Jun 02 2009
Voice Acting Going Massive
Voice acting in video games is an art of frustration and excellence. I could list a number of games that drove me to play with the volume down, but I would rather state mention two paragons of voice-acting gone right: Final Fantasy XII and Mass Effect. And speaking of Mass Effect, Bioware is hard on work on a new massively multiplayer online game, Star Wars: The Old Republic. What does this upcoming MMO have to do with voice acting? According to Luke Plunkett of Kotaku.com, Bioware made an interesting announcement during E3 regarding The Old Republic. In his article “Old Republic is All-Talk (Literally)“, Luke reports that Old Republic will abandon text messages altogether and every NPC will be backed by a voice actor.
I am all for voice acted NPCs, but will the no text policy apply to ingame chat as well? As incredible a feat as an all voice presentation would be, I think many players would be turned off by the lack of text chatting. Although, imagine a plaza full of players chatting away, and you had to be close to players to hear them unless you were using a communications device. Now imagine having to sneak up to a couple of players to overhear their plans. While I am a man of the written word, I think a textless MMO would be interesting. Include ingame sign language and I am all in.
