Originally posted by arieste

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?  

 

 

 

 

 

Well I enjoyed the less frequent Voice Overs (all starter area quests & all destiny quests + some Key quests) in Age of Conan and I enjoyed the VO's in SWTOR as well even though I am no longer playing the game.

I think Voice overs add a lot to player Immersion in the game world.

In a word, yes.

Originally posted by BarakIII

In a word, yes.

QFT

Definitely not. I respect the fact some people love the idea of being told a story through cutscenes, but I personally cannot stand it. I prefer quest text.

It's one of the best parts of the game, but it's not JUST the voice, having someone read you the quest text is equally boring.  It's the whole package, voice, animated cutscene, companion one liners during conversations and my favorite feature - mutli-player implementation of conversations.  I was very wary before launch about how conversations would work with multiple people but the roll system is great because you don't know exactly how an encounter is going to go.  I play with friends who always just used the "whatever" button, as they called it, to just accept the quest without reading it.  They all love participating in the conversations now.

Also, I have to shake my head at the people who say they should only have done this for the class quests and flashpoints.  Does no one remember the uproar when Age of Conan was released and people realized that after the starting area voice acting only happened during a few "epic" quests and your storyline?  People screamed rip-off and called Funcom cheap.

If you get bored with the cutscenes for regular quests you can spacebar through them, personally I'm very thankful they are there and I never skip them.

Originally posted by Mellkor

They should of did the skyrim approach:

Have a few voice actors say a few lines and reuse those lines among many npc's..

It would have freed up development costs so they could Put some fun gameplay feature's in.

Fixed that for you but it's also very unlikely.  People don't understand how development generally works.

You don't go "Ok folks we have 200 million to spend, how do we divide it up?".

What happens is you go "Ok, this is the game that we want to make, now how much would that cost?  Ok, let's get the budget approved."

The number crunchers figure out if spending 50 million dollars on voice (I'm just throwing a random number out there) is worth it or not.  If they don't think so they don't then let you spend an extra 50 million on something else.

Also, there is a certain point where adding more people to the job doesn't make it go any faster, in fact having too many programmers can actually make your developement slower. 

Originally posted by arieste

Originally posted by Vorthanion

I want my computer games to be more interactive than reading a text box.

not to be nitpicky, but you do realize that in TOR you're still reading a text box with your dialogue choices for every single quest.  So instead of reading what the NPC was saying, you're reading what you're saying.

It's not actually reading a wall of text when it takes one second each time just to peek at what you want to say back, you know, it's quite handy to get even a slight idea of what you are saying back. Or just pick 1 for the nice answer, 2 for the on the fence or 3 for the not so nice answer, it's most of the time in that order, assuming you dont want to read absolutely any written line at all, but I dont think that's what he ment.

The 100% voice was a brilliant move but one that was even better is the whole thing.

Animation, expression, it really comes together and in terms of presentation it set the bar. Whether any MMOs can match it is an open question and as far as I can tell, that bar will be there for a long time cause no MMO coming out is even close.

Voice Over, cutscenes, good stories really make the difference in SWTOR. I like it, a lot.

Originally posted by BarakIII

In a word, yes.

QFT

Originally posted by DaRoamer

 

Fixed that for you but it's also very unlikely.  People don't understand how development generally works.

You don't go "Ok folks we have 200 million to spend, how do we divide it up?".

What happens is you go "Ok, this is the game that we want to make, now how much would that cost?  Ok, let's get the budget approved."

The number crunchers figure out if spending 50 million dollars on voice (I'm just throwing a random number out there) is worth it or not.  If they don't think so they don't then let you spend an extra 50 million on something else.

Also, there is a certain point where adding more people to the job doesn't make it go any faster, in fact having too many programmers can actually make your developement slower. 

 

Thank you!

I constantly see this "if they didn't spend money on x they would have spent it on y. It just doesnt' work that way. At all.

Every component of a project, whether it's a game or a building or "whatever" gets factored into a budget and then the budget is set.

After the 600th person telling me why i need to kill 10 droids, it got incredibly tedious 

Originally posted by Sovrath

Thank you!

I constantly see this "if they didn't spend money on x they would have spent it on y. It just doesnt' work that way. At all.

Every component of a project, whether it's a game or a building or "whatever" gets factored into a budget and then the budget is set.

 

So they spend 199 million voice over and 1 million on game play?

Originally posted by zWolf

Yes, Yes, and more Yes - the Voice over is what makes this game so darn fun to play.

I was on the fence when I heard they were going this route, but once I saw it in action, I was blown away! I REALLY like it.

Voice in my MMORPG, is like the diffrence between a Silent Movie, and when Actors could speak - it REALLY makes the game. I doubt that I will EVER go back to playing an MMO that doesn't have Voice Over work done.

that said, I DO like the fact that I have the option to 'space bar' through a dialog that I have seen before.  Say a Flash point that I am running over and over again with a group, for loot or XP. it's Great to be able to 'skip' the dialog, but to answer your question, I DO indeed think that Voice over is the best thing since sliced bread.

 

Put me on the positive  side of this poll please!

 

Dude, you have 15 hours on SWTOR

Wait till you have an entire weeks worth of people telling you their life story before you go out to collect giant droid brains or whatever incrdibly mundane quest they give you

games too short and easy, and getting end game gear took less time and effort then I would have liked.

but the story was nice,

but I must rather have a real challenge something that makes me care about the characters more, the whole trip was too short for me to care about the characters in the story.  =(

No.  Voice over for anything other than class quests, is wasted money.  It would have been better kept in their pockets, or if inclined to build a solid game, then into the aspects of the game that will KEEP players around.

I mostly spacebar. I then if i have to use the questlog to get info on objectives.

Yes, i still think iots a good idea....

espescially the group quests with voice overs where awesome the first time..

(this is exactly what GW2 recognised) you'll only play the dungeons in story mode once with voice overs, after that the dungeons are set up differently for group play.

Honestly at first I wasn't too hyped up about a fully voiced mmo. Main reason was for players progression coordination (just think of the intro(s) in The Cavern of Time in WoW, after listening to it 30 times, it gets kinda old). But I was actualy quite impressed how I enjoyed these cut scenes. Thats what I like in my regular single player rpgs, just laid back and watch the movie. But I think it might have been too much for a mmo to try and add voices everywhere. Even for the class story lines, there is alot of bland fill in and the robotized anymations do not help.

And for those talking about budget, it all depends on the company. Bioware is doing pretty well and have the support of EA on this project so they can do whatever they want. They must be on a tighter leash than Blizzard (or Square Enix lulz, talking about doing whatever they want...) but I sure they arent limited in their budget. Many companies could have dealt with that kind of game in under a 100 millions just by cutting in some of the content. We're talking about Star Wars here, one of the most known franchise of all time, you can't risk to fuck it up with lack of money.

err really are you guys stoped to heard it? or just smash space to run to the choices you have to make? I know most of

people do just that skip all talking so its useless the same way.

and swtor is not the first to have VA on it, others had va on main quest and people just skiped it the same way.

now if the only way to finish quests was like mmo started, you had to read to do the quests... but now we have wikis so even with that people would just search for it....