Please have Voice acting for the quests

Star wars the Old Republic had amazing voice acting for all the questlines. Each NPC had an amazing voice actor behind them to help bring them to life and helped the player get sucked into the story and helped the players care more about the story. They even gave the players their own voice actors too! This helps to immerse the player into the game and helps the player to not skip the quest txt. I think ashes should implement this into their questlines. What do you y'all think?

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Comments

ShadonSol

Voice acting is something we'll likely won't see at launch as it is pretty expensive.

I do agree tho, having voiced quests dialogues adds a lot to the experience and I hope that this is something that gets added later down the line \o/

Camthetrashman

Ehhh I'm inclined to disagree, mostly because having voice acting doesn't necessarily mean it'll be good and personally I'd rather stick to text than be distracted by bad voice acting.

CROW3

I like voice acted for story telling and world immersion. But it's incredibly expensive from both a voice talent and sound engineering perspective. SWTOR was funded by Bioware and EA, a near bottomless coffer especially on a Star Wars IP.

I'd rather IS direct resources to more valuable aspects of the game.

JustVine

Strong disagree. That money should go into quest writing, not va. A bad va can fuck up good script. A good va cannot unfuck a bad script. Please for the love of RNG don't roll those dice. The quest dialogue is so good rn. Don't split the focus. If anything pay Jeff more to come back and write/direct more quests XD

Talents

There's not enough money to do that. SWTOR reportedly spent 1/3 of their $200m budget on voice acting, that's more than the current entire budget for Ashes on just voice acting.

SirChancelot

I agree that would Star wars did was above and beyond every other MMO and it was absolutely fantastic for immersion while playing through that story... I just don't know if that would fiscally be possible for intrepid

CROW3

Talents wrote: »

There's not enough money to do that. SWTOR reportedly spent 1/3 of their $200m budget on voice acting, that's more than the current entire budget for Ashes on just voice acting.

As a random aside, I met the executive creative director of SWTOR at some party a few months before their launch. He was super excited that they were going to 'take over the MMO genre,' and was really confused about my comment that from everything I'd seen (and knew about Bioware) they were making an awesome single-player SW RPG for friends to participate in obliquely.

Fozzik

No voice acting is better than bad voice acting.

Good writing is key...but if you can put in some good voice acting with the good writing that's great. Bad lines read badly just get skipped and make the game seem cheesy. It's almost impossible to get emotionally / psychologically invested in a story if it sounds like it is written / read by grade school kids.

Atama

Yes please, Intrepid I want you to spend millions of dollars paying for top-notch voice actors so that I know that there is quality dialog for me to skip past with my space bar as I turn in my quest.

George_Black

Mmorpgs are not for singleplayer experience.
Voice acting has nothing to do with community gameplay and is a waste of money that is needed elsewhere. Be reasonable.

Xerheart

Has voice acting not shown to be good in several games such as SWTOR and FF14 tho? So I disagree with fully throwing it out of the picture for AoC.

I do however agree, that VA should be near the bottom of the list of current priorities. Like everyone said, I feel like funding, not that I have a say in this obviously, should be focused on other parts of the game.

That being said if, in a later patch or expansion, they want to add some form of main quest, cutscenes etc. I would enjoy VA in that regard. Especially if they had the budget to hire good VA's. Having solid singleplayer experiences imo, is healthy for an mmo. Sometimes I just want to hop on in the evening and play solo. Granted community and group gameplay should always be way more prioritized, but working on good solo content is great too.

An example of good solo content in a MMO, that was universally liked was the Mage Tower in legion. It wasn't some massive bit of content but served as a nice side piece of content to have players log on.

TLDR: Maybe eventually, but focus the budget on group gameplay first.

Vhaeyne

I am once again stating that voice acting is a waste of time and money.

There has never been a single MMORPG where the voice acting was good in my opinion. NOT ONE.

I don't want to see an Indy studio like Intrepid struggling to break into the highly competitive MMORPG market, waste what little valuable resources it has on cringe voices that is going to be muted by 90% of the player base. Not when that time and money could be spent on real content.

Not for Ashes.

CROW3

Vhaeyne wrote: »

There has never been a single MMORPG where the voice acting was good in my opinion. NOT ONE.

Really?

Vhaeyne

CROW3 wrote: »

Vhaeyne wrote: »

There has never been a single MMORPG where the voice acting was good in my opinion. NOT ONE.

Really?

Absolutely. Not a single game. I have played most MMORPGS too.

Noaani

Vhaeyne wrote: »

There has never been a single MMORPG where the voice acting was good in my opinion. NOT ONE.

I have to agree.

There are some games that have some good voice acting, but no game that has mostly good voice acting. Going to cite EQ2 again - when the games original release had the cast it had (Christopher Lee and Heather Graham leading the charge), there is going to be some good voice acting. However, there is a massive amount of just absolute shit in that game.

There is significantly more cringe in MMO's than non-cringe.

maouw

for me, va hasn't added much value to my gaming experience.

*except for games with heavy storylines and intimate characters

Xerheart

Are we arguing budget or concept at this point?

If Intrepid had no budget concerns, would people who are against it right now be fine with it?

If you are just against it in general on the basis that it has never been done well. I am pretty sure WoW and FF14 both have very well-liked voice actors. Maybe I am missing out on some FF14 va drama/grievances, but I haven't run into many complaints on the WoW side.

I mean dialogue and story decisions are a different thing altogether, but the actors themselves are liked afaik.

Again, let me reiterate that I do not think VA should be included in the release. Not only does Intrepid have a budget, they also have so many other core mechanics to work on that take greater precedence. It just sounds like we have shifted into the realm of disagrement with VA as a concept altogether. I know some of you personally might not like the VA, but it is hard to argue when generally two giants in MMO history, have had a generally positive reaction to VA.

Maybe I am missing something tho.

Noaani

Xerheart wrote: »

Are we arguing budget or concept at this point?

Why limit ourselves to one?

Xerheart

Not limiting ourselves to one. I am asking if we are looking at both sides.

I wanted to clarify if people were disagreeing with it because of budget solely or if their opinion changed if budget is a non-issue.

It sounded like people would not want VA at all, even if it was in the budget.

Vhaeyne

@Xerheart

I am arguing against both.

As a concept, I am against Voice Acting in MMORPGs because it is not relevant to MMORPG game play.
Especially competitive MMORPGs like Ashes. While you are sitting around listening to cringe NPCs tell you about unimportant shit. Real PvP wars with real humans are taking place in the same world. In fact, you could get killed while the NPC is trying to talk to you. NPCs are not safe spaces.

(To be real with you, I don't think NPCs have any place in MMORPGs, but that is a different discussion.)

Financially, it makes no sense for them to put money into voice acting. It is expensive, Time-consuming, and hard to get right. The pay-out is that a percentage of the player base may listen to voice acting sometimes, and a very small percentage will listen all the time.

Remember, Intrepid is a fresh new Indy start up. They are attempting to do something different and niche in a niche genre. This makes Ashes is an extremely risky project. More so because they are not a large studio. Intrepid has enough on its plate without complicating things with extras like voice acting.

Not having voice acting in Ashes is a no-brainer.

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