Sound, Steampunk, and Music

savarage

Firstly I want to ask you about your enviromental sounds and how in depth  you are taking them will there be approptiate sounds for every enviroment with babbling brooks, quiet whispers in libraries, busy haggling and shouts from the crowd in the market places etc. ?

Secondly I want to ask about npc's and their one greatest flaw in all mmos to date in the area of sound, no voices they are all voiceless mutes who all have text but no actual voices. The only exception are the really important characters and they are far and few between. It's not that I'm expecting a full cgi movie every time I talk to a npc ( though that would be freaking sweet) no I just want to actually hear someone's voice when I'm talking to someone in the game that isn't a player.

Let us move on to my third worry / rant material music. Music is the proverbial icing on the cake and as such it can create emotional reactions that can make us weep with joy, pray in terror, and stand in awe but most mmo's (and most games in general) don't give it as much attention as it deserves they just stick the standard orchestra music and call it a day. What they should be doing is useing the music to create a certain feeling while in a certain area of the game, an example of this done well would be silent hill where the music feels genuinly creepy which is of course the point of the game. to make it simple the music should draw attention to itself in a way that doesn't break the immersive quality of the game but deepens it to perfect harmony between excellent music, graphics, and gameplay that seemlessly blend together to create a superior gaming experiance.

Finally on a note completely different from the above will your game have some steampunk influences expecially in areas like Morphael’s fortress and other areas where technology or in a common cases in fantasy settings magiology where magic is used to run what can be obviously seen as our technology with a magic power source or reasoning behind it.

Dakirn

Nobody really thought much about NPC voices until EQ2 tried to do it, or at least complained when games didn't deliver it

The problem with voicing every NPC is that it's extremely expensive and time consuming.  Imagine having 500 NPCs and having to have 500 different voice actors come in and record every possible thing that NPC ever could say.  After you send them home, you can't add anything new to the NPC's dialog unless you hire them to come in again.  While drive space is cheap these days, this is still a ton of time and effort..

I remember a dev in AoC beta trying to explain this to people.  Sometimes people just expect the world without considering the logistics and complexity of delivering it.  Some games do this pretty well and try to do it whenever possible.  I don't think that it would work with CoS with the way that that they said they're designing the game to make NPCs more realistic.  It would probably limit what they could do way too much if they had to make sure that every NPC had every piece of dialog recorded.

Dunno, could be wrong.  Maybe Jatar would chime in about it.. but since they seem like a smaller company I'd rather see their resources going to making the game fun, complete and enjoyable rather than some "gee that's nice to have" voice overs.

savarage

I know it's not on the top of the list for features but it would greatly improve  the immersion and having a feature that could already be looked at by other mmo companies and duplicated quickly could cause great innovation in mmo's because more is expected from them than just endless walls of text of course the most important thing is the dynamic quest system but npc's voices would be the thing that makes it even more like the I'm not just a person at  a computer but an adventurous hero.

As for the costs of hiring tons of voice actors why not just hire one to read all the dialogue then put there voice through a variety of filters that alter it for gender, (which decides the range the voices go ordinarlly) species, (which can cause unique effect such as adding an accent an example is dwarfs with a scottish voice) Age, (which can soften or add harshness to the undertones) Emotion which can add bemused, angry, hateful, sorrowful and the whole range of emotions to a voice for dramatic tention and the filter could be removed when it is no longer needed or changed to another one as appropriate.  You can have a few other special voices for special npcs like an evil voice for really high ranking demons or a spectral voice for ghosts.

Now I don't know if what I stated above is possible but it could at least spark some ideas in the CoS sound team but still I dont have any sound technican experiance or computer programing skills so if what I stated above is impossible please tell me and explain why besides of course time and money constrants because that doesn't make it impossible it just makes it too expensive and time consuming for now.

Jatar

Sound and Music questions are simply getting into an area in which we are not yet releasing information (as it is too much in flux).   I apologize, but you'll have to wait until a later date for those details. 

As for your final question, the Jenemos race was created by Morphael to make his evil machines.  These machines  combine magic and science.  The Citadel does not employ much in the way of machines, prefering to rely on their socerey, but certainly these elements exist in the world... and Morphael is pursing this type of technology to his evil ends.   That's really all I can state about this right now.  (Most of this can be gleaned from the Lore on www.citadelofsorcery.com anyway).

Elderos

Just because you dont see alot of MMOs with voices does not mean that other games dont have them. Morrowwind has voices on many of the NPCs you encounter. Granted, they repeat alot and there is not may different voices, but they do have them. I recall the guards in the capital city calling me scum every time I passed them. Nice touch.

You really would not need as many voice actors/actresses as you might think. I am sure that the dev team could come up with a good many of them. Heck! I'd volenteer my meager voice for an NPC or two. That'd be fun.

I do agree with the origenal statment about sound and music. It can really make or break a game these days. Movies too. Everquest had some awsome sound tracks. Really added alot to the game.