my fav game before this was AOC or more corectly Tortage with its 20 levels of Voice over and excellent story, it really brings a game to life. My next fav game would have to be Vanguard, no voice overs but great diversity in game play keeps you from getting bored
100% Voice over with a great story line is THE ONLY WAY TO GO!!! It brings tremendouse immersion to the game you can really feel it in your bones, the combo of single player and group play is great fun and it is the wave of the future for those who can afford it
i think they should have avoided doing player VO's though, those are for the most part, completely daft, the conversation selections don't even indicate what the players avatar is actually going to say, which can be often completely inapropriate, all i can say is thank goodness you can spacebar past some of the sillier parts.
Despite the lack of gameplay innovation full VO's help a lot to create immersion. It's the first time ever I actually enjoy playing alts in an MMO - all thanks to the story and how it is presented.
Well I am part of the few that like a voiceless hero and read quest text. I rather have no choices then the illision of choice. So take this with a grain of salt.
I don't think 100% voice is a bad idea but like others said it needs to be the topping not the main course like it is in SWTOR. I just don't think the game let alone the ciche predictable storys could stand on their own.
Also I still hate the Lie Wheel.
I will not play a game with a cash shop ever again. A dev job should be to make the game better not make me pay so it sucks less.
Creating spoken dialog requires you build the scene and pay actors which is time and resources that can be used to advance the game and genre as a whole.
Besides, eventually people spacebar though the cutscene anyway which means a complete waste of time. Or do you really feel that the game speaks to you and your character?
I personally enjoy the conversations in the gaming community about immersion and how that relates as a social darwanistic construct. Are we becoming that lazy that we need our games to speak to us?
To sum up: THEY BASICALLY TRICKED YOU INTO PLAYING A LINEAR MMO FROM 8 YEARS AGO... And many people fell for it because they got tired of reading...
Well I am part of the few that like a voiceless hero and read quest text. I rather have no choices then the illision of choice. So take this with a grain of salt.
I don't think 100% voice is a bad idea but like others said it needs to be the topping not the main course like it is in SWTOR. I just don't think the game let alone the ciche predictable storys could stand on their own.
Also I still hate the Lie Wheel.
I feel the same way. I think the VO feature carried the game, but is that really what should make a game popular? When asked what the feature that set SWTOR apart from the competition was, the resounding answer was "woah dude, like, 100% voice is the future". Maybe it is, but when it's the only "innovation" (I put this in quotes because VO's are hardly innovative) in a linear, and quite average game, it doesn't add to the game once the big thrill has passed. In fact, playing alts of the same characters on different servers (something I enjoyed doing in WoW) becomes almost impossible without abusing your space bar.
What SWTOR did was step the industry forward. it tried something new. My opinion was that it became overkill, but now that its been done we can take that experiance and push the MMORPG genre farther.
Because i can. I'm Hopeful For Every Game, Until the Fan Boys Attack My Games. Then the Knives Come Out. Logic every gamers worst enemy.
What SWTOR did was step the industry forward. it tried something new. My opinion was that it became overkill, but now that its been done we can take that experiance and push the MMORPG genre farther.
You know last year when I spoke to people about rift in another forum, they said this exact same thing.
It'll be nice when someone takes atleast a crack at taking both steps. Then improving opon that.Eh well.
I might get banned for this. - Rizel Star.
I'm not afraid to tell trolls what they [need] to hear, even if that means for me to have an forced absence afterwards.
P2P LOGIC = If it's P2P it means longevity, overall better game, and THE BEST SUPPORT EVER!!!!!(Which has been rinsed and repeated about a thousand times)
Common Sense Logic = P2P logic is no better than F2P Logic.
What SWTOR did was step the industry forward. it tried something new. My opinion was that it became overkill, but now that its been done we can take that experiance and push the MMORPG genre farther.
Step the industry forward? With Voiceovers? That's too funny The "Lie Wheel" as so dubbed is just that, prepaid responses that barely indicate what you will say and paid voice acting over a linear story.
Do you buy audiobooks too?
All Voiceovers did was create higher overhead cost to producing a game. I could care less about Voice acting, Why.
1. Not integral to story.
2. I don't get to pick the voice.
3. Makes for a purely single player experience.
4. Even if used for non cutscenes everyone will sound the same - Less immersive.
In the end it looses its luster quickly and limits endgame/ new content rollout as new cutscenes and acting needs to be completed which delays content rollout due to a useless feature...
The fact that this turd of a MMORPG's most iconic image is someone hitting the spacebar to skip past the poorly animated, crappy fanfic level voice overs would strongly indicated the answer is no...
Agreed. So much focus went into the voiced over cinematics that they built the game around it instead of using it as a great topping.
The other issue with the VO is most of the dialog choices do nothing more than just changing your lines. It doesn't help replayability that much.
Finally the writing isn't that great. IMHO AoC has even better writing and LotRo is far superior.
I agree as well. I've gone through the book quests several times in LotR. Even with the differing class story lines I have no desire to go through the stories on the planets again. There is only one planet's story line I enjoyed enough that I wouldn't mind repeating it.
The rest? No thanks...
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
Well I am part of the few that like a voiceless hero and read quest text. I rather have no choices then the illision of choice. So take this with a grain of salt.
I don't think 100% voice is a bad idea but like others said it needs to be the topping not the main course like it is in SWTOR. I just don't think the game let alone the ciche predictable storys could stand on their own.
Also I still hate the Lie Wheel.
The highlighted red text is factually false.
Going through the trooper quest line again and I'm seeing very different results/VO due to a choice I made 2-3 hours ago.
Gdemami - Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
Well I am part of the few that like a voiceless hero and read quest text. I rather have no choices then the illision of choice. So take this with a grain of salt.
I don't think 100% voice is a bad idea but like others said it needs to be the topping not the main course like it is in SWTOR. I just don't think the game let alone the ciche predictable storys could stand on their own.
Also I still hate the Lie Wheel.
The highlighted red text is factually false.
Going through the trooper quest line again and I'm seeing very different results/VO due to a choice I made 2-3 hours ago.
But what you may not understand is that no matter what choices you make, your story will end @ 50 the same way as every other troopers. So, its still an illusion.
As soon as you start spending more time in dialogue than it takes to actually complete the quest (not including travel time), this is when the game really disappointed.
It was a very poor design choice by Bioware because the voice acting loses its novelty very quickly from overuse. If they used it more sparingly for only the important quests, I think they would have better succeeded in that department because people would be less eager to skip the content to get back to playing the game.
But instead it becomes more of an annoyance because it distracts you from the game by constantly interrupting you. I don't consider sitting through chat dialogue making worthless decisions for mundane quests, to be meaningful gameplay.
It gets especially tedious when you come to a new quest hub and you see a crowd of quest NPC's staring you in the face, as you know its going to take you at least 10 minutes to simply pick up the quests if you actually intend to listen to the voice acting.
I think a lot of people aren't being completely truthful: when AoC had its voice overs extensively up to L20, I didn't hear people say 'fuck, why did they do that? I don't want cutscenes, dialogue choices and VO, I want my normal textbased questing'. Nope, instead most of the times I heard 'AoC sucks, the first 20 levels questing is great and then they switch to the same old questing that I done before'.
Also, when people criticise VO and cutscenes, it's always about how it's a waste of money and that they should improve other gameplay aspects with it, but almost never do I hear 'traditional questing with text and no choices is SOOOO much better than VO/cutscene questing!'
Why? Because everyone knows damn well that maybe VO/cutscene dialogues and dialogue choices may have its flaws, but the traditional text questing has even less to offer in pretty much most of the cases. Hence the whole reason why most MMO gamers just tend to skip reading quest text anyway nowadays in MMO's.
Well, MMO devs have noticed that trend too, the pushing towards triviality of quests that has become common practice. The GW2 devs, TOR devs as well as the TSW devs have all opted for implementing very extensive VO/cutscene dialogues in their questing and MMO's, so I guess it's safe to say that it's here to stay.
Besides, when it comes to questing fun and I have to compare the VO/cutscene quest presentation of those 3 games with the traditional quests with purely text that MMO's like Rift and TERA and other MMO's will use, then my bet is on the games that use VO/cutscene quest delivery, not on the traditional way of text quests.
The VOs were a complete waste of money in my opinion. A few VOs here and there for the intresting quests (not many of those) would've been fine. But most VOs really added nothing to the game. I really hope future MMOs stay away from the swtor way of doing quests.
Voice overs are great, especially for the story missions. They really add to the immersion. However, I feel that BioWare went too far with them as far as the planet missions go. I mean, if an NPC wants me to kill 10 space rats, must I listen to his whole life story before hand?
First of all - if you're like me and you've always thought that wasting most of the game's budget on voice was a terrible idea, then you need not reply, i already know your opinion
What I'm curious about is the updated opinions of the folks that - prior to the game's launch - thought it was going to be a game-changer and the greatest thing since leia's slave outfit.
I'm seeing more and more people - people who're avid fans of the game - admit that really, having every single dialogue voiced gets to be a bit of a drag (at best) or downright annoying (at worst).
So, to you that were excited the voicing, are you still excited about it? Are you looking forward to LISTENING to 200 more "kill 10 rats" quests with generic dialogue that is fully voiced? Or would you rather see the dialogue scaled back to the more important & interesting areas of the game, parts that actually have interesting story and characters whose names you might actually remember?
I've got several characters in the 30s and i'm now just spacebarring through all the cutscenes thesedays, even the character story. I just don't have time to listen to all that guff and run around for twenty minutes between missions. The distances between mission givers and missions is a nightmare. It takes twice as long as other games to get the simpliest things done.
The voice acting and cutscenes were great at first, now they just get in the way of me playing the game and the short amounts of time I have to play.
I remember when AoC came out and everyone criticised it for having no cutscenes or voice acting outside of Tortage, because it felt 'unfinished' now i'm thinking FunCom were right.
I think a lot of people aren't being completely truthful: when AoC had its voice overs extensively up to L20, I didn't hear people say 'fuck, why did they do that? I don't want cutscenes, dialogue choices and VO, I want my normal textbased questing'. Nope, instead most of the times I heard 'AoC sucks, the first 20 levels questing is great and then they switch to the same old questing that I done before'.
No one complained about the first 20 levels of cutscenes in AoC because it was possible to do Tortage in just few hours and then get out into the game proper. It's not just the cutscenes that are time consuming in SWTOR it's the running between mission hubs and mission. It Tortage everything was within reach and felt natural. In TOR I daren't count up all the minutes i've had to waste running back to my ship via a starport, then a lift loading screen, then a run across a hanger, then a cutscene of the ship taking off etc... What a waste of time and not at all immersive, just annoying. Thank God for the spacebar.
As for text based mmos, the greatest RPG of all time, Planescape, had pages and pages of text. Nothing wrong with text at all. I don't think cutscenes are more immersive (the most immersive mmos didn't have them) they are just a gimic in my opinion.
As soon as you start spending more time in dialogue than it takes to actually complete the quest (not including travel time), this is when the game really disappointed.
It was a very poor design choice by Bioware because the voice acting loses its novelty very quickly from overuse. If they used it more sparingly for only the important quests, I think they would have better succeeded in that department because people would be less eager to skip the content to get back to playing the game.
But instead it becomes more of an annoyance because it distracts you from the game by constantly interrupting you. I don't consider sitting through chat dialogue making worthless decisions for mundane quests, to be meaningful gameplay.
It gets especially tedious when you come to a new quest hub and you see a crowd of quest NPC's staring you in the face, as you know its going to take you at least 10 minutes to simply pick up the quests if you actually intend to listen to the voice acting.
Good post... and then another 15 minutes running to where the mission is.
First of all - if you're like me and you've always thought that wasting most of the game's budget on voice was a terrible idea, then you need not reply, i already know your opinion
What I'm curious about is the updated opinions of the folks that - prior to the game's launch - thought it was going to be a game-changer and the greatest thing since leia's slave outfit.
I'm seeing more and more people - people who're avid fans of the game - admit that really, having every single dialogue voiced gets to be a bit of a drag (at best) or downright annoying (at worst).
So, to you that were excited the voicing, are you still excited about it? Are you looking forward to LISTENING to 200 more "kill 10 rats" quests with generic dialogue that is fully voiced? Or would you rather see the dialogue scaled back to the more important & interesting areas of the game, parts that actually have interesting story and characters whose names you might actually remember?
I've got several characters in the 30s and i'm now just spacebarring through all the cutscenes thesedays, even the character story. I just don't have time to listen to all that guff and run around for twenty minutes between missions. The distances between mission givers and missions is a nightmare. It takes twice as long as other games to get the simpliest things done.
The voice acting and cutscenes were great at first, now they just get in the way of me playing the game and the short amounts of time I have to play.
I remember when AoC came out and everyone criticised it for having no cutscenes or voice acting outside of Tortage, because it felt 'unfinished' now i'm thinking FunCom were right.
Aoc dident Fail because they dident have voice overs after Tortage. It Failed because they couldent fix the Bugs fast enough. and the main story of AOC still had voice overs after Tortage... When you get your Tatoo removed etc. I would go so far as to say that if Funcom had waited about 1 year before releasing the game, and had put in some more mayor plot lines after Tortage with voice over.. the game would have been a smash hit.
Also AOCs combat system was very skilled based from the begining, Items dident have a big Impact, you could kill people 20 plus levels above you without anny problem. But many Tab Target ability spam people couldent handle it, they got PAWNED horribly, because they lacked player skill. This also put many people off the product, they just couldent handle getting Rolf stomped by superior players. Another thing was Lack of content, after doing villas after villas ( small instances) to level my charecter it became boring....
Point being, If FUNCOM had explained more about the combat, had special training programs for NOOBS from other MMOS, Devs holding combat lessons in a BG Enviorment maybe? And had enough conent so you dident have to do the same things over and over plus had about 80% less bugs at Release AOC would have been one of the largest MMOS today...
Also if they had released with a functioning Seige mechanic.. It could have held peoples Interest for years..
For players it's not that big of a deal since you can skip it. But for developer to spend so much money on it just to see players skipping dialgoues is not encouraging.
Not in this case though. 100% VO was TOR's main selling point. The fact it was never done to such extent befor made it exciting enough for masses to buy the game and try it out. Just like 3D. Who cares if it is a good idea, it's fresh and exciting enough to sel. Mission accomplished.
First of all - if you're like me and you've always thought that wasting most of the game's budget on voice was a terrible idea, then you need not reply, i already know your opinion
What I'm curious about is the updated opinions of the folks that - prior to the game's launch - thought it was going to be a game-changer and the greatest thing since leia's slave outfit.
I'm seeing more and more people - people who're avid fans of the game - admit that really, having every single dialogue voiced gets to be a bit of a drag (at best) or downright annoying (at worst).
So, to you that were excited the voicing, are you still excited about it? Are you looking forward to LISTENING to 200 more "kill 10 rats" quests with generic dialogue that is fully voiced? Or would you rather see the dialogue scaled back to the more important & interesting areas of the game, parts that actually have interesting story and characters whose names you might actually remember?
I've got several characters in the 30s and i'm now just spacebarring through all the cutscenes thesedays, even the character story. I just don't have time to listen to all that guff and run around for twenty minutes between missions. The distances between mission givers and missions is a nightmare. It takes twice as long as other games to get the simpliest things done.
The voice acting and cutscenes were great at first, now they just get in the way of me playing the game and the short amounts of time I have to play.
I remember when AoC came out and everyone criticised it for having no cutscenes or voice acting outside of Tortage, because it felt 'unfinished' now i'm thinking FunCom were right.
Aoc dident Fail because they dident have voice overs after Tortage. It Failed because they couldent fix the Bugs fast enough. and the main story of AOC still had voice overs after Tortage... When you get your Tatoo removed etc. I would go so far as to say that if Funcom had waited about 1 year before releasing the game, and had put in some more mayor plot lines after Tortage with voice over.. the game would have been a smash hit.
Also AOCs combat system was very skilled based from the begining, Items dident have a big Impact, you could kill people 20 plus levels above you without anny problem. But many Tab Target ability spam people couldent handle it, they got PAWNED horribly, because they lacked player skill. This also put many people off the product, they just couldent handle getting Rolf stomped by superior players. Another thing was Lack of content, after doing villas after villas ( small instances) to level my charecter it became boring....
Point being, If FUNCOM had explained more about the combat, had special training programs for NOOBS from other MMOS, Devs holding combat lessons in a BG Enviorment maybe? And had enough conent so you dident have to do the same things over and over plus had about 80% less bugs at Release AOC would have been one of the largest MMOS today...
I didn't say it failed because there was no voice acting after 20, I said it was criticised. Read my post properly please.
I just realised you said it wasn't the lack of voice acting why it failed, it was the bugs, and then say if there was voice acting after 20 it would have been a smash hit. So the bugs wouldn't have mattered then if the game was better designed?
Comments
my fav game before this was AOC or more corectly Tortage with its 20 levels of Voice over and excellent story, it really brings a game to life. My next fav game would have to be Vanguard, no voice overs but great diversity in game play keeps you from getting bored
i think they should have avoided doing player VO's though, those are for the most part, completely daft, the conversation selections don't even indicate what the players avatar is actually going to say, which can be often completely inapropriate, all i can say is thank goodness you can spacebar past some of the sillier parts.
I love that is FULLY voice and cut scene, makes you feel more part of the game than any other that I have played.
EQ2 has some voiced quests but not acted, so it was still click on quest skip reading it go do it, same with WoW.
I find that I want to hear what they mission giver has to say, but by the looks of it, I'm a lone voice, but thats personal choice I guess.
Yes
-----
The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
What he said.
Despite the lack of gameplay innovation full VO's help a lot to create immersion. It's the first time ever I actually enjoy playing alts in an MMO - all thanks to the story and how it is presented.
Well I am part of the few that like a voiceless hero and read quest text. I rather have no choices then the illision of choice. So take this with a grain of salt.
I don't think 100% voice is a bad idea but like others said it needs to be the topping not the main course like it is in SWTOR. I just don't think the game let alone the ciche predictable storys could stand on their own.
Also I still hate the Lie Wheel.
I will not play a game with a cash shop ever again. A dev job should be to make the game better not make me pay so it sucks less.
IMO - Voiceovers are are a gimmick.
Creating spoken dialog requires you build the scene and pay actors which is time and resources that can be used to advance the game and genre as a whole.
Besides, eventually people spacebar though the cutscene anyway which means a complete waste of time. Or do you really feel that the game speaks to you and your character?
I personally enjoy the conversations in the gaming community about immersion and how that relates as a social darwanistic construct. Are we becoming that lazy that we need our games to speak to us?
To sum up: THEY BASICALLY TRICKED YOU INTO PLAYING A LINEAR MMO FROM 8 YEARS AGO... And many people fell for it because they got tired of reading...
I feel the same way. I think the VO feature carried the game, but is that really what should make a game popular? When asked what the feature that set SWTOR apart from the competition was, the resounding answer was "woah dude, like, 100% voice is the future". Maybe it is, but when it's the only "innovation" (I put this in quotes because VO's are hardly innovative) in a linear, and quite average game, it doesn't add to the game once the big thrill has passed. In fact, playing alts of the same characters on different servers (something I enjoyed doing in WoW) becomes almost impossible without abusing your space bar.
What SWTOR did was step the industry forward. it tried something new. My opinion was that it became overkill, but now that its been done we can take that experiance and push the MMORPG genre farther.
Because i can.
I'm Hopeful For Every Game, Until the Fan Boys Attack My Games. Then the Knives Come Out.
Logic every gamers worst enemy.
You know last year when I spoke to people about rift in another forum, they said this exact same thing.
It'll be nice when someone takes atleast a crack at taking both steps. Then improving opon that.Eh well.
I might get banned for this. - Rizel Star.
I'm not afraid to tell trolls what they [need] to hear, even if that means for me to have an forced absence afterwards.
P2P LOGIC = If it's P2P it means longevity, overall better game, and THE BEST SUPPORT EVER!!!!!(Which has been rinsed and repeated about a thousand times)
Common Sense Logic = P2P logic is no better than F2P Logic.
Step the industry forward? With Voiceovers? That's too funny The "Lie Wheel" as so dubbed is just that, prepaid responses that barely indicate what you will say and paid voice acting over a linear story.
Do you buy audiobooks too?
All Voiceovers did was create higher overhead cost to producing a game. I could care less about Voice acting, Why.
1. Not integral to story.
2. I don't get to pick the voice.
3. Makes for a purely single player experience.
4. Even if used for non cutscenes everyone will sound the same - Less immersive.
In the end it looses its luster quickly and limits endgame/ new content rollout as new cutscenes and acting needs to be completed which delays content rollout due to a useless feature...
The fact that this turd of a MMORPG's most iconic image is someone hitting the spacebar to skip past the poorly animated, crappy fanfic level voice overs would strongly indicated the answer is no...
I agree as well. I've gone through the book quests several times in LotR. Even with the differing class story lines I have no desire to go through the stories on the planets again. There is only one planet's story line I enjoyed enough that I wouldn't mind repeating it.
The rest? No thanks...
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
The highlighted red text is factually false.
Going through the trooper quest line again and I'm seeing very different results/VO due to a choice I made 2-3 hours ago.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
But what you may not understand is that no matter what choices you make, your story will end @ 50 the same way as every other troopers. So, its still an illusion.
Plus sidequests do not impact main story...
full voice over for the entire game is overrated.
As soon as you start spending more time in dialogue than it takes to actually complete the quest (not including travel time), this is when the game really disappointed.
It was a very poor design choice by Bioware because the voice acting loses its novelty very quickly from overuse. If they used it more sparingly for only the important quests, I think they would have better succeeded in that department because people would be less eager to skip the content to get back to playing the game.
But instead it becomes more of an annoyance because it distracts you from the game by constantly interrupting you. I don't consider sitting through chat dialogue making worthless decisions for mundane quests, to be meaningful gameplay.
It gets especially tedious when you come to a new quest hub and you see a crowd of quest NPC's staring you in the face, as you know its going to take you at least 10 minutes to simply pick up the quests if you actually intend to listen to the voice acting.
Also, when people criticise VO and cutscenes, it's always about how it's a waste of money and that they should improve other gameplay aspects with it, but almost never do I hear 'traditional questing with text and no choices is SOOOO much better than VO/cutscene questing!'
Why? Because everyone knows damn well that maybe VO/cutscene dialogues and dialogue choices may have its flaws, but the traditional text questing has even less to offer in pretty much most of the cases. Hence the whole reason why most MMO gamers just tend to skip reading quest text anyway nowadays in MMO's.Well, MMO devs have noticed that trend too, the pushing towards triviality of quests that has become common practice. The GW2 devs, TOR devs as well as the TSW devs have all opted for implementing very extensive VO/cutscene dialogues in their questing and MMO's, so I guess it's safe to say that it's here to stay.
Besides, when it comes to questing fun and I have to compare the VO/cutscene quest presentation of those 3 games with the traditional quests with purely text that MMO's like Rift and TERA and other MMO's will use, then my bet is on the games that use VO/cutscene quest delivery, not on the traditional way of text quests.
The VOs were a complete waste of money in my opinion. A few VOs here and there for the intresting quests (not many of those) would've been fine. But most VOs really added nothing to the game. I really hope future MMOs stay away from the swtor way of doing quests.
Voice overs are great, especially for the story missions. They really add to the immersion. However, I feel that BioWare went too far with them as far as the planet missions go. I mean, if an NPC wants me to kill 10 space rats, must I listen to his whole life story before hand?
I've got several characters in the 30s and i'm now just spacebarring through all the cutscenes thesedays, even the character story. I just don't have time to listen to all that guff and run around for twenty minutes between missions. The distances between mission givers and missions is a nightmare. It takes twice as long as other games to get the simpliest things done.
The voice acting and cutscenes were great at first, now they just get in the way of me playing the game and the short amounts of time I have to play.
I remember when AoC came out and everyone criticised it for having no cutscenes or voice acting outside of Tortage, because it felt 'unfinished' now i'm thinking FunCom were right.
No one complained about the first 20 levels of cutscenes in AoC because it was possible to do Tortage in just few hours and then get out into the game proper. It's not just the cutscenes that are time consuming in SWTOR it's the running between mission hubs and mission. It Tortage everything was within reach and felt natural. In TOR I daren't count up all the minutes i've had to waste running back to my ship via a starport, then a lift loading screen, then a run across a hanger, then a cutscene of the ship taking off etc... What a waste of time and not at all immersive, just annoying. Thank God for the spacebar.
As for text based mmos, the greatest RPG of all time, Planescape, had pages and pages of text. Nothing wrong with text at all. I don't think cutscenes are more immersive (the most immersive mmos didn't have them) they are just a gimic in my opinion.
Good post... and then another 15 minutes running to where the mission is.
Aoc dident Fail because they dident have voice overs after Tortage. It Failed because they couldent fix the Bugs fast enough. and the main story of AOC still had voice overs after Tortage... When you get your Tatoo removed etc. I would go so far as to say that if Funcom had waited about 1 year before releasing the game, and had put in some more mayor plot lines after Tortage with voice over.. the game would have been a smash hit.
Also AOCs combat system was very skilled based from the begining, Items dident have a big Impact, you could kill people 20 plus levels above you without anny problem. But many Tab Target ability spam people couldent handle it, they got PAWNED horribly, because they lacked player skill. This also put many people off the product, they just couldent handle getting Rolf stomped by superior players. Another thing was Lack of content, after doing villas after villas ( small instances) to level my charecter it became boring....
Point being, If FUNCOM had explained more about the combat, had special training programs for NOOBS from other MMOS, Devs holding combat lessons in a BG Enviorment maybe? And had enough conent so you dident have to do the same things over and over plus had about 80% less bugs at Release AOC would have been one of the largest MMOS today...
Also if they had released with a functioning Seige mechanic.. It could have held peoples Interest for years..
For players it's not that big of a deal since you can skip it. But for developer to spend so much money on it just to see players skipping dialgoues is not encouraging.
Not in this case though. 100% VO was TOR's main selling point. The fact it was never done to such extent befor made it exciting enough for masses to buy the game and try it out. Just like 3D. Who cares if it is a good idea, it's fresh and exciting enough to sel. Mission accomplished.
I didn't say it failed because there was no voice acting after 20, I said it was criticised. Read my post properly please.
I just realised you said it wasn't the lack of voice acting why it failed, it was the bugs, and then say if there was voice acting after 20 it would have been a smash hit. So the bugs wouldn't have mattered then if the game was better designed?