To Voice, or not to Voice

[Venthrac]

With The Old Republic and The Secret World, in-game cinematics are clearly becoming a bigger part of MMOs. Dialogue that was once exclusively the domain of text is now being brought to life by a voice cast, including not just NPCs, but also your own player character.

For obvious reasons, this latter part has caused some controversy. Players no more want the game to decide how their character talks than they want the game to pick their clothes, hairstyle, race or class.

On the other hand, some players find it annoying when everyone in the cinematic talks except for their character, who stands around like a mute.

I submit for discussion... is it better to have cinematics in which your player character has a voice, but you don't get to choose it? (The Old Republic way) Or do you prefer that if you don't get to choose a voice for your character, then your character never speaks (the Secret World way)?

[Askari]

My opinion:

I want my MMO's to actually be multiplayer, so I don't want a lot of cutscenes, solo instances, personal story, dialog or any other shenanigans that takes me away from interacting with real people.

If a multiplayer game decides it wants to take me away from other players for a personal cutscene and dialog, I want them to make it repeatable or let me pause it. But overall, I prefer cinematics be kept to a minimum.

If a multiplayer game wants to get me alone for a fight, where they can control the fight's difficulty by tuning it as solo-only for dramatic effect or as a content-gating mechanism, keep it very short. Instance just the final boss' room, not the whole encounter.

As for my character's voice-acting, I'd rather have no voice than the wrong voice. Voice choice would be good, and I definitely like that is solo RPGs. But that's because I like a lot of cutscenes and dialog in solo-RPGs. But since I am not a huge fan of pausing for cutscenes in multiplayer games, choice of voices is not something I think is worth the resources in an MMO.

[oakmist]

Very well put Askari.  I'm with you.

[Rumze]

I dont mind too much.
Im usually in for the ride with a game and multiplayer tends to be more fun because you can enjoy the ride with others. Share the fun and laughter.

That said, there were classes I could not play in swtor because the voice was just too jarring for my concept.

Thats one of the reasons I picked my class race combos for guild wars the way I did. I changed from sylvari male to female for that reason.

But I do like to have cinematics be short and have an impact. Not long and overdrawn. Im not sure if people played it but the zone of Uldum was beautiful but I hated questing there because despite loving the lore, they had cutscenes every 2 or 3 quests that often went on for 5 to 6 minutes.

Swtor wasnt too bad but I like the balance guild wars has. No waiting for npcs to walk or run, just dialogue and bam bam bam done and on to the next part.

[Askari]

One thing that was a very nice novelty in SWTOR was the extension of multiplayer-ness into the cutscene format. The first few times I did the party cutscenes in SWTOR,  I thought it was pretty cool. I liked how each person selected a dialog option, and then one person "won" and got to speak their line.

The problem comes right back to it being multiplayer though.

There will be people who have already seen the multi-player cutscene several times and could care less. There will be impatient people who are just aggravated by cutscenes in general. So you're back to either escaping through the expensive-to-produce cutscene, so as not to hold up the party... or some people are standing around tapping their feet while you watch the thing.

So once again, SWTOR's multiplayer cutscenes were a cool idea, but I still think I prefer minimal cutscenes/cinematics in multiplayer games.

[Mixxi]

If my character has a voice, I'd like some sort of choice. I did like being able to select my player's voice from a menu of several voices in EQ2.  Pirrip may have been a Froglok, but she definitely did not have a Froglok voice.

[Gith]

I liked it back in the day of Baldur's Gate where you could choose one of many voices for your character when they said random stuff. But in a completely voice acted game that would cost too much. I don't really mind the voice acting being determined for me. I am a gamer that enjoys long ass cut scenes but mostly in my single player games. I would prefer stuff be more group oriented and less single player for an MMO as Askari said.

[Venthrac]

Neverwinter Nights also let you choose your character's voice, and I adored that feature. I wish more games offered it, especially MMOs. But then of course, that means you have to pay for a lot more hours of VO recording, and that stuff is expensive.