…I would never have made that statement before playing Sacred 1. Their voiceovers are good enough that I want to hear them read. At least the first time anyway. Sometimes on subsequent visits with other characters I may listen to them. >.> or not.

There are numerous reasons why people might want a save game to go back to and take a different choice. For example, imagine your cat or child attacking the keyboard at just the wrong moment and making a dialogue choice that sends your character development or current quest path in entirely the opposite direction to what you had intended. Part of the fun of the Bioware games is that the choices you make in dialogue do often have an impact on the world, but those consequences can also turn out to be not what you imagined they would be.

Will Bioware’s MMO have some sort of save option? It doesn’t seem likely, so I wonder if they have come up with a different way to deal with the fact that most MMO players don’t seem to like being tied to a decision if it turns out to be the wrong one for them.

Sort of like when you help Volcor in ‘A Lost Master’ in Darkshore. You get a choice of fighting your way out while trying to keep Volcor alive, or sneaking out which, unless you’re a Stealth class, usually means legging it and hoping you survive (because Volcor will nick the Cloak of Invisibility and disappear on you).

So, how about a nice bit of Wensleydale?

I don’t often read quest text in WoW and I remember being annoyed by the slow text when I played the beta. I guess I don’t really care about the quests that I do, I just want to experience the social fun and thrill of rewards when I do them.

Voice acting though, without a doubt, does enhance the immersion of a game. I’d urge anyone to try out Everquest 2 if they disagree. Even just running around a city and hearing NPCs talking and calling out to you is incredible. Once players get past the intitial immersion and roleplay though and enter the “stat grind/competition” element, it’s all meaningless.

As previously mentioned, this has been done in the Wiiware title “My Life as a King”. It’s also dreadfully dull to wait for the NPCs to come back from their dungeon crawling. An MMO like that would be….. painful at best.

As for the content locusts, they can bite my caucasian ass. The only problem (though it’s a sizeable one) I have with voice-overs is that they’re lovely THE FIRST TIME. When it’s the second, third or thirty-third time then yes, I am mashing that ESC key right next to the content locusts.

“Enchantment? Enchantment!”

I rest my case.

To the pain!

I installed instant quest text because I got tired of the slow pace. I can read incredibly fast and it was just annoying having the quest text scroll so slowly. However, it got harder to actually read the quest text once my friends installed it, too. But, for me, voice acting causes the same frustration because I’m happy reading instead of listening. I suspect I’m in the minority, though, and that good voice acting might draw some more people in.

Does this mean that MMOs should devolve to “push quest vending machine button, insert 10 rat corpses, obtain product” setup? No. It means that we have to be smarter about how we do stories in games. My guess is that fully voiced dialog isn’t the way, but Bioware will probably happily prove me wrong. At the very least, I think some people will enjoy the voice content mostly because it is in a beloved setting.