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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Please have Voice acting for the quests
Arthus Dawnbreaker
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
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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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/
I'd rather IS direct resources to more valuable aspects of the game.
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.
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.
Voice acting has nothing to do with community gameplay and is a waste of money that is needed elsewhere. Be reasonable.
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.
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.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Really?
Absolutely. Not a single game. I have played most MMORPGS too.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
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.
*except for games with heavy storylines and intimate characters
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.
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.
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.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Ironically, even though I have been making an argument for it, I really don't care all that much either way. Maybe I'm just being a dick for playing devil's advocate a little too hard, since its kind of a neutral topic for me. Basically concept-wise I am on the fence, even leaning slightly towards no.
Financially, like I've stated, I am also very against it. I am reading through your "target audience post" (or at least some of it haha) and I would much prefer extra funding to maybe going into high end raiding content. I think that is a more fruitful gain to the game, over VA for example.
Of course if money is a none factor and AoC is raking in the millions, sure, fuck it, knock out some VA, but only if you're swimming in cash and literally have nothing else to do.
Was just curious, since I haven't met anyone so adamantly against VA. But I do see where you are coming from.
Better invest that money to pay 5-10 more people for some years than have that imo.
Plus i do not want my godly dwarf lord to have a nice voice at start and a shitty one at the expansion!
Elite Dangerous
Not an MMORPG for one. Did not have VA when I played it for two. Not necessary for game play unless they really ruined the game...
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
As others have said, voice acting is very expensive and even good developers rarely get it right.
Its too big of a risk.
Maybe if the game is a hit and one of the top 5 mmo-rpgs within a year or two, we will see voice acting in expansion packs.
You all have such weird definitions of mmo. It's massive, multiplayer, has different roles, customizable and upgradeable gear, open world pvp, and a constantly expanding story effected by player action. Just because its not a WoW clone and has atypical combat doesn't make it less an mmo. It just means it has atypical combat for the genre.
Afix a different label all you want to put it in a 'niche' or 'subgenre' but it is still 'close enough' to an mmo that excluding it in such a simple context as voice acting makes, no sense.
I will agree that you could make a definition for MMORPG that includes Elite. In doing so other games become MMORPGs. Atlas for example.
If you say anything game with stats and a number system is a RPG, almost every game becomes an RPG.
I don't think Elite is a MMORPG and I am confident that most people would agree.
You can also just play offline which is strange to me given that your chances of seeing another person in a 1:1 scale Milky way is so low. More so with the games population being low...
I like Elite a lot but I don't think it is a MMORPG. I guess a MMORPG is like ______ and you know it when you see it...
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
But it is not just stats and numbers. Every ship and weapon set has a unique role strengths and weaknesses in various aspects of the games combat. The modifications on the weapons furthet define your role. Role Play. You don't mount a chieftan with full frags and expect it to do the same thing as a type 10 with beams lasers and multicannons in a conflict zone.
If the stats don't distinguish your characters role relative to other players or content approaches it's not a roleplay game.
Additionally you can customize your character appearance. Not originally in the game, but they added it in because 'why not'. It helps immerse me in the world further as a commander. Same with the voice acting. Not really adding to my point beyond the fact that it has added more traditional elements over time.
The reason why so many games have gone rpg is because humans love self expression, progression, and different approaches to content. It increases fun and that's a games job. But action shooters are generally not mmos because they don't have a massive changing world effected by player vs player action. That's where Division 1 falls sort of an fps mmorpg for example.
ED doesn't have this failing. The world is constant and effected by massive multiplayer action. It has distinct and unique play styles, game play loops, and ways to influence the world.
Most people would agree because the general population is on average intellectually lazy. Just like 'I know it when I see it'. We have labels for a reason. Because.it helps quickly convey a set of traits about a topic. If you don't have some form of logical definitions behind the label the label becomes useless.
Why am i derailing the thread on something so offtopic? Because I respect you and your opinions are weakened when you just off the cuff dismiss something like that when there are better reasons to exclude the game from the topic. I expect you to call me out similarly.
The solo mode is sort of valid in terms of 'determining if the game meets the definition of open world pvp but not really 'quality or usefulness of voice acting',. The elements of the player vs player interactions in cc or minor faction control are still extant despite Frontiers poor implementation of that feature. It still therefore meets the definition of massive multiplayer online even if it has flaws.