Voice overs potentially ToRs downfall?

Yes, voice overs were the downfall of SWTOR. Too much resources put into them when they would have been MUCH better put into something else. PvP, etc.

Interesting to note: your top-tier voice actors will pull in more cash for lending their voice to a game than your most high-profile live actors.

So because someone mentions something that could potentially be true yet you disagree with it then it's a troll thread?

if you are going to say it's a single player game then so is wow, tera, eve, aion, dcuo, and all the rest because every single one of them you can solo easy, no problem.

MMO is = having hundreds or thousands (considered massive) of people all online at the same time playing with each other in a world/universe. That's an mmo.

It never stops to amaze me why and how EA spend so much money and effort on full voice acting and at same time displayed absolutely no effort or ambition at all when it comes to writing and character development.

At least good 80% of all dialogue you will ever encounter is of utterly forgettable " typical vanilla wow quest log read out loud" quality.

Vast majority of characters you ever encounter are severly lacking in character. It is very rare to encounter anyone who'd have any personality to speak of. Part of this has to do with their oddball decision to introduce like five million NPCs. Generally speaking typical NPC gets very little " screen time" and whatever little he gets is spend on " i need droid arses. there are some in north. go pick them up. may fiorce be with you" - drivel. If you must have 100 quests in planet Y, why is it you have some..33-50 NPCs giving these quests? So many different faces,none of them has time to establish any depth.

It is unsettling how much better The Secret World does in this regard. Ultimately, the structure is similar. You have tons of NPCs givign tons of quests. Player does the quests. Player moves on. Yet, TSW NPCs display much more personality..they are so much more alive. They give a very credible illusion of being NPCs with worries, fears and lives of their own..rather than NPCs who stand there waiting for player to click them so they can speak about gathering droid arses.

Much of it has to do with Bioware's persistently sticking with typical quest log approach to the quest giver NPCs. Somewhere very early on they decided every single NPC - MUST - tell player about how droids have arses, how he needs droid arses, how there are some arses available up north and how it'd be great if player went to pick the said arses up. Game mechanics present make all of this dialogue completely unnecessry, if not unwelcome; Once you've enjoyed some 90 secs of dialogue about where's and hows of droid arses, the quest pops in your log. You get friendly big arrow pointing straight to the said droid arses. Finding the location of the arses is not part of the game, so to speak. It is not among the challenges or..aspects TOR presents to player. With this in mind, why is it necessary to sacrifice virtually all of quest NPCs screen time for this?

If you go with arrows and pointers leading straight to quest zones shown in map, quest logs and descriptions themselves should be way more abstract. That 90 sec screentime of an invidual NPC could be used for plot advancement or building of much needed character.

Class storylines themselves have some good moments here and there. At least companion-> player interaction dodges the bullet described above almost always. Sadly this vanishes in sea of dialogue about droid arses. Imagine opening scene of Pulp Fiction where Jackson and Travolta spend all of their time speaking about shotguns in truck of the car. Once that is covered they speak of where the right appartment is, how to get there, how many people are inside and how they need to be extra careful about it all. No character development, no feet massages, no trips to Amsterdam. That's TOR dialogue for you.

I completely disagree, I've found the personalities and writing pretty good over all for SWTOR, sure there are some dud's like the Consular Story but over all they did a pretty good job....
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OP is flat out wrong the voice overs and story is the only thing that sets the game aside and is the only reason I play the game.
If anything there should have been more voice overs.

Investment in any other area would be a waste of time PVP players always whine and move on.

If there is mistake that has been done is to not introduce more planetary quests with several levels of it.

Something on the line of multiple bonus series for each planet.