supertimtaf Posted May 31 Share Posted May 31 2 hours ago, DuchessKristania said: The companies who own the game would see the loss, fire the person in charge and put the resources into something else. Remember when they moved away Ben Irving after 5.X when all he did was nothing but crap. They moved him onto Anthem. We all know how that turned out. Some people aren't made to be lead producers on a game. The amount of work and game knowledge it requires is massive. If you're also not able to stand up against your publisher that obviously will try its best to have you take all the bad decisions in the name of profit, well... Yeah of course things go bad. I think that from the start this game lacked proper direction and knowledge. "We want to make a star wars MMO, okay, let's do one like WoW but with a story." "Why do we make this like WoW ?" "I don't know, but it works for them. Do it too." This is basically how most of 1.0 went. How most of the class were just reskins of existing WoW classes, how most of their systems were completely borrowed from there. If from the start your leadership can't do anything but "copy something without knowing why", yeah you're in for a bad start. It's more or less the same now. The mentality hasn't evolved, and even worse, it seems to spread to other, newer members of the dev team. I think we all remember when Jackie arrived on the forums, how more active she was and trying her best to engage in discussions with us all the time. And I believe it took like three months for the cracks to appear and her to stop chatting. Can you imagine how bad it must be if it takes you three month in your new workplace to lose all desire to do your work well ? Anyway. Idk who at EA is managing the game but I'm fairly sure you can all thanks that (or these) people for not helping too. But I mean... Yeah, they don't have any idea of what an MMO is supposed to be. How are they supposed to lead Broadsword somewhere... :'D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sarfux Posted May 31 Share Posted May 31 If this is how it's going to be from now on? I would prefer EA just pull the plug and call it a day. Give us ONE last expansion where the empire is beaten back, defeated, all the "evil heads" are taken out and peace and freedom reign supreme for thousands of years until the phantom menace threat and all that. I would prefer swtor to go out in a blaze of glory rather than a whimper and shell of it's former self. this just does this whole thing a disservice. one of the main reasons i always PLAYED the story was it being fully voice acted a fleshed out. always found that awesome. now? why bother. it breaks the immersion and is boring now. if i wanted to read a book, I would read a star wars book. I want to sit back and listen to the people telling the stories and also interact with it. what a shame. I'm for closing the doors for good if THIS is what's going to be the future. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DuchessKristania Posted May 31 Share Posted May 31 Well, in fairness this game has kept me playing, I didn't even last a month before quitting WoW. I felt that one was super boring and grindy, and I kept just getting lost and then pissed off, lol. I'll take SWTOR over WoW any day of the week. I don't love every decision they make, but overall I do love the game. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sarfux Posted May 31 Share Posted May 31 we all do. that's why we are still here. but a lot of us see these terrible decisions and are helpless to do anything about them 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DuchessKristania Posted May 31 Share Posted May 31 It's true, but I do think they look at the forums more than we realize. In the years I've played the game I have seen them apply player feedback. The reality is they're just not going to do everything players ask for. I mean really, different groups of players ask for different things, and no matter what they put focus on one group is always going to feel left out and angry. That's not me excusing this recent and rather impressive blunder, but I try to approach these things with a fair and realistic perspective. Making the player character into a glorified sidekick in this patch was an objectively bad decision and they need to avoid repeating it. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FlatTax Posted May 31 Share Posted May 31 The absence of developer communication on this is an embarrassment. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Foxfirerose Posted May 31 Share Posted May 31 On 5/29/2024 at 12:25 PM, DuchessKristania said: I hope this isn't the case moving forward, I really dislike the kotor voiceless character thing. I can tolerate it for little one off things, or events, but for story? I look forward to hearing my character's voice, to the inflection and life the VAs put into the responses. It's like my characters no longer have any real sense of life in the story. Exactly! Even new cheapeer VA's would be better than none at all. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DuchessKristania Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 (edited) 4 hours ago, Foxfirerose said: Exactly! Even new cheapeer VA's would be better than none at all. The thing is, we may have to be willing to endure long waits if we want fully voiced main story. I'm a writer for an up and coming production company that works with professional VAs, and getting people nailed down and in the recording studio can take A LOT of time, and then you have all the sound editing afterwards. These are things I've learned over the past year and it has definitely changed my perspective on waiting for content. Edited June 1 by DuchessKristania Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sarfux Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 49 minutes ago, DuchessKristania said: The thing is, we may have to be willing to endure long waits if we want fully voiced main story. I'm a writer for an up and coming production company that works with professional VAs, and getting people nailed down and in the recording studio can take A LOT of time, and then you have all the sound editing afterwards. These are things I've learned over the past year and it has definitely changed my perspective on waiting for content. i think that era is over, sadly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DuchessKristania Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 8 minutes ago, Sarfux said: i think that era is over, sadly. I'm an optimistic person by nature, so I'll keep hoping for it, lol. So far optimism has served me well in life. I'll hope for both of us. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sarfux Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 1 hour ago, DuchessKristania said: I'm an optimistic person by nature, so I'll keep hoping for it, lol. So far optimism has served me well in life. I'll hope for both of us. i get what you mean. I'm a realistic optimist that analyzes situations while seeing patterns in things. It's over kris. sorry 😢 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cannibithobbal Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 4 hours ago, DuchessKristania said: The thing is, we may have to be willing to endure long waits if we want fully voiced main story. I'm a writer for an up and coming production company that works with professional VAs, and getting people nailed down and in the recording studio can take A LOT of time, and then you have all the sound editing afterwards. These are things I've learned over the past year and it has definitely changed my perspective on waiting for content. I will say, I am 10000% willing to wait longer for updates if they actually get them fully voice acted. Like, I would absolutely rather have no updates at all, or literally just one update a year that is fully voice acted over these more frequent updates without voice acting. However, equally, pretty sure it is a money issue and not a time issue (other than time to animate/lip sync to the audio) for getting the voice actors to record. Because they DID get every voice actor into the studio. Every single one of them had lines. They just dragged them all the way into the studio for like 10 lines or whatever a piece lol (It was probably more than that, but, ya know, I didn't count. it wasn't many is the point). Like, if they got them into the studio already, why not have them record more lines, if not because they literally can't afford to pay them for more lines or can't afford to pay their staff to animate the characters afterward? And sadly, without them literally going back to the paid expansion model (which IMO they never should have stopped in the first place because that's what keeps other MMOs alive) it seems inevitable that their money will just keep drying up more and more and they will spend less and less of it on paying for voice acted dialogue. I hope beyond hope that devs see how angry all the fans are for having so much unvoiced content in this update (like, pretty sure even a lot of people who were on the fence before were really livid after this update had crucial mainline story scenes with recurring NPCs suddenly unvoiced and not even just the planetary story) and they listen to our pleas and STOP with this, but 😔 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stradlin Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 (edited) ^^ I wish I'd be able to place such a massive amount of importance over getting to hear voice acting from my character. SWTOR has hundreds of hours of it. Folks who love it this unconditionally must be in 7th heaven whenever playing og class stories. Truly, I never fully get it. Almost all PCVA is of incredibly high quality. Just that they almost never say anything important. I mean, as long as we speak of Bioware dialogue wheel spinnings, PCVA is mostly about asking one liner questions or offering punctuation and paragraph changes to the actual beef of the dialogue, which virtually always is delivered by the NPC anyways. PlayerChar is almost never an important part of the conversation. I mean, let's travel to the absolute high water mark of SWTOR production values, faction capital bits of class stories. I did some of Inquisitor DK story just yesterday. Wonderful absolute top of the line Voice acting through and through, male sith inq voice is just perfect! What does that quality VA provide? Four word questions and pre-canned recycled responses make like..what, 75% of all you can ever say to anyone. - Zash: [goes on and on about her plans, why Darth Skotia must die, how killing him involves getting this Mcuffin tablet from Trandoshians.] -PC: " Don't worry about me!" - Zash: [Explains how tablet can be found underneath some statue, bit of further exposition about Skotia and Trandoshian culture. Gives isntructions how to find the statue] - PC: " On my way!" Like 17 times out of 20, PC dialogue doesn't even pretrend to have any weight of its own, it is all about getting the actual content out from the NPC. Its in the very nature and design of dialogue wheel stuff. Though I swear, first two Mass Effect games masked this much better. They are more clever and sophisticated in this regard when compared to SWTOR or DA:I for example. ..To be fair those 3 times out of 20 are often awesome. I still find it incredible people care about them as much as they do though. Each their own and all that. Like...one could do all kinds of "fun" personal experiments here. Have two pens handy, red and blue. Write down some summary of " important and memorable things said in this conversation" after each dialogue ever had in TOR. Use red pen when writing down important/memorable thing NPC says. Blue pen when you hear important stuff from PCVA. I swears, there won¨'t be much blue on your paper. "murder and mayhem await!" Or.. Completely remove what PCVA says from every dialogue and see how it looks. [Essentially unchanged, NPCs just turn more proactive, telling you what you must hear without needing questions to pull the answers from them] Now, completely remove all that the NPC says in every dialogue and see how it looks. [All of the actual content disappears, dialogue stops making sense. ] Edited June 1 by Stradlin 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stradlin Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 (edited) Towards end of DK bits of class story, Sith Inquisitor meets certain very important NPC in Dark Temple. Extremely important,. meaty dialogue follows. One that establishes huge portions of the entire class story right there and then. About four minutes of top notch BW storytelling bliss! What's PCVA's contriobution to this dialogue? During all of those four minutes, you get the following from PCVA: What do you mean I awakened you? I am going to return my family to glory? I will handle him as I see fit. Don't worry about me. It wouldn't be worth taking otherwise. Ofc there are irrelevant changes depending on which option you pick, but it won't get any more or less beefy than this. Oh no lets all go on strike and hope game is a kill rather than lose this bliss. NPC brings the story and content. PCVA brings punctuation and paragraph changes. Completely remove each of those remarks and the actual content, actual story established in that dialogue by the NPC changes in no way. Almost all encounters work in this same way. In order to have those five practically irrelevant little comments present, amount of voice actors that single dialogue needs goes from three to nine.Or from one to three, if you wanna deal with English speaking client only. Yet, notion of losing those five practically irrelevant little comments is widely seen as utterly apocalyptic over here. Edited June 1 by Stradlin 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FlatTax Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 I was wondering what 7.5's new monetization scheme would be, and now we know: reduced product quality. The absence of voice acting is probably a harbinger of more passive monetization to come. ...which constitutes an attack on our subscriptions. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DuchessKristania Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 (edited) 8 hours ago, cannibithobbal said: I will say, I am 10000% willing to wait longer for updates if they actually get them fully voice acted. Like, I would absolutely rather have no updates at all, or literally just one update a year that is fully voice acted over these more frequent updates without voice acting. However, equally, pretty sure it is a money issue and not a time issue (other than time to animate/lip sync to the audio) for getting the voice actors to record. Because they DID get every voice actor into the studio. Every single one of them had lines. They just dragged them all the way into the studio for like 10 lines or whatever a piece lol (It was probably more than that, but, ya know, I didn't count. it wasn't many is the point). Like, if they got them into the studio already, why not have them record more lines, if not because they literally can't afford to pay them for more lines or can't afford to pay their staff to animate the characters afterward? And sadly, without them literally going back to the paid expansion model (which IMO they never should have stopped in the first place because that's what keeps other MMOs alive) it seems inevitable that their money will just keep drying up more and more and they will spend less and less of it on paying for voice acted dialogue. I hope beyond hope that devs see how angry all the fans are for having so much unvoiced content in this update (like, pretty sure even a lot of people who were on the fence before were really livid after this update had crucial mainline story scenes with recurring NPCs suddenly unvoiced and not even just the planetary story) and they listen to our pleas and STOP with this, but 😔 Oh I agree that in this case it was not a time issue. I'm just saying fully voiced and larger updates would take a lot longer. I can see how it was misread though. I actually feel the more frequent updates have led to more disappointing content, at least from the perspective of story. Oh well, as far as story goes I have a vast library of head canon that I share with a fellow writer who plays the game, lol. Edited June 1 by DuchessKristania Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sarfux Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 guys listen. I know you want to hold out hope but it's over. changed times are here and even more change is coming. gone are the days of the everything fully voiced and fleshed out. it's time to be realistic about this. there's no going back. there simply is not enough money, dev power, design power and creativity to do EVERYTHING fully voice acted anymore. That was the OG squad and those that came right after. it's all different people now. different company, different decisions, different manner, a different way the game will go. It will be milked on nostalgia, just like wow , runescape, everquest and all the others are. I for one do NOT care about the story past a certain point and don't agree at all with the whole bringing malgus back over and over and over. It's just a meme now really. out of alllll these people, why keep bringing HIM back? I'm just over the story. and it looks like BS is too. we are lucky to have this game in 2024. you can get mad at me all you want or shake your head or w/e. but you have to realize the reality of what is going on. the game is past it's peak. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DuchessKristania Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 Just now, Sarfux said: guys listen. I know you want to hold out hope but it's over. changed times are here and even more change is coming. gone are the days of the everything fully voiced and fleshed out. it's time to be realistic about this. there's no going back. there simply is not enough money, dev power, design power and creativity to do EVERYTHING fully voice acted anymore. That was the OG squad and those that came right after. it's all different people now. different company, different decisions, different manner, a different way the game will go. It will be milked on nostalgia, just like wow , runescape, everquest and all the others are. I for one do NOT care about the story past a certain point and don't agree at all with the whole bringing malgus back over and over and over. It's just a meme now really. out of alllll these people, why keep bringing HIM back? I'm just over the story. and it looks like BS is too. we are lucky to have this game in 2024. you can get mad at me all you want or shake your head or w/e. but you have to realize the reality of what is going on. the game is past it's peak. You are entirely entitled to that perspective, it's by no means a new one. I and others choose to hold out hope and that's okay as well. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kristallia Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 19 hours ago, FlatTax said: The absence of developer communication on this is an embarrassment. They will probably communicate little later as they might be very busy now so soon after the patch launch. Broadsword says that communication and transparency is one of their core values so I think its safe to say that they will eventually communicate about it. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cannibithobbal Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 2 hours ago, DuchessKristania said: Oh I agree that in this case it was not a time issue. I'm just saying fully voiced and larger updates would take a lot longer. I can see how it was misread though. I actually feel the more frequent updates have led to more disappointing content, at least from the perspective of story. omg yes agreed, the story quality in the last few updates has been..... lacking to say the least. Even if it WAS all voiced as it should be, the majority of the content has been "do all these fetch quests on this planet" "now do it on this planet" "and look, another planet!" (IMO all content that should be released as optional side content that you do not have to do to progress the main story, an optional planetary story you can do to unlock daily areas a la Oricon, but it's clearly kept in just to pad the run time and make the update feel longer) with just a few scenes actually related to the main story. Thankfully we've had flirting and romance content in every update since that's definitely the way to keep me playing 😅, but it would be nice if the actual story was keeping me engaged too. 2 hours ago, DuchessKristania said: Oh well, as far as story goes I have a vast library of head canon that I share with a fellow writer who plays the game, lol. Literally same 😂 HCverse >>> game story at this point tbh hahaha 2 hours ago, Sarfux said: don't agree at all with the whole bringing malgus back over and over and over. It's just a meme now really. out of alllll these people, why keep bringing HIM back? Wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. Can we please stop with Malgus, omg. I've honestly never been more concerned for the future of the game's story than when the devs said in a livestream "this is Malgus' story" 😣 tbh I do barely care about the story that's happening rn, but I'm here for the romances and to hear my characters talk more because I always miss that between updates and can only play a few repeatable side missions where they talk (thank god for date nights TBH). OH, and look at them trying to take one of those two things away. 😔 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sarova Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 On 5/29/2024 at 9:35 PM, DuchessKristania said: I completely agree. It makes our characters feel like nothing more than supporting cast for Sa'har. Super fun to feel like your playing someone else's story. This was a misstep, and a bad one. I'm about to log on to play the new storyline, thought I'd check if there are any bug issues first and saw this thread. Am I right that you and everyone are saying our characters are not voiced throughout the new story? How disappointing, especially after the livestream. If this is how the story aspect of the game is going (no more voiced characters), maybe @KeithKanneg will update us. Someone mentioned going back to paid expansions. If that's what it takes to get my character their voice back, I'm in. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DuchessKristania Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 2 minutes ago, Sarova said: I'm about to log on to play the new storyline, thought I'd check if there are any bug issues first and saw this thread. Am I right that you and everyone are saying our characters are not voiced throughout the new story? How disappointing, especially after the livestream. If this is how the story aspect of the game is going (no more voiced characters), maybe @KeithKanneg will update us. Someone mentioned going back to paid expansions. If that's what it takes to get my character their voice back, I'm in. There are a few scenes where our characters are voiced, but the majority is the kotor style and you just stare awkwardly at whoever you're supposed to be interacting with. It's impressively lame. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sarova Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 Just now, DuchessKristania said: It's impressively lame. 🥺 Maybe the block of text (aka Kotor interactions) is not permanent and was required because they changed the voice actor for the male IA too late to get all that character's interactions voiced, so rather than have just that character with no voiced parts, they gave us all the same. At least, I hope this is the case. I'm optimistic, as the voiced story is one of the best things about SWTOR. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trlance Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 How be optimistic when for last 3 story updates in a row we have kotor style cutscenes on main story and here peoples hate them already for year when Old Wounds was released and still nothing changed, it's worse? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sarfux Posted June 1 Share Posted June 1 16 minutes ago, Sarova said: I'm about to log on to play the new storyline, thought I'd check if there are any bug issues first and saw this thread. Am I right that you and everyone are saying our characters are not voiced throughout the new story? How disappointing, especially after the livestream. If this is how the story aspect of the game is going (no more voiced characters), maybe @KeithKanneg will update us. Someone mentioned going back to paid expansions. If that's what it takes to get my character their voice back, I'm in. it's incredibly lame and I won't be doing anymore after this point. sorry to say. i'm done with the story. especially with all this malgus and shae crud. ugh. it's just over done. I miss the days of "play your way" and THAT whole route the game was taking. this doesnt feel right. or good Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts