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Voice Acting, Do you really like this Idea ? (poll)
delete5230
Member EpicPosts: 7,081
OK,
A few days ago, I made a post expressing my concerns and dislikes about the Voice Acting used in SWTOR. I must say that I not a large fan of Starwars. It's ok but I just not a major follower of it.
Now, with watching sooooooo many playing the bata on my real time web site, I must say that I really like this game.
1) Open world is beautiful. Graphics are a change, A good break from the fantasy setting.
2) Love the companion Idea.
3) Love the classes.
4) Having your own ship.
5) Many others
But the voice acting cut scenes will stop my adrenalin flow, as it seems to do with the players I had been watching. I'll try and go into this Fridays bata with an open mind, who knows it may not really be that bad. So many of us will soon find out.
Many of you are hard-core StarWars fans. In fact there are many here that are not normally mmo players, but Hay you love Starwars that much " good for you ".
Now my question is, and please be honest. Do you really like the voice acting or because it's StarWars and a good quality game made by BioWare.
Comments
Bioware has done a fantastic job with SWTOR voice acting and it adds another layer of immersion to the game.
To be honest I don't really like voice acting. I mean I like it in cinematic intros and movies between chapters (in single player games), I don't mind some voice acting in game BUT I really don't like cutscenes especially frequent ones and what I loathe is when MY character is voice acted.
If there is VO in game, I prefer that text options are just read, I really don't like paraphrasing.
VO that totally irritated me was in example in Dragon Age 2 (game itself was horrid as well, abandoned playing it).
That is just a preference I think.
I like when certain things are left to imagination, I don't like when games fell like I am directing some fictional character and not that I AM fictional character. Full VO with paraphrasing make me feel more like I am a director of a movie, instead of actor
Very un-immersive for me.
I know that for some people it has opposite effect of increasing immersion, but I really don't understand that.
Unless I'm in serious PvP with stuff-loot or other noticeable death/lose penalty, I don't have any adrenalin flow. So I really don't see any downside in the voice acting.
If a games npcs had voice acting instead of a text box that's a win in my book.
But The amount of emphasis swotor has put on their VO as a feature is to much in my book.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
In general archievers, hate voice acting, but then i hate archievers as they are allways pushing people to go faster and do more in less time when grouped/raided with them.
So since this game might not be their kind of game because of the inevitable voice acting, maybe they'll leave quickly to other places.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
i'll be competely honest, i'm not a star wars fans. The movies were so-so, not bad but not great. I like bioware games i really do so that helps with my decision but there are two factors that really got me into this game more then anything else.
One it feels like kotor style, Vocie acting quests, choice system, dark side morphing. controls are a bit different then kotor but i think thats a huge improvement over the kotor game.
It's really story first and choices in quests that got me interested, add in the voice acting, the movement of the characters and it's just sweetness on top of cake
For me when you pick up the quest it's not just hearing sir wholey al mighty saying line after line while in place. If all it was, was hearing someone say the quest text that would be really boring for me and express elevator to the space bar.
Fortuantly it's not the case here. You do have the voice acting. In some places it's bad but in most it's great. I was actually surprised in a few cases, but that alone wouldn't do it, they add in character to the person when they move around, make hand gestures. But even with that, you get the interaction of your character along with it. No i'm not talking about your character talking, what i mean is you choice a response and the other person reacts accordingly to it. You decide in a quest to kill some people the other side remarks about it and asks you questions on why you did it.
The whole thing just feels like your apart of that story and the world around it so much more then other MMOs that have you do tasks for X reason. Your doing that here to, but the Voice acting, the movement of the npcs, the music, everything really goes well with it.
As for my view of it and why i went into this long post about it. By itself, no, voice acting doesn't in and of itself make for a great idea. It might help to move quests along but it's still the same thing as text box, just someone reading it to you. You have to go the whole 9 yards, you can't just add voice acting and be done with it. It will feel tacked on, you gotta give the character the emotions that he is protraying with his voice. If hes angry in his voice, he needs to look angry in his actions. If hes begging you for something, he needs to get on his knees and beg you for it, or at least clasp his hands together.
It's the whole package thing. If your going to go with VA, you need to have the character protray that in their body motions as well. Otherwise VA by itlself is only half the picture.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
I don't agree with putting all people that dislike voice acting to one group as "achievers".
I believve I am not 'an achiever', yet I don't like voice acting and I LIKE dialogues in game.
What I always not understood is why in mmorpg's there were no conversaations. Just usually box filled with text with accept or decline option. You can have great conversations without voice acting, actually from production side it is easier, faster & cheaper and allows for more in-depth and varied conversation options.
See games like Fallout 1 & 2, Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Planescapre Torment, Arcanum, etc as perfect examples of this.
This. It is against the RP philosophy if your character has a voice. It breaks the immersion because your character is supposed to speak in your voice.
I like voice acting but in the case of TOR, it does not work out very well for various reasons, to the point that it is not an RPG in my opinion...
No, not really. It is Sci-Fi, Science Fiction, meaning science fantasy.
Guild Wars 2's 50 minutes game play video:
http://n4g.com/news/592585/guild-wars-2-50-minutes-of-pure-gameplay
Everything We Know about GW2:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/287180/page/1
I think what he means is high fantasy, elves, castles, dragons, medieval times, knights.
Things like that.
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
The real problem with voice acting and the cutscenes is that you can't turn them off. Yeah, ou can skip to ne sentence with spacebar but you should be able to turn it off in the menu and just get a text box with what they said and the options you have.
It is really simple to add and would make both sides happy.
I like the idea of different voice-options. Like callous, sweet, angry... It's simply there to add more immersion to the game. But if they're planning on something like this at least think of our purists and add a Mute option.
Didn't vote, as I didn't see a option that fits....As I cannot say I 'love' swtor, and the voice acting is ok, but it sounds like it took a major amount of money/time to do it....I would maybe of prefered that time spent on putting more stuff in the game.
I mean its different, and I am not hating on it...Just contemplating what they maybe could of done/added, if they put that effort/money into the game elsewhere.
So I am a little positive on it so far, but I only played a little so far, and to be honest, I dislike rails, so I cannot say I feel super railed yet or not, the game supposedly opens up more later....I like to explore and do my own thing...
I guess this would be a question, since a lot of people hate on the space portion (which I havent played or really even looked at, just see people all the time saying it is railed and a afterthought in their opinion....How much better would the space portion be if all the voice work went into the space part...would that be worth it?
The voice stuff makes it different, for good or bad, I am not sure yet.
Will tell you monday if i liked it or not. A priori, i'm not a fan of it.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
I didn't think I would like it, or more accurately i thought it would be a feature I would 'endure' to play the game. I was quite surprised when I found out how much it added to my personal enjoyment factor.
The only time I 'skipped' sections of VO was when I rolled another character of the same class. (I wanted to see the skill trees of the other AC option). Even then, I let all the story arc VOs roll out as normal and limited myself to 'fast-skipping' a few of the standard quests.
One thing to keep in mind.
How about the long haul ?..........Most go into an mmo expecting or at least hoping to play them for months if not years.
It's only my OPINION, but END GAME VOICE ACTING will get old on everyone if there is too much !
BioWare has raised the bar in this industry with the amount and quality of the voice acting in SWTOR.
Other "AAA" MMO offerings will need to play catch up.
"Don't corpse-camp that idea. Its never gonna rez"
Bladezz (The Guild)
there is nothing particularly "wrong" with the voice acting. i just don't think that it adds a lot to the game and i think that that $10-20 million dollars in development could have been much better spent. I also think that it creates a barrier for BioWare to make changes / create additional content in the future, which is alwyas bad in an MMO.
I've already heard people say "well no, they can't make all the companions available to all the class - imagine the VO work it would take!" That should NEVER be a good reason to limit the possibilities of a game.
"Id rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
- Raph Koster
Tried: AO,EQ,EQ2,DAoC,SWG,AA,SB,HZ,CoX,PS,GA,TR,IV,GnH,EVE, PP,DnL,WAR,MxO,SWG,FE,VG,AoC,DDO,LoTRO,Rift,TOR,Aion,Tera,TSW,GW2,DCUO,CO,STO
Favourites: AO,SWG,EVE,TR,LoTRO,TSW,EQ2, Firefall
Currently Playing: ESO
I agree,
SWTOR seems to be a high quality game, lots of time and money put into it. Yet...Just think of how much more could have been put in without the time sink of the voice acting.
If they focused more on the game with more emphasis on companions, space combat, more starter zones, even better optmising the system, even better class skills, and more end game...........This could blow a hole in WoW by far.
Do we really need another thread on this?
Clench if you want..but it's here ;P
I pretty much think voice acting should be (and probably will be) a standard feature of MMO's going forward. EQ 2 had some, AOC had vo's too. What I'm very interested to see is the rate at which Bioware will produce new content that is also fully voiced after the games initial release. If vo's mean you can't put out the content fast enough, which it could very well mean, then I can see alot of people leaving the game only to re-sub for a month on patch releases.
Also, I hope they don't go the route of adding non-voice quests in patches down the road just to put the content out to tide the masses over. That'd just seem like a backward step to me.
I agree. There are a few kiosk quests 'Wanted!" type which fit nicely. Making 'standard' quests non-vo would be a very bad decision IMO.
I firmly believe Dragon Age would have been a better game without the voice-acting.
I actually thought the voice acting would slow the game down and just be a stupid gimmick. I changed my mind after the beta, it really got me into the game and I did't feel the need to skip any conversations.
The thing is, no one does this kind of thing better than Bioware. They started to zero in on it with first Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Then they nailed it in Mass Effect 2. The pacing of the dialog in ME2 and SWTOR is perfect. I'm playing Skyrim right now and as good as the game is, sometimes the NPC's will babble on forever.
I suspect Bioware actually did research and found out exactly how long people could stand to listen to an NPC talk. After they found out that most people have the attention span of fruit flies, they moved to shorter more streamlined conversations.
I'm hoping other devs learn from the example.