One big selling point of SWTOR by BioWare is that it is fully voices and highly story-based. But is the whole “fully voiced” thing a bit overrated? Others have said it before but MMOCrunch published an interesting story on the very same topic recently.
The author points out, “While it seems to be a giant step forward in terms of immersing players into the game and story-line, one quickly realizes that it’s probably going to be pointless in the long run.”
Could there be some truth to this? I think the idea and the concept behind total voice acting sounds awesome but is it really going to make that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things?
The MMOCrunch article goes on to say, “I know for me, unless there’s vital info in the quest description, I’m not going to read it.”
Well, this isn’t the case for me. I do read the quests (at least the first go round) and I appreciate them and the story involved in an MMO. I don’t much care for the point-and-click nav running so many games are now doing a la WoW style. But one thing that I did like about WoW was the ability to skip through the scrolling text from an NPC because once you’ve done a quest one or two times, you get tired of waiting as the stupid NPC yaps on and on.
I have an 85 of every class in WoW so after the first or second time at a quest, I knew what to do and where to go without needing to read everything. If SWTOR forces you to hear the full voiced script every time, could a player run into the same problem?
SWTOR has nav points so what about those players who don’t want to read and instead want to spend every moment they have for gaming on doing something productive, leveling and getting right to the point of all of those quests? What about those who like to skim read and then rush off to figure out the quest for themselves?
You can’t skim read a voiceover. Instead you have to sit and listen and wait while the NPC finishes whatever he or she has to tell you. Is this going to end up being a negative rather than the positive BioWare is making the voice acting out to be?
Will you be listening to every word or spamming the “skip” key?