Originally posted by loyaltrekie

Full voiceover = waste of space/time

Voiceover for critical story components = Yes

Voiceover for random NPC telling me to kill a rat = No

 

i disagree and agree with the op

in aoc the point where the game lost a lot of immersion for me was when the voice over stopped around level 20. vo is one aspect everyone praises the tortage levels.

i stated bevore that vo (and cutscenes) is especially helpfull in telling a story to a group where in other games people click away the dialog and rush you to move on and get their precious xp instead of enjoying atmosphere and story

Originally posted by D3mis3

What the heck is with this 30GB stuff you people are talking about?

(a) The graphics are far below AoC's (which is only about 25GB). Graphics (textures/models/etc.) take up like, 85% of the game's size.

(b) Mass Effect and KOTOR were massive games, and less than 10GB + full voice acting.

It can, and probably will be, done.

By that reasoning WoW looks almost as good as AoC since it's over 3/5ths it's file size now (15g). But seriously, I had a nice reply regarding how massive the files for thousands of quests fully voiced would be, and how much larger this game would have to be then ME or KOTOR (who wants to finish an mmo in 40-80 hours), but it's just easier to call you ignorant.

30g was just a shot in the dark, it's anyones guess how large this game file will be.

Meh, bring on full voiceovers!  EQ2 was 12 CDs (if I remember right, not DVDs) so now let TOR be the record holder for most DVDs in a case! I just got my terabyte drives in on Friday so I am good to go.

Wanting an entire MMO to have voice-overs is just wishful thinking.

However, that is one of the things that made KOTOR so awesome. Going to an MMO, it's bound to lose some awesome qualities like that, while gaining others.

I feel that it will definitely have a decent amount of voice-overs, but by no means will the entire game be.

If you put 500 npcs talk for 2,5 minutes each you will spend about 31gigabytes of space (in wave form)that is without compresion and lowering the quality of the sound to mp3 or any other protocol...you can easily drop that space to half  (15gigs) and even more,like 8 to 10gigs and still maintain a good professional level of quality sounds.

So no,it is not science fiction anymore to create an mmo with full speech dialogues.

disclaimer:Numbers are not 100% accurate but close enough(90%) i've made a quick calculation any fellow sound engineer feel free to corect the numbers aproximity

I am more of a text man. I prefer taking my time to read the text, but I know Im getting old. ;)

I am 100% for the voice over concept.  I feel that it will add a more imersive environment.  I hope Bioware can accomplish this task.  I have really high hopes for this game as well. 

That would make it the first MMO to only offer a English language version. So all those people who dont speak English and want localised versions can all take a jump or cough up the $billion dollars required to translate it into Russian/ Spanish / Chinese etc

Or maybe it would have voice - then the text pop up underneath localised - so a MMO with subtitles.

At the very least I would like to see the core story threads voiced.  I think that if Bioware wants to be serious about having storytelling be one of the "pillars" of this game, they need to meet the expectations of the modern RPG player in that respect.  Sure the majority can be unvoiced, but some camera direction of voice acting go a long way towards building a world.

As for non-english speaking nations, I think there still needs to be subtitles available regardless if the in-game characters are speaking the language or not.  Who knows, if this game takes off like I hope it does, and they are just swimming in the money like Blizzard, they could do the entire game in a handful of languages with patching.  Oooh.  Better yet, just streamed into the game as they add it and you talk to NPCs.

Dare I even say that having voice acted NPCs to model mannerisims and acccents off of might even lead to more interesting and widespread role playing on the servers.

Originally posted by Dimajex

At the very least I would like to see the core story threads voiced.  I think that if Bioware wants to be serious about having storytelling be one of the "pillars" of this game, they need to meet the expectations of the modern RPG player in that respect. 

The core story is all that I am really interested in as far as the voice over concept.  There isn't much reason to put voice over in every little story path that the game takes, this would only cause more problems and delay launch.  But, I definately want to see it in the main story.

Originally posted by mefistofelis

If you put 500 npcs talk for 2,5 minutes each you will spend about 31gigabytes of space (in wave form)that is without compresion and lowering the quality of the sound to mp3 or any other protocol...you can easily drop that space to half  (15gigs) and even more,like 8 to 10gigs and still maintain a good professional level of quality sounds.

So no,it is not science fiction anymore to create an mmo with full speech dialogues.

disclaimer:Numbers are not 100% accurate but close enough(90%) i've made a quick calculation any fellow sound engineer feel free to corect the numbers aproximity

http://www.sounddevices.com/calculator/index.html

I use this audio/time calculator.

While full voice over would be great for many, it by no means should be the make or break of the "immersion" factor. You see, all those nice, fake accents takes money to pay the actors to do them. If an mmo were to pay actors for EVERY quest in the game, that would be hundreds of thousands of dollars, that I would actually prefer to see being worked on bugs, increased content, better customer support, and/ or increase graphics- in that order. Voice overs should always remain just icing on the proverbial cake.

if they do it, it should give you the option to install because i bet that game would be 30-40 gig (even more) with every NPC having multiple voice over story threads, the way bioware is trying to do it.

I expect that the game will be voice-acted. This is one of Bioware's best game features and something that we have all come to expect from their games. I don't think that they would go to all this effort and then NOT do voice acting for their characters.

I don't even think that it would be as monumental of a task as many expect seeing as how many of the characters in the game will be alien species. Those of you who have played KOTOR no doubt remember how many of the NPCs spoke in alien jibber-jabber with sub-titles that made sense. Using this technique on roughly half of the NPCs would vastly reduce the amount of work Bioware needs to do on the voice acting and would also create the ILLUSION of voice acting for every NPC.

Whenever they want to be lazy with an unimportant NPC, all they have to do is make it an alien...

Originally posted by baphamet

if they do it, it should give you the option to install because i bet that game would be 30-40 gig (even more) with every NPC having multiple voice over story threads, the way bioware is trying to do it.

Storage is so cheap now, I say go with as much voice as possible.  I don't care if it takes three blu-ray disks to fit the game, I would still like everything voiced.  To be realistic only main quest lines will be voiced at start with a possible addition later on for other quests.

The droids can have full voiceover with a little help from some random text-to-speech program. Easy peasy :)

Full voice isn't that great.  Some people play in areas where the the noise wouldn't be welcome, and other parents like myself would miss a lot of it anyway, since you can't schedule a kids squeel.  Typically I find a lot of voice overs annoying, either due to the voice actors themselves, or the the pace of speech, etc.  I'd much rather not have to hear it in many cases, and the size of sound files not used would be a lot of wasted space.

Yea I understand voice over that’s why it’s so much better to buy CD versions of books so someone reads it to me!! I understand the feel that you would be trying to get from voice over! However, if you tell a good story and since your actions affect the type of character you become you won’t mind reading a little, because you just might miss something that is important it’s one thing to do this in an RPG(single player game) where you can save---but as stated from the Devs themselves “there are no second chances you can’t save, the choice you make is final” how big are decisions and how big does it affect you I have no-idea.. However if you’re doing a quest/story line thing and you could have reached a new level or opened a new skill—but because you didn’t read it and just made a decision---I wonder if you would make that same mistake twice?

Originally posted by loyaltrekie

Full voiceover = waste of space/time

Voiceover for critical story components = Yes

Voiceover for random NPC telling me to kill a rat = No

 

This is the common sense answer!

Voiceover is a nice gimmick, and can SOMETIMES add to the immersion quality of a game.  I, however, do not believe that it is a component that will "make" a game.  On the other hand it is most assuredly a way to "break" the game for damn sure.  How many games have you played where the voice acting was little more than just phoned in?  I know I have played far too many for my tastes.  And a game where you will ostensibly spend hundreds if not thousands of hours in the game world can easily be sunk by an annoying character voice droning on and on.

I would prefer it if the designers of games spent far more time and money on improving gameplay elements and the engine so that the game will run and be entertaining.