Why did SWTOR advertise "voice-acting" so much?

[rhorle]

To my knowledge right now, SWTOR is the only full voice acted MMO in existence. Even a game like skyrim, as big as it is, doesn't come close in size to SWTOR. Every npc of every quest of every class is alot of voice acting.

To be fair though its not every npc of every quest that is voice acted. Majority of the content is voice acted but there are still "no voice" quests and stuff. As well as the alien and droid voices that still require reading and could very well be computer generated. It still has done a monumental task, it just isn't full or really that different from other modern games. It is still something that is a relatively new concept for MMO's however.

[javen]

The main reason I paid attention to the VO aspect is that MY character has a voice. I love playing TOR because my character is actually a character, instead of being just a character sheet and a hotbar with an avatar attached. I always love hearing about "what kind of character" people play and instead of just listing a spec, they list personality traits that are actually reflected in the levelling process.

[mrbadxampl]

it may be full voiced over but actually a lot of npcs speak 'random alien language' what pisse dme off a little :/

this, coupled with the fact that most of the 'random alien language' is cut-and-paste straight from the movies without any consideration to what the words 'translated' to when they were spoken! listen to a few aliens talk, you'll hear a lot of stuff like 'bo shuda' and 'cha skrunee do pat' even if the alien is just asking you to go buy bread for him, it makes NO sense! listen a little more and you'll hear entire lines of 'dialog' repeated, sometimes even in the same conversation!

[Peta]

Well, they should have probably invested more into a different area of the dame... I was ill this week, so yesterday evening I decided to finally check out SWTOR. Dunno, but after having played 11 levels I start regretting the purchase Sure, it has all this great voice acting and stories but I actually wanted to buy an MMO, not a KOTOR/Mass Effect thingie where you have to be online to play it. So far, I haven't seen much of other players, combat is boring and feels weird and I can't say that I enjoyed the Jedi Consular storyline that much so far.... + all these pointless side quests... it really feels like a typical Bioware single-player game to me, with some co-op options like flashpoints (didn't try them yet). Well, I hope the PvP is good at least...

Your posts adds nothing new. Same stuff people keep saying over and over again. And funny enough it's always the same ppl who lvl to 10 and start complaining. At lvl 11 you havent done anything yet. You just came of your starting world...

-Ontopic-
It is true that not everything is voice acted. But tell me this why should a postbox (mission terminal) be talking to you.
Why when you type on a computer or work it should it be talking to you? It is true that if a npc doesnt have a quest for you it will not speak to you. But why should it? The game is already too big why add more meaningless speech.
What people also need to understand is that every choice you make has an appropriate responce in speech. So some speech you will never even hear even if you play the game 3 times over. Multiplied by the classes in the game at the moment.
I cant talk about Skyrim because i haven't played it. But I doubt that game can offer the same.

[rigoremortis]

What kinda movies does it need to be in to fall in "hollywood actors" category? Most people there are voice-actors not actors. Do you really expect that they hired Tom Cruise to do voice acting in this game? These are hollywood level voice-actors to me.
And stuff like babylon 5 not hollywood enough for example? Saw IV and VI? Not because they havent been in oscars or something? What about other AAA title games, do they count at all?

go look at the casts for the last couple of GTA's, they say "whatup" lol

Most of them are hollywood actors :P

i was jokingly replying to this.


also smartass, i was replying to someone on the context that it would cost 250 million to hire "hollywood actors" (im fully aware of the difference between voice and actual actors, sherlock), as theres no way in hell a cast of randoms cost them 250 mill, L2 read forums and context before you put someone on blast for no effing reason.

[jaakkeli]

It is the same way on the republic side. I've never been able to figure out how people claim it's fully voiced when a large portion of your quests aren't voiced.

All the dialogue is voiced. It is fully voice overed. That there are some quests you get from a wanted poster (or a "bounty board" or whatever) just follows real life. After all, that printed list of wanted criminals does not read itself loud to you in real life, does it?

It has long been standard practice in RPGs that most of the dialogue is text only to cut costs and then the most important characters have a voice actor. SWToR is exactly the same as most RPGs except that *all* the dialogue is voice overed. That there are other things in this game besides NPC interaction and dialogue doesn't mean the dialogue is not "fully voice overed" or otherwise the only "fully voice overed" game would be a game that has only dialogue and nothing else...

The word "Bonus" in front of a quest magically makes it not a quest

You go talk to an NPC who tells you that he needs you to pick up an item in area X. You travel to area X and find out it's full of monster type Y and a bonus pops up under your quest text that you get extra experience if you kill a certain number of Ys. Practically always you end up having to kill that many Ys anyway to get to the primary objective so it's just bonus experience for completing the primary quest without stealthing past mobs or using some other trick to avoid the hostiles. (Mostly for imperial side though, I noticed the republic bonus quests on first planets are very badly done and don't get automatically completed while doing the actual quest.)

In fact, if you actually listen to the voice overs, you will find out that the bonus quest often does have a voice over: the quest giver asks you to fetch an item (primary quest) and then often mentions something like "while you're there, you could teach them a lesson" (the optional bonus quest to kill some number of mobs).

if you were to skip bonus quests you'd be woefully underleveled.

Um, no. If you do all the quests in a planet you'll soon be ridiculously overleveled...

[rigoremortis]

All the dialogue is voiced. It is fully voice overed. That there are some quests you get from a wanted poster (or a "bounty board" or whatever) just follows real life. After all, that printed list of wanted criminals does not read itself loud to you in real life, does it?

It has long been standard practice in RPGs that most of the dialogue is text only to cut costs and then the most important characters have a voice actor. SWToR is exactly the same as most RPGs except that *all* the dialogue is voice overed. That there are other things in this game besides NPC interaction and dialogue doesn't mean the dialogue is not "fully voice overed" or otherwise the only "fully voice overed" game would be a game that has only dialogue and nothing else...



You go talk to an NPC who tells you that he needs you to pick up an item in area X. You travel to area X and find out it's full of monster type Y and a bonus pops up under your quest text that you get extra experience if you kill a certain number of Ys. Practically always you end up having to kill that many Ys anyway to get to the primary objective so it's just bonus experience for completing the primary quest without stealthing past mobs or using some other trick to avoid the hostiles. (Mostly for imperial side though, I noticed the republic bonus quests on first planets are very badly done and don't get automatically completed while doing the actual quest.)

In fact, if you actually listen to the voice overs, you will find out that the bonus quest often does have a voice over: the quest giver asks you to fetch an item (primary quest) and then often mentions something like "while you're there, you could teach them a lesson" (the optional bonus quest to kill some number of mobs).



Um, no. If you do all the quests in a planet you'll soon be ridiculously overleveled...

this guy gets it.


do you people expect that once you get to an area for a quest, kill 1 mob, some random voice is gonna pop into your speakers telling you to kill X amount of mobs? rofl, that would be ridiculous. same as finding a data pad on the ground and expecting it to talk to you. YES, this game IS fully voiced over. ffs quit taking everything so literal ppl, lol.

[Vrachara]

But honestly, a lot of games released these days -are- fully voiced already.

And how many of those are MMOs? Somewhere around 0?

GW2 ain't out yet, when it is, we'll see whether it's fully voiced (I don't know if ANet set out to make a fully voiced MMO with it). Even if it is, it doesn't even have a release date yet, so when TOR was coming out, it was the first and only MMO to be fully voiced.

[Nellise]

All the dialogue is voiced. It is fully voice overed. That there are some quests you get from a wanted poster (or a "bounty board" or whatever) just follows real life. After all, that printed list of wanted criminals does not read itself loud to you in real life, does it?

It has long been standard practice in RPGs that most of the dialogue is text only to cut costs and then the most important characters have a voice actor. SWToR is exactly the same as most RPGs except that *all* the dialogue is voice overed. That there are other things in this game besides NPC interaction and dialogue doesn't mean the dialogue is not "fully voice overed" or otherwise the only "fully voice overed" game would be a game that has only dialogue and nothing else...

I guess it isn't clear to me what decides which actions deserve dialog and which don't. Sure, all the dialog they chose to put into the game is VO'd, but why is it only a portion of what you're asked to do that's given dialogue? Like the bonus quest chains where you do like "kill x->kill y->kill boss" would be nice ones to have dialog for and would be good places to use your holocomm to give a purpose for what you're doing. Those ones especially have you killing stuff you wouldn't be if you weren't given that bonus quest.

In fact, if you actually listen to the voice overs, you will find out that the bonus quest often does have a voice over: the quest giver asks you to fetch an item (primary quest) and then often mentions something like "while you're there, you could teach them a lesson" (the optional bonus quest to kill some number of mobs).

If that were true, you'd be given the bonus quest when the original quest is given to you. While that happens occassionally, it does not happen for the large majority of bonus quests.

I actually think they shouldn't have bothered with the bonus quests. They mostly encourage grinding and force a ton of mobs into corridors so you have enough to kill which makes it a pain to get back out without re-killing them. Simply bump normal mob xp up a bit and the bonus quest xp wouldn't be needed. I'd have much less of an issue with calling it fully VO'd without these quests (a few terminals here or there are ok, but over a 1/3rd of the quests you do are these bonus ones).

[PandasAreComming]

All the dialogue is voiced. It is fully voice overed.

Most people don't consider "beep beep" or "grrrrrrrrrrr mmmmmmmmmmrrrrrrrgggggllllbeee" voices. It's the same as without voice acting. You still read text.

Um, no. If you do all the quests in a planet you'll soon be ridiculously overleveled...

Um, no. I skipped heroic 4 quests and was way way underleveled. Most people gain required experience by doing space missions (which I despise) or running warzones and completing it's dailies.

[atrixx]

Um, no. I skipped heroic 4 quests and was way way underleveled. Most people gain required experience by doing space missions (which I despise) or running warzones and completing it's dailies.

You must have missed a ton of quests then. I didn't do ANY heroic 2+ or 4 quests while leveling and I still had a couple planets that I didn't even though yet when I turned 50. Also I should point out that I only ran BT once while leveling and didn't do any other FPs. Chances are you missed/skipped a lot of quests or weren't managing rested XP well either.

[rhorle]

they didnt exactly hire hollywood actors for the voice acting, rofl i think people read too much into this like they really spent sooooo much money on voice acting, lol they didnt. its just a cool feature they wanted to promote as they put a lot of work into it, thats all.

Most of the voice actors they hired were/are accomplished voice actors. They didn't just pick random people off the street to read a script. Voice acting is harder then it sounds. The average salary for a Voice actor is around 40k. While that is a "salary" and not a one time gig I expect Bioware paid decently. Also many experienced Voice Actors can get a percentage of the profit from said product as part of their contract.

While its not a large part of the budget 300+ voice actors could be as high as 30 million (or more) depending on how much some of the more experienced talent earned. Just for perspective the cast of the Simpson's was once said to earn 400k per episode. Any way you cut it, it is still a large amount of a budget to spend on something.

[Zardro]

I would imagine after spending a lot of resources on the voice acting, they would try to use it as selling point.

[Bonkbonk100]

After playing this game for 23 days ( Somewhere around 75 hours ) I can honestly say that my spacebar saw much abuse, especially in the later parts of the game. Although I did enjoy my class story, but that's it.
Voice acting on NPCs with generic quests are, in my opinion, unnesseary. Example: Some quest giver with X name representing X company, having to kill X monsters before X happens because his wife is sick and he needs your help. When you complete the quest, you rarely hear about them again.

Another thing I found rather odd, was the talking between NPCs. You'd think a game with so much voice acting, would have some casual talking going on to make places seem more alive, but it rarely occurred.
When NPCs would finally have a conversation together, the voice would follow you, no matter how far you ran away from them. I remember being at least 80-90 meters away from a couple talking together and it sounded like they were right next to me, lol.

The alien voices were just, ugh. Couple of lines being repeated 9-12 times for every dialog. I still have some hearing issues because of Khem'val, the walking toilet.

Otherwise, a pretty meh game.

[rigoremortis]

Most of the voice actors they hired were/are accomplished voice actors. They didn't just pick random people off the street to read a script. Voice acting is harder then it sounds. The average salary for a Voice actor is around 40k. While that is a "salary" and not a one time gig I expect Bioware paid decently. Also many experienced Voice Actors can get a percentage of the profit from said product as part of their contract.

While its not a large part of the budget 300+ voice actors could be as high as 30 million (or more) depending on how much some of the more experienced talent earned. Just for perspective the cast of the Simpson's was once said to earn 400k per episode. Any way you cut it, it is still a large amount of a budget to spend on something.

well obviously they didnt pick random people off the street, im just saying that people were saying "oh they hired hollywood actors" "oh, they spent 250mil on voice acting" blah blah blah, is a bunch of bullshit, lol thats all. i dont discount the skilled people that can do voice acting, its a tough job.

[PandasAreComming]

You must have missed a ton of quests then. I didn't do ANY heroic 2+ or 4 quests while leveling and I still had a couple planets that I didn't even though yet when I turned 50. Also I should point out that I only ran BT once while leveling and didn't do any other FPs. Chances are you missed/skipped a lot of quests or weren't managing rested XP well either.

Ofcourse I haven't had any rested exp. This is what you rely on to level?

[Deleted]

I think the voice acting is soso at times. The class quests felt like it was voiced the best (which I think it's the most important anyway).
But when I told a jokes there is no emotion what so ever in both parts. Specially remember an ironic joke my character said and in the end of the answer the NPC said "Oh, it was a joke... ha ha" in a complete emotionless tone like he was just reading the line from a paper. (which he probably did, but doesn't have to sound that way!)

The answers I took often led to the same dialog as I have been hearing multiple times before. When leveling my inquisitor I kept hearing "It was actually quite simple" "I will leave no survivors" and on my Bounty Hunter I heard "I have had way tougher jobs" "Now you get to see what Bounty Hunters are all about" etc...

I love the voice acting overall. I like sitting back and just listen instead of reading (unless they talk some alien language). But just a few things I annoy myself on.

[ZeroWashu]

it was the only selling point that they had other than the Star Wars IP?

I guess I do not understand the question.

I certainly would prefer to NOT have my character voiced. It further emphasizes that they character is not mine, merely just mob I have limited control over.

[Tomana]

IMO Bioware "forgot" that they were making a MMORPG and not a single player game, and put too much of their attention on stuff like voice acting rather than end-game content.

[Magzilla]

The only npc in the whole game who deserved a voice is that darth baras guy. He's got talent

'accept payment in kisses' guy? not so much