Star Wars: The Old Republic

[Tolya]

Im no fan of MMORPG's. To me, they basically are MUD's with nice graphics. The problem is not that these games suck, but they require investing huge amounts of time to achieve anything. And most of what you are doing are just XP-and-money chores. Since I started a family I just play games casually from time to time in my spare moments (which are few).

Which is why I never paid too much attention to SW:TOR. However, I watched some stuff on GT about full voiceovers and became dumbfounded: the game looks like a normal singleplayer RPG, with a Biowarese style dialogue system, with full voiceovers. And they want to have it fitted for MMO purposes. How can you do that? Dialogues by their definition require a fixed story path.

I just can't imagine how do they want to build a fully voiceovered MMO without making it essentially a multiplayer RPG game, like Neverwinter Nights or whatnot. This just does not compute.

[tezunegari]

I don't really see the problem.
You have to remember that the voice over is played on your computer and not transfered from the server.

You have the NPCs giving you quests by playing sound files.
All you have to do is to record the text and play the file when the text is displayed.

All in all an MMORPG isn't that different from an offline game when sound is concerned.

So far most MMORPG don't have voice overs because the amount of text could easily be in the Gigabyte size if recorded as soundfile.

So if SW:TOR actually has soundfiles for all quest texts, background chatter of NPCs then the installation might take more then double-digit harddisk space (which already is the case for WoW and LotRO with around 11gig each)

And all MMORPG do have a fixed story path. The creators might decide to do an event (WoW - The gates of An'Qiraj where the server had to gather certain amounts of items to open the instance) but those would be the only times where an action changes things.

[Tolya]

But you can't be claiming that a game has FULL voiceovers if it relies on player to player interaction. Quests and story missions are okay, but what are you going to do if two characters meet in-game?

Implementing a VO via a mic system is okay and done countless of times, but considering that your character has its own voice already, would really spoil the effect. Imagine a bounty hunter who in one scene talks like... a bounty hunter and in the other like a 14 year old kid. So this wouldn't kill the text messaging system.

This game is essentially presented as KOTOR style game but in a MMO environment. And that's where I can't wrap my head around the idea. Every character class is supposed to have his own story to follow, along with bot companions and whatnot. I get that, I just don't understand how do they want to put the online factor in without making the stories limited and repetitive.

I don't get it. Or maybe my knowledge of how MMORPGs look like today is too limited.

[tezunegari]

I might have misread your first post then.

Giving the NPCs audible voice for quest describtion and interaction isn't the problem but giving the avatar of the players a voice.

Well it could be limited to special pre-defined emotes for player-player interaction and recorded dialog options - while the real player-player interaction is kept as Instant Messaging style text.
Maybe the game will feature a text-to-speech function (like windows xp has - it works, it's really funny getting german text read in english voice ).
Or you simply choose a voice when creating your character as in normal RPGs.

But true voice over interaction with the NPC and/or other players is not possible at this time - as far as I know at least.

Though this is speculative from my point as I haven't taken a closer look into SW:TOR because I still think they should have made it another offline RPG. (like a thousand years prior EP1)