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

[rigoremortis]

I duno man, last I read they spent well over 200 million on just voice acting on a 350 million dollar budget. They weren't high end celebs, just the sheer ammount of different actors and time recording everything added up, big time.

ROFL, plz find a source for this, thats ridiculous & the dumbest thing ive heard in a while. theres no way in hell they almost spent more than half the budget on voice acting of a 350 million budget.

[Mekh]

It's not 'just' voiced. Even if you play every quest, you will only have heard maybe half of all the voice acting. There's different lines for different dialog options and sometimes NPC reaction to groups or certain species is different from the experience a single player has.

I don't think people appreciate the work that goes into first building these huge dialog trees and then having every branch of it voiced.

[Deleted]

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.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1320395/fullcredits#cast

Most of them are hollywood actors :P

[rigoremortis]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1320395/fullcredits#cast

Most of them are hollywood actors :P

just cause theres an IMDB link with unknown people with pictures, doesnt make them "hollywood actors" =P rofl


trust me, i effing love this game, but honestly, plz point one of those people that is a current active actor in hollywood movies, lol i saw a few d-list actors at best in there =p

[Primernova]

ROFL, plz find a source for this, thats ridiculous & the dumbest thing ive heard in a while. theres no way in hell they almost spent more than half the budget on voice acting of a 350 million budget.

It's the intarwebz! Their is no solid proof but alot of whackos like to number crunch and with this many people pondering the same thing, it actually starts to flesh out.

I wouldn't palce bets either way, but it was extremely expensive, that is for sure.

[Hedleyazg]

It was their gimmick to try to get more people to play.

[rigoremortis]

It's the intarwebz! Their is no solid proof but alot of whackos like to number crunch and with this many people pondering the same thing, it actually starts to flesh out.

I wouldn't palce bets either way, but it was extremely expensive, that is for sure.

having worked in the industry, i can tell you this......they spent more "moneyz" on programming those audio clips in and creating the visuals for the cutscenes. voice acting is cheap simply because you just have someone come into a studio, say their lines, then leave, lol

[Conzar]

I skipped Skyrim because Oblivion's voice acting was a joke. Loads of people to talk to, all with voices from a pool of about 5 actors. Too hard to speed up playback or slow it down a couple per cent to make the illusion there are more voices than they really are? Doom did it decades ago.

I may pick it up on budget when it gets bundled with a bunch if mods and the inevitable expansion.

[Deleted]

just cause theres an IMDB link with unknown people with pictures, doesnt make them "hollywood actors" =P rofl


trust me, i effing love this game, but honestly, plz point one of those people that is a current active actor in hollywood movies, lol i saw a few d-list actors at best in there =p

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?

[vizzle]

I skipped Skyrim because Oblivion's voice acting was a joke. Loads of people to talk to, all with voices from a pool of about 5 actors. Too hard to speed up playback or slow it down a couple per cent to make the illusion there are more voices than they really are? Doom did it decades ago.

I may pick it up on budget when it gets bundled with a bunch if mods and the inevitable expansion.

You didn't buy a game because the voice acting is weak.

??????

I didn't know voice acting was so important to people...

---------- Post added 2012-03-04 at 07:09 PM ----------

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?

And the guy who voiced the Trooper was a secondary character in the A-Team movie.

[Deleted]

A full voice over is a waste of time in a world where most of the people skip the dialogue. Dunno about you, but it didnt make me play or even buy that game - nor would it add any replay value if I'd play it.

[Kavoo]

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

[Deleted]

because it is easier to talk then it is to make a proper endgame content

[Eroginous]

I'm not trying to antagonize anyone or troll these forums, I'm just confused. Back before the game was launched, the thing you always heard was "fully voiced". They kept advertising this as one of the main selling points of the game, like it was some great innovative feature that no one had ever thought of before.

But honestly, a lot of games released these days -are- fully voiced already. Skyrim has a gigantic world and is fully-voiced, apart from the few letters and books that you have to read (which makes sense). Every video I've seen of GW2 is fully voiced, and plenty of other games are fully-voiced too.

*Shrug* And then people complain about how they spent so much money on voice actors. I don't see how SWTOR has any more voice acting than other recent games. Fully-voiced is expected in current games.

People complain about the voice acting because it gets old quickly, it's mostly british voices being acted, and it's not exactly anything anyone's never seen in a video game before. I understand voice acting isn't extremely common in MMOs (wait, actually it is) the only thing that sets SWTOR apart from other MMOs is that EVERY LITTLE THING is voice acted, which contributes to the redundancy.

Wow at least saves the VA for things that are important.

Relevant:http://imgur.com/a/jdvxx

So full of win.

[PandasAreComming]

I'm always scratching my head when people are saying it's fully voice overed. Did they even played the game?

It might be on Republic's side, but on Empire it goes like this:
At Balmorra you encounter an area quest to kill droids. You kill droids, sabotage stuff and kill one big droid. Without any explanation or voice overs. When I turned it in mission dropbox, I was "the fuck just I did?..". There are a lot of non VO quests with even crappier writting than good ol' WoW. Quests from Mission Boxes, quests with aliens in them, quests from world objects, randomly popping up area quests, bonus 3 step quests which are a quests of their own... So please...

Also, VO made this game primitive and shallow. Three or four choices? Please, I've played MUDs or older 3D RPGs with atleast 10 choices....

Pre-recorded VO without emotion (I insult an npc, he talks with anger, then proceeds without emotion like nothing ever happened? the fuck... atleast while reading I would give the proper tone...) and a very limited ammount of them is a GIMMICK. Just like 3D with glasses, just like Kinect. Until we'll have voice synthezation in games, VO will be an useless total crap for fanboys to give arguments "BUT IT'S FULLY VOICE OVERED LOL WOW IS SO PRIMITIVE...". Meh..

[Lathais]

Little to no meaning? You decide whether a station is destroyed, you could be single-handedly responsible for the literal deaths of millions of people, you sway where a planet's resources go, you decide if you're faction gets any real sway over an indigenous people. If you think these have no meaning, then I'm guessing by "meaning" you must mean..............I have no idea what you mean. Unless you mean it doesn't shape the entire mmo-verse to your specific storyline. The only real step they could have taken from there would be to have it to where the players actually fight over and decide planets on an hourly basis, which is not how a current war works, much less a futuristic one.

Except for other than the line the NPC says right after you make the decision, it means absolutely nothing.

[Nellise]

I'm always scratching my head when people are saying it's fully voice overed. Did they even played the game?

It might be on Republic's side, but on Empire it goes like this:
At Balmorra you encounter an area quest to kill droids. You kill droids, sabotage stuff and kill one big droid. Without any explanation or voice overs. When I turned it in mission dropbox, I was "the fuck just I did?..". There are a lot of non VO quests with even crappier writting than good ol' WoW. Quests from Mission Boxes, quests with aliens in them, quests from world objects, randomly popping up area quests, bonus 3 step quests which are a quests of their own... So please...

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. I argued this with someone in beta and they claimed almost all quests were voiced so I counted on the first 3 planets. Tython had 1/3rd of its quests non-voiced and then Coruscant and Taris were around 40-50% non-voiced. The word "Bonus" in front of a quest magically makes it not a quest to most people even though if you were to skip bonus quests you'd be woefully underleveled.

[oldglory1977]

Imo the voice acting in SWTOR has been top notch and one of the best in the industry which helps explain why it was hailed as a prominent feature. And as a gamer that always wanted more voice acting in games ever since Starfox64, I welcome it. Going back to older games or even watching trailers for new ones, without proper voice acting they feel hallow and cheap. Don't get me wrong you can go overboard on any feature, but too many games and franchises skimp out on the overall presentation of the game before they allow players to get immersed in the story

[Deleted]

I'm not trying to antagonize anyone or troll these forums, I'm just confused. Back before the game was launched, the thing you always heard was "fully voiced". They kept advertising this as one of the main selling points of the game, like it was some great innovative feature that no one had ever thought of before.

But honestly, a lot of games released these days -are- fully voiced already. Skyrim has a gigantic world and is fully-voiced, apart from the few letters and books that you have to read (which makes sense). Every video I've seen of GW2 is fully voiced, and plenty of other games are fully-voiced too.

*Shrug* And then people complain about how they spent so much money on voice actors. I don't see how SWTOR has any more voice acting than other recent games. Fully-voiced is expected in current games.

To be honest skyrim voice acting was horrible, but to be honest voice acted games have been in fact around for a long time. Shenmue in 1999 was fully voice acted video game and probably had more dialogue than SWTOR and probably better quality.

[mafao]

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...