An Epiphany: Voice Acted content.

[IMatricksI]

Then I'm thankful YOU are not in charge of creating the games I enjoy, because honestly it sounds as if I wouldn't enjoy them nearly as much. I really enjoy the VO work. I really enjoy watching a dialogue sequence unfold before my eyes rather than reading a pop-up box with text. And I really enjoy the presentation aspect of it all.

[krookie]

You don't think they talked about LFG tools, UI customization before?

 

With or without voice overs they wouldn't currently be in the game.

 

Games have a budget. If they spent most of the money on voice overs, that leaves less money for development hours, thus less systems and game play elements get added.

[krameriffic]

You don't think they talked about LFG tools, UI customization before?

 

With or without voice overs they wouldn't currently be in the game.

 

The voice acting was a massive resource hog for the development of this game. It was a stupid design decision that is only interesting for so long and past that point becomes boring and time-consuming for the player. Anybody who is saying they don't find it boring either hasn't played that much or have a tolerance for boredom that rivals even the most hardcore Asian Lineage players.

 

Voice acting doesn't make a story interesting. An interesting story make a story interesting. It's like special effects in a movie, a particularly salient notion to consider within the Star Wars universe. Voice acting (like special effects in a movie) is a tool used to convey interesting ideas and to enhance them. If the core meat of the story they are telling isn't interesting or engaging to the audience, dressing it up will only impress the stupid magpies who don't like to think about things too deeply in order to understand them.

 

It's pertinent in the context of Star Wars because so many people were mesmerized by the fancy special effects of the prequel trilogy that they couldn't look past it to see the busted, unengaging, illogical mess of a story, poor cinematography and general design of the movies. Special effects didn't make those movies good, and voice acting doesn't make this game good. Uninteresting filler side content where you go kill 10 guys for no reason is not made interesting by voice acting. It's that simple.

 

It spices up the main storyline for each class a bit, but even there things feel token and watered down compared to a traditional cRPG. Once again, in those traditional RPGs, you don't need voice acting to make them good (see Baldur's Gate). The compromise between the two genres leaves hardcore MMO number crunchers with blue balls about a lack of features and hardcore RPG roleplayers with a lack of truly interesting choices, customization and content.

 

Am I getting through to you people at all?

Edited January 28, 2012 by krameriffic

[PendragonPrime]

I love the voice acting. Love. It. I desperately hope that they keep it up through future content.

[Aussircaex]

Games have a budget. If they spent most of the money on voice overs, that leaves less money for development hours, thus less systems and game play elements get added.

 

Movies have a budget. If they spend most of the money on scripts and actors, that leaves less money for gratuitous action scenes, explosions and sweeping vistas.

[Stejo]

There's more to a game than simply gameplay.

 

Know why the character you control looks even vaguely like something human (or whatever race you chose) instead of just being any sort of symbol on the screen? What your character looks like on the screen has actually nothing to do with gameplay in most games. It's done that way for reasons of aesthetics and immersion. You know, the same reasons why you have real actors in voiced-over and acted/re-created cutscenes.

 

It's a nice feature to have. Voiced player characters not so much, sine the voice doesn't necessarily match how you pictured the character when you created it, but voiced npcs are cool. The question is how this affects the gameplay?

 

Instead of 8 classes per side, we got 4 "classes" that split in 2 "advanced classes" so they wouldn't have to do 8 class quests. As a result, my tank assassin gets a tank companion first and has to bear through the first 30 levels or so of the game with him, because a tank companion made sense as the first companion for the sorcerer advanced class.

 

Instead of multiple zones per level range, we got a corridor with rails that leads from 1 to 50, since the cost of implementing optional zones was exorbitantly high.

 

There is no branching in the storyline to account for choices made, since that would drive voiceover costs through the roof. Also, producing new content requires way much more money and possibly time.

 

And finally, the game was released in an extremely unpolished and buggy state, with many expected features missing or implemented poorly, presumably because the budget was taken up by the voice acting.

 

Baldur's Gate, Torment, heck even WoW, were all fine games that worked perfectly without wasting resources on voiceovers.

[PendragonPrime]

It spices up the main storyline for each class a bit, but even there things feel token and watered down compared to a traditional cRPG. Once again, in those traditional RPGs, you don't need voice acting to make them good (see Baldur's Gate). The compromise between the two genres leaves hardcore MMO number crunchers with blue balls about a lack of features and hardcore RPG roleplayers with a lack of truly interesting choices, customization and content.

 

Am I getting through to you people at all?

 

I understand your points, I just disagree with each and every one of them.

[IMatricksI]

Am I getting through to you people at all?

Nope, because I still enjoy the hell out of the voice acting. Its a shame development on the game has ceased and we will never have improved or new systems added in the future.

[Taurusaud]

Well this and marketing hype is where the funding went, because it certainly didn't go into coding.

[Jessicayla]

Have you noticed that the SI seems to change her 'approach' to the character on a whim? For example, on Korriban she was kind of light-hearted and sarcastic. But the moment I got on Dromund Kaas, she turned really slow and kind of slurred... like she was trying to sound uber dark but just couldn't pull it off.

 

lol I didn't particularly notice the change too much, but now that you mention it, I see what you mean. Horrible, isn't it?

[TheSwamper]

So, according to the OP, if I can read the book faster than watch the movie, the movie is utterly useless?

[areto]

My favorite format is where other characters talk but your character is just in text, generally in an option (it was like that in DAO yes?). It allows me to think of the role I am playing as me. And, being of a thesbimatic lilt I sometimes even read out my choice in character for my kids.

[krookie]

Movies have a budget. If they spend most of the money on scripts and actors, that leaves less money for gratuitous action scenes, explosions and sweeping vistas.

 

In a movie, you are a passive observer, thus the presentation--acting, sounds, special effects, etc.--is important.

 

You're actively participating in a video game and as such game play elements are more important than voice acting. Spending so much money on non-interactive content, which you only get to experience once per character, instead of spending it on game play elements is mind boggling to me.

 

It's a video game! It's not suppose to talk better than it plays.

[krameriffic]

I understand your points, I just disagree with each and every one of them.

 

So you're saying that an uninteresting sidequest can be made interesting simply by voice acting? That special effects can make a mediocre movie good? That the veneer plastered over the core game design designed simply to distract you from said core game design is good enough?

 

If that's true, I won't bother to pursue this argument further because your mind is clearly deviant and operating on a form of moon logic unfamiliar to me.

[SoulstitchMMO]

Bottom line is Bioware should have hired less voice actors and more coders. They obviously spent the lions share of the budget on the story, adn forgot the game pillar completely.

 

As evidenced by:

 

• The Unresponsive UI
  
• Class Balance in Favor of Empire
  
• Pvp
  
• The UI (it bears repeating
  
• Uninspired End Game.
  

Edited January 28, 2012 by SoulstitchMMO

[Aussircaex]

I think many people seriously undervalue voice acting.

 

What would Portal be without GLaDOS? It'd have been a well-designed curiosity of a puzzle game. The script was what made that game a classic.

[krameriffic]

So, according to the OP, if I can read the book faster than watch the movie, the movie is utterly useless?

 

The movie is meant to convey things in a visual manner, particularly to people who don't read books. Also, you'll probably notice that there are about a billion more books than there are movies and most don't ever get a bigscreen translation. And many big screen translations of popular books are garbage because the conversion has to be done carefully and properly in order to make it good. Slapping it into the form of a movie doesn't instantaneously make it better.

 

Oh, and if you can read the entire Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter series faster than you can watch the movies, I'll eat my own shoes.

[Thumpor]

Voiceover is only useless if a quest's "story" is boring. Unfortunately, most world quests are rather boring, and are usually the same kill X/activate X/collect X quests we got from Vanilla WoW and most other MMOs.

 

I like voiceover for the class quests, and since class quests are only like 10% of all quests, they could save a lot of money by only doing VO for class stories.

Edited January 28, 2012 by Thumpor

[krookie]

I think many people seriously undervalue voice acting.

 

What would Portal be without GLaDOS? It'd have been a well-designed curiosity of a puzzle game. The script was what made that game a classic.

 

The difference is that Portal's game play elements do not suffer due to voice acting. SWTOR is a shell of an MMORPG because a big chunk of money was spent on voice acting rather than more development hours.

 

Edit: Don't get me wrong, voice acting can be very beneficial to the immersion but it has to come second to game play.

Edited January 28, 2012 by krookie

[krameriffic]

I think many people seriously undervalue voice acting.

 

What would Portal be without GLaDOS? It'd have been a well-designed curiosity of a puzzle game. The script was what made that game a classic.

 

But do you understand the difference between extremely well positioned, unique voice acting (like a GLADOS or a Cave Johnson) and whitewashing the entire game with voice acting in order to cover up the bland, samey, uninteresting core MMO gameplay? That's the problem here, not with voice acting as a whole. GLADOS enhanced an interesting core experience by being one of a kind and amazingly well done. Having GLADOS voice a hundred hours of dialog, most of which thinly explaining why you need to kill 10 manka cats or collect 15 data recorders would get old and irritating.

[Enako]

then just go back to wow huh ...... i mean, dont waste our and your time. and just go back to wow.

 

i enjoy voice acting a lot. if you dont like it. just scram. you can find wow, - suprise surprise - in wow. dont look for wow in swtor.

 

farewell. and dont look back.

 

It's completely and utterly useless.

 

What I came to realize is that, it takes the same amount of time, if not SHORTER, (so the attention span argument is invalid) to just read quests instead of hearing a voice actor painfully say it slower than I can read (and in nowhere near as awesome of a voice that I hear in my head. You know, the one that my creativity gave the NPC). And, even on a personal note, it's kind of pathetic that the majority of society isn't interested in something just because they have to read.

 

Not to mention, at some point, most people turn subtitles on anyway to read, then space bar before the voice actor has finished the sentence.

 

Side rant:

I know there is a growing majority of people who do not have full use of their mental faculties (I do not mean this in a mean way), one of which being creativity. It reminds me of the case of the child who, before he was exposed to lots of artist's depictions of birds, to draw a bird, and subsequently drew a rather creative bird for a kid. Then, when he was exposed to other people's renditions of birds (i.e. force fed content and have other people's creativity affect his consciousness), he drew very boring "normal" birds. Being force fed such a specific aspect of content in such a big way kind of kills it for me. Though this is just personal and in no way affects my over all post.

[Mackuss]

I laugh hard when I see these threads.

"Oh, woe is me! I have no patience to be in groups with people who listen to the voice-acting! Take it out now so I can get to lvl 50 faster!"

 

Why don't you ask Bioware to take down the forums? Or get them to streamline posts, so you don't have to waste so much time here reading?

 

"Dear Bioware, posts in the forums are too long, and its wasting my time to come here and read so much. Could you automatically delete posts of more than 100 words? And make sure all words are mono-syllable? Thank you, everything is TL;DR for me."

 

Everyone loved the voice-acting in Mass Effect, but now that it slows your game advancement, you want it out?

 

Your complaints fuel my laughter.

 

That was the most incoherent post I think I've ever read.

 

Are you sure you posted in the right thread? Because it, infact, is agreeing with me in some aspects, but the tone suggests that you meant it in a disagreeing manner.

[Mackuss]

Really...you would read it all if there was no VO? Because i certainly would not. Immersion is a bonus but I much rather sit back and listen than read every single quest story. I read enough IRL thank you.

 

Nice you had an epiphany, now stop acting like its a universal truth...

 

You sound threatened. It's an opinion after all - but let me ask you something.

 

Why would you not read it all? Actually state a reason.

[Cernow]

I'm really enjoying the voice acting. But I wouldn't want to see it in every MMO. It suits a Bioware MMO because it is their speciality and it continues the legacy of good voice acting in their other games such as Mass Effect, Dragon Age etc.

 

In the main the voice acting in Swtor is very good, though it can be a bit patchy, especially with some of the bit part actors, but thats perhaps to be expected. After all there's a huge amount of lines recorded.

 

So far I've played male Inquisitor, male Imperial Agent and female Bounty Hunter and they are all voiced acted very well, especially the male IA (I guess it's because I'm a Brit and I love the sarcastic and cynical tone that Bertie Carvel brings to the role). I did also start a male Jedi Consular and rapidly lost interest because the actor's lines were so dull and the storyline didn't engage. So I can understand both side of the argument here. It does very much depend if you can make a connection with the voice acting for your chosen class and this will be a matter of taste and can break the immersion factor for some.

 

Those who spacebar through everything on their first run through are missing out. Even on repeat play throughs different classes and genders get different reactions from many quests, plus theres the issue of how your companion will react to your choices depending on what you say and do. Yes there's some filler and not all of it is worth listening to multiple times, but much of it is.

 

I'm actually quite surprised by the depth of content they've managed with the voice acting. Yes, you could have even more depth with text. But lets be honest, in many games much of the text in quest descriptions is pure waffle and tedious drivel. I think one of the advantages of having an actor need to say the lines is it weeds out some of the bombast and pomposity that often permeates quest text in many games (though here and there it still pops up in the voice acting).

 

Ultimately, this is one of those things that is bound to divide opinion, it's a matter of taste.

[Fatbaldandalone]

The voice acting would have been cool and all if with that $200 mil budget they put some more of the money into a better engine/client.

 

 

Voice acting ontop of an engine that runs like **** is like pimping a 90s hyundai.

 

Maybe it'll get you blown by a fat chick in a supermarket parking lot, and thats cool if you're into that kind of thing. But its still a turd.