Voice overs potentially ToRs downfall?

Good idea-get rid of all text in the game to avoid that nasty reading!

So after they fix the other three pillars they'll get around to the fourth one they touted endlessly?

So that means they have even less excuse for the paltry amount of content released so far?

I think he's referring to the voice overs. As in the voice overs for the content are already long done. That would explain how the dialogue from future raids is already in the game available to be data mined. Building the raids and content which includes these conversations is quite another thing entirely.

Honestly I don't believe the voice overs took as much resources as people are thinking. Compared to building the game itself, simply recording the conversations of the characters isn't all that difficult. Yes they have to hire a writing staff and voice actors in addition to normal staff, but its not like these guys make up the majority of the development team.

Good for you!! Now that they said they are going to release new content every 6-week. Have fun waiting. Anyways, they did say alot of things but where are they??

The voice overs are what sets this game apart from all the rest. It's one of the many reasons I am still playing this game. I loved it and Bioware did a great job on them.

It's not what they did wrong, voice overs are what they did right.

Almost all MMOs are filled with this type of quests, except that it's usually 'collect 100 boar butts'. And yes I think class stories are worth collecting those butts.

I have an idea to help with this problem.

1) there is a huge collection of VO for alien and robot races in the game. Dialog can be written for this kind of speech since it is not standard.
2) there is also a good amount of dialog that can be considered story neutral...especially player responses.

So here is my idea...Spec Ops/Jedi Council/Sith Order missions

The idea is to create a single set of VO intros to the supplemental mission system. A short dialog set, contacted by a special member of the organization listed above, directs you to the mission boards.

On those boards missions are generated randomly, using plugins to generate/assign dialog sets. You can have three kinds of missions

1) Special

This is a retrieve or repair mission, where you are sent in behind enemy lines to destroy or repair an item. You may have a boss to kill. An alien or droid will provide dialog. Accessing systems or retrieving records can also be done.

2) Search and Destroy

This mission sends you in to attack a base, group or installation. You kill X amount of trash, and perhaps one or two bosses, no dialog except for Alien or Droid commentary.

3) Intelligence or Espionage

This mission asks you to investigate/frame subjects or do recon on a specific area. May or may not have enemy contact.

4) Companion missions

Not from terminals. Companions would offer missions that you could go on, could be any type of mission. Again, standard existing dialog is used.


The rewards would be commendations and/or orange items (empty) and perhaps class specific green items. Other drops from mobs would be regular world drops.

This way an unlimited supply of missions is provided. Eventually this system can be used to create space and personal ship defense/invasion missions as well.

Just a thought....

I have to add an addendum...

Scaling heroics.

The idea is to set heroics to allow scaling, using an UI setting. This way ANY heroic can be run at your level, as all mobs inside will scale based on your level or group level, and rewards will also scale automatically. This gives interest in running old content since it scales up in difficulty based on your level or group...and is optional.

Its not just voice overs. Its also building the cut scenes and the coding for it. Its also building the choices and the coding for it. Its the extra coding it takes to let the database know your character has chosen "x" and not "y" "z" or "a". Its also syncing all that together. Perhaps you were not in beta but if you were in early beta there were alot of cutscense that were way out of sync. Showing the wrong frame, showing the wrong dialogue, choices poping up too soon, showing the wall instead of the characters talking. Some selections would bug quests all together and was not fixable until they actual fixed the bug. There was one I remember, in the BH story, that bugged and you couldnt continue the class story at all. That was still in, in some cases, at launch. That stuff is all extra coding work, extra art work, extra animation work and extra testing and everything else... that text quests or terminal quests dont have to worry about.

Well thing about that part is that easy entry of dialog options tends to be built into the toolset they made for building the game.

Dialog options are probably fairly easy to make at this point for them. Hopefully they've also streamlined a lot of the body animations used while talking. The most difficult part that I can see for them now is matching the mouth to the words. That I can see them having to do new work for each time.

That being said, I don't actually know how they built their toolset. If its similar to the Dragonage toolset, and they continuously streamline it(which is probably how they were able to fix all those problems from beta, I doubt they redid their code individually on each and every cutscene, but instead fixed the toolset issues that caused the cutscenes to be buggy). Overall I'm not sure how much effort is required to add in new cutscenes. My personal opinion is that relative to the rest of the game, new warzones or new operations, which require the addition of new mechanics to the toolset, they would be easy and quick to do. It probably took a lot of resources to build into the toolset originally, but doesn't take as much resources now. Like the design of a bush might originally take a lot of work, but from the toolset its now a drag and drop(not quite to that extreme but you get the picture).

Of course I don't really know how they built their toolset. Given the focus of the game, its 4th pillar, I would assume they'd have tried to streamline the addition of new story content as much as possible. Nobody outside of Bioware really knows how much resources are now required to add new voice over content, so I think its hard to judge whether or not its causing a dearth of content.