PC) rather than an external server, which allows for something which audio and cinematics programmer James Boer describes as "dynamically branching cinematics." All necessary information is transmitted to the client PC before the cinematic triggers.

In practice, this allows a cinematic to be "tuned for a specific player’s character." Even if a group of players trigger the 'same' cinematic, it may play out slightly differently for each of them depending upon the prior choices their characters have made. Boer claims that "the cinematic engine can do something as simple as swapping out a single line of dialogue, or as complex as branching the entire scene."

As a result, the Guild Wars 2 cinematics should always appear to be somewhat personalised to a player's own character.

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