Yes, the VO is needed for EVERY quest. Sorry guys, but you would be bitching about it if it was just in the class story; and this is a staple of BioWare games. You KNEW this was going to be the case and yet you still bought the game, and now you're complaining. This is what BioWare does, if you're not a fan of it, than disable voice overs when you're doing regular quests and turn it on when you're doing your personal ones.
It would be really monotenous and seem quite lazy to not have dialogue in every quest, Age of Conan anyone??? Remember how you were all bitching about how the voice overs were exclusive to the personal/destiny quests? This is a LONG since over-due mechanic in MMORPG's, I can't even imagine playing a MMO that doesn't have dialogue for quests, and decent voice overs now. I just won't do it; this is what immerses people into the RPG side of "MMORPG", without it you've just got an MMO. Don't lie and say you wouldn't complain if the regular missions weren't voiced over and/or didn't have dialogue. You would be. This game is a huge success with what it has, unfortunately the operations loot bug is causing trouble, and Illum did before they fixed it so who knows what'll happen at this point, as the MMO community is pathetically impatient and unforgiving of the slightest misstep of new games. But this game is the first to really grab me, or any of my guild members, since vanilla WoW. In-game you mainly just hear praise over the game, and it's voice/dialogue system.
A con would be the cost of adding so much voice acting to a single game, and having to maintain that level of consistency through out the rest of the games life.
Personally I hope no other MMO has VO. I'm not dead set against it, but considering how much it costs I hope coming games instead focus on, like, you know, the game. And not the quasi interactive movie part of it. It's really jarring how run of the mill and plain swtor is considering the huge budget. Less VO in the future, please!
Worst: the voice who may be Jason Schwartzman and sure sounds just like him. Pulls me out of the game every time he opens his mouth. I'm glad I don't use Theran Cedrax as my companion...
Ultimate, and this is going to sound dorky, I enjoy voice work. However, I wish my character didn't talk, as it's an immersion breaker. It's just another reminder that I have no control over my character.
I like it, but do I want full VO for all mmos, no. Why? Because it's expensive and I don't want the lion's share of an mmos budget going toward vo's. I want the money to go toward gameplay features.
A con would be the cost of adding so much voice acting to a single game, and having to maintain that level of consistency through out the rest of the games life.
Exactly. You get it.
Gaming companies have budgets. So what are we giving up for VO.
I enjoy that the voice acting is available for every quest, and I enjoy that I can skip past it when it if it gets tedious pith a couple clicks of the space bar. I wish I could get the subtitles to show up in a custom chatbox though, so that when they go away too quickly during a spiel in Huttese (which I am unfortunately not fluent in), that I could scroll back and see what was said. Voice acting is awesome... depending on voice acting to tell the story is flawed.
In a related note, I would be vastly more excited about the voice acting if I could choose from a few options for my character's voice actor... older, younger, high pitched or lower, Imperial accent or outer rim... They have a lot of voice actors providing a tremendous amount of talent. I know it would take a lot of time and money to record other people reading all the lines for the main characters, but it would be worth it to be able to roll a second BH and not have him sound like Spike Spiegel. The benefit would also become quickly apparent when you have a social scene in a mission when you're teamed up with one or more players of the same class (and sex) as yourself.
If brute force isn't working, you're not using enough.
In a related note, I would be vastly more excited about the voice acting if I could choose from a few options for my character's voice actor... older, younger, high pitched or lower, Imperial accent or outer rim... "
This I agree with 100%
I have had to remake characters actually because I could not picture this big gruff voice coming out of the pipsqueak I made.
I would have especially loved it if I could have an attitude slider or something. As a sith lord I have three basic choices:
A)What I would say
something ridiculous
C) something a light sider would say.
I'd rather have once I established the character's attiude, that it's three different sith comments, I can only decide between snark, menacing and reasonable instead, because to say "Let's all work together and be lovey dovey" after basically doing all these deplorable things to this person doesn't seem like it shold even be an option at that point.
But that would be difficult I am sure for them to pull off.
"I really want the game to be like World of Warcraft"
don't like voice acting and brilliant storylines?
Then shut the hell up, because I don't want biowares designers to listen to you.
You have "Every Other Game" out there
Brilliant story lines huh? Missed that part. What I got was a a pretty predictable storyline(s) where it made no real difference what you answered or not - especially on the sidequests. Like the time i decided to send the guy on Taris to jail for robbing the dead and he happily stood around all through the next quest his partner gave me making "funny" remarks as if absolutely nothing had happened (and in fact, nothing did).
Have you ever tried getting to almost the end of a quest VO and then exiting back and doing it over with different responses? Except for a few occasions where you do really make a choice (kill the guy or not, get a blue or red point) you actually end up with the same exact final result.
And btw the game is like WoW, with VO, and lightsabers, no one is trying to make it anything it isn't.
Back on topic... by the the time I got to Alderaan i was ready to pick out my eyes with a spoon at the very next meaningless voiced over side quest. So yes, I agree, please use VO only for drammatic effect and not EVERYWHERE. It's not THAT interesting.
Well so called haters said full VO is nonsense even before release ...
BTW why all say that game is fully VO, does your mission terminals speak to you ? Well mine just display 'wall of text' ...
Repeatables should totally be walls of text.
And they should really have a way of skipping standing around for VOs in flashpoints. It so sucks to opt out (press space) and sit there with nothing happening for a minute or more.
I think there should be a balance in VO and 'wall of text'
O honestly dont see much point giving voice overs to side missions that makes no relevance to the main story progression, eg: dailies and random 'go there and collect some research for me' missions
SWTOR couldve saved some money and worked on core mechanics, like combat. Instead of the same old 5 hotkey bar rotation combat.
How much WoW could a WoWhater hate, if a WoWhater could hate WoW? As much WoW as a WoWhater would, if a WoWhater could hate WoW.
The Jedi Knight voice work was terrible. My character sounded like some anti-drug Captain America-type person at the end of some 80s cartoon.
The Sith Warrior, however was pretty decent.
I have a similar reaction (same with the Jedi Consular).
Bounty Hunter is my favorite. I don't see why Jedi has to be so...I don't know...It just sounds like a "corporate" take on "good guys." I mean the Jedi voice acting sounds like a guy that works in a cubicle or something.
Actually this is a good article. VO is over done and at cap I dont want to see these cut scenes over and over all the time, I would like an option to turn Voice Acting off completely and let me just pick dark side or good.
I am just so pleased I have a mechanical keyboard otherwise my spacebar could be broken by now.
However I do enjoy the class quests and companion interactions thats about it really the rest is overkill. I would also like the option to choose my voice when I create my character I WANT A BRITISH JEDI DAMN IT
Yes. This seemed really apparent from about level 2 or 3 on also.
The other piece that bothered me was the canned player pieces. I admit, I only played a short time in beta, but it seemed like a lot of the NPCs would basically ignore the player comment like you weren't there or it could be any schmo talking to the npc.
I hated that space combat it’s useless, as are the ships in general; the game economy and crafting is poorly executed. You can not have vendors selling and giving away items that are as good, as what crafters make using uncommon or rare items, Blue quality items. Lack of content, really how many times did you run off the map, and die from “exhaustion” The Graphics or style was cartoonist and dated totally WOW, but without that computer power savings, that game is an resource hog.
Months before release i got called a troll and worse because i said VO in this game would get annoying. Bioware's trademark is cheesy VO. And they PRETEND that all of your choices matter. They do not matter. So when kids grow up and realize this maybe we wont have to hear all of the bioware crap about how great the company is. All games need a good story but when thats all you can offer in a game, and people praise them so highly, its no wonder mmo's suck so bad.
You like pvp, crafting and spacemissions - the three most shalllow parts of the game. You dislike the fully voiced part of the game. I see. Make sense much?
So, voice acting is what makes a good mmo? Right....
The voice acting was neat when I first got the game but by the end of the first week I found myself spacebarring through everything except my class quests. Didn't help that every other NPC sounded the same and I kept hearing my charactar repeat the same lines all the time. That and your 'choices' are meaningless in the game. No matter what you do you will get the same outcome and you'll never hear anything from that NPC you saved again or hear anyone comment about how maybe you killed the NPC. It also amused me how you can sound like a total dick if you choose one option and in the next option you sound like you're gonna hug the person. Almost felt like my charactar was bipolar sometimes.
Comments
You lost me at : For me, Star Wars: The Old Republic has exceeded expectations.
I used to play MMOs like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee.
Yes, the VO is needed for EVERY quest. Sorry guys, but you would be bitching about it if it was just in the class story; and this is a staple of BioWare games. You KNEW this was going to be the case and yet you still bought the game, and now you're complaining. This is what BioWare does, if you're not a fan of it, than disable voice overs when you're doing regular quests and turn it on when you're doing your personal ones.
It would be really monotenous and seem quite lazy to not have dialogue in every quest, Age of Conan anyone??? Remember how you were all bitching about how the voice overs were exclusive to the personal/destiny quests? This is a LONG since over-due mechanic in MMORPG's, I can't even imagine playing a MMO that doesn't have dialogue for quests, and decent voice overs now. I just won't do it; this is what immerses people into the RPG side of "MMORPG", without it you've just got an MMO. Don't lie and say you wouldn't complain if the regular missions weren't voiced over and/or didn't have dialogue. You would be. This game is a huge success with what it has, unfortunately the operations loot bug is causing trouble, and Illum did before they fixed it so who knows what'll happen at this point, as the MMO community is pathetically impatient and unforgiving of the slightest misstep of new games. But this game is the first to really grab me, or any of my guild members, since vanilla WoW. In-game you mainly just hear praise over the game, and it's voice/dialogue system.
A con would be the cost of adding so much voice acting to a single game, and having to maintain that level of consistency through out the rest of the games life.
Personally I hope no other MMO has VO. I'm not dead set against it, but considering how much it costs I hope coming games instead focus on, like, you know, the game. And not the quasi interactive movie part of it. It's really jarring how run of the mill and plain swtor is considering the huge budget. Less VO in the future, please!
Worst: the voice who may be Jason Schwartzman and sure sounds just like him. Pulls me out of the game every time he opens his mouth. I'm glad I don't use Theran Cedrax as my companion...
I cannot imagine playing another game without voice overs. Reading, or just clicking through a wall of text for me now is ruined.
Ultimate, and this is going to sound dorky, I enjoy voice work. However, I wish my character didn't talk, as it's an immersion breaker. It's just another reminder that I have no control over my character.
I like it, but do I want full VO for all mmos, no. Why? Because it's expensive and I don't want the lion's share of an mmos budget going toward vo's. I want the money to go toward gameplay features.
Exactly. You get it.
Gaming companies have budgets. So what are we giving up for VO.
I enjoy that the voice acting is available for every quest, and I enjoy that I can skip past it when it if it gets tedious pith a couple clicks of the space bar. I wish I could get the subtitles to show up in a custom chatbox though, so that when they go away too quickly during a spiel in Huttese (which I am unfortunately not fluent in), that I could scroll back and see what was said. Voice acting is awesome... depending on voice acting to tell the story is flawed.
In a related note, I would be vastly more excited about the voice acting if I could choose from a few options for my character's voice actor... older, younger, high pitched or lower, Imperial accent or outer rim... They have a lot of voice actors providing a tremendous amount of talent. I know it would take a lot of time and money to record other people reading all the lines for the main characters, but it would be worth it to be able to roll a second BH and not have him sound like Spike Spiegel. The benefit would also become quickly apparent when you have a social scene in a mission when you're teamed up with one or more players of the same class (and sex) as yourself.
If brute force isn't working, you're not using enough.
This "Article" could be gelled down to:
"I really want the game to be like World of Warcraft"
don't like voice acting and brilliant storylines?
Then shut the hell up, because I don't want biowares designers to listen to you.
You have "Every Other Game" out there
This I agree with 100%
I have had to remake characters actually because I could not picture this big gruff voice coming out of the pipsqueak I made.
I would have especially loved it if I could have an attitude slider or something. As a sith lord I have three basic choices:
A)What I would say
C) something a light sider would say.
I'd rather have once I established the character's attiude, that it's three different sith comments, I can only decide between snark, menacing and reasonable instead, because to say "Let's all work together and be lovey dovey" after basically doing all these deplorable things to this person doesn't seem like it shold even be an option at that point.
But that would be difficult I am sure for them to pull off.
Brilliant story lines huh? Missed that part. What I got was a a pretty predictable storyline(s) where it made no real difference what you answered or not - especially on the sidequests. Like the time i decided to send the guy on Taris to jail for robbing the dead and he happily stood around all through the next quest his partner gave me making "funny" remarks as if absolutely nothing had happened (and in fact, nothing did).
Have you ever tried getting to almost the end of a quest VO and then exiting back and doing it over with different responses? Except for a few occasions where you do really make a choice (kill the guy or not, get a blue or red point) you actually end up with the same exact final result.
And btw the game is like WoW, with VO, and lightsabers, no one is trying to make it anything it isn't.
Back on topic... by the the time I got to Alderaan i was ready to pick out my eyes with a spoon at the very next meaningless voiced over side quest. So yes, I agree, please use VO only for drammatic effect and not EVERYWHERE. It's not THAT interesting.
The worst part was that my character had a voice that I couldn't pick. My characters rarely "looked" like the voice.
Oh, and republic sounded so damn namby pamby, I couldn't play them because of the cheese.
Well so called haters said full VO is nonsense even before release ...
BTW why all say that game is fully VO, does your mission terminals speak to you ? Well mine just display 'wall of text' ...
Repeatables should totally be walls of text.
And they should really have a way of skipping standing around for VOs in flashpoints. It so sucks to opt out (press space) and sit there with nothing happening for a minute or more.
I think there should be a balance in VO and 'wall of text'
O honestly dont see much point giving voice overs to side missions that makes no relevance to the main story progression, eg: dailies and random 'go there and collect some research for me' missions
SWTOR couldve saved some money and worked on core mechanics, like combat. Instead of the same old 5 hotkey bar rotation combat.
How much WoW could a WoWhater hate, if a WoWhater could hate WoW?
As much WoW as a WoWhater would, if a WoWhater could hate WoW.
I have a similar reaction (same with the Jedi Consular).
Bounty Hunter is my favorite. I don't see why Jedi has to be so...I don't know...It just sounds like a "corporate" take on "good guys." I mean the Jedi voice acting sounds like a guy that works in a cubicle or something.
Actually this is a good article. VO is over done and at cap I dont want to see these cut scenes over and over all the time, I would like an option to turn Voice Acting off completely and let me just pick dark side or good.
I am just so pleased I have a mechanical keyboard otherwise my spacebar could be broken by now.
However I do enjoy the class quests and companion interactions thats about it really the rest is overkill. I would also like the option to choose my voice when I create my character I WANT A BRITISH JEDI DAMN IT
Yes. This seemed really apparent from about level 2 or 3 on also.
The other piece that bothered me was the canned player pieces. I admit, I only played a short time in beta, but it seemed like a lot of the NPCs would basically ignore the player comment like you weren't there or it could be any schmo talking to the npc.
If you don't worry about it, it's not a problem.
I hated that space combat it’s useless, as are the ships in general; the game economy and crafting is poorly executed. You can not have vendors selling and giving away items that are as good, as what crafters make using uncommon or rare items, Blue quality items. Lack of content, really how many times did you run off the map, and die from “exhaustion” The Graphics or style was cartoonist and dated totally WOW, but without that computer power savings, that game is an resource hog.
Months before release i got called a troll and worse because i said VO in this game would get annoying. Bioware's trademark is cheesy VO. And they PRETEND that all of your choices matter. They do not matter. So when kids grow up and realize this maybe we wont have to hear all of the bioware crap about how great the company is. All games need a good story but when thats all you can offer in a game, and people praise them so highly, its no wonder mmo's suck so bad.
So, voice acting is what makes a good mmo? Right....
*Spacebar* *Spacebar* *Spacebar* *Spacebar* *Spacebar* *Spacebar*
The voice acting was neat when I first got the game but by the end of the first week I found myself spacebarring through everything except my class quests. Didn't help that every other NPC sounded the same and I kept hearing my charactar repeat the same lines all the time. That and your 'choices' are meaningless in the game. No matter what you do you will get the same outcome and you'll never hear anything from that NPC you saved again or hear anyone comment about how maybe you killed the NPC. It also amused me how you can sound like a total dick if you choose one option and in the next option you sound like you're gonna hug the person. Almost felt like my charactar was bipolar sometimes.
Personally, I'm bored with PvE. I'm only buying PvP-centered MMORPGs from now on.