I'm pretty sure, to mimic story and voice overs to the extent that TOR has done it, would require an extremely large amount of funds that most publishers can't, or are not willing to match.
I think story will find it's way into questing in the larger scheme of things, but full voice acting isn't exactly necessary or advisable for a company with a limited budget.
Im not sure it will change questing forever. I dont see many other games really going to this extreme that Swtor has. Or does the author of the article think that every game developer really has 200 million bucks to spend on a game? Most of that on voice talent? Nope.
I do agree that "story" really give a great context to whats going on. But the actual game play has to stand up as well. And in Swtors case it just might.
I agree that the days of blocks of quest texts might be slowly coming to an end. But I dont think many other games are going to mess with gigantic tons of voice content even if they could afford it. There are other game play mechanics that are more important than interactive cut scenes.
And thats really what this article was about. Interactive cut scenes will change mmos forever! Okay, well if they do, big whoop. Every game from Swtor on could do it and I dont think Id just wig out over it. If I have a ten minute conversation with some quest giver about how he needs ten rats killed, I honestly would rather just get the stupid quest text and kill the stupid rats. In the time it takes me to hold one stupid NPC conversation I could have half completed the quest by then.
Change questing forever! Woooo! Exciting.....
Only things I really disagree with is the supposed cost of voice acting and the length of cutscenes.
First, the costs of VO are actually pretty low considering the amount of content that can be completed in one day of recording. The "Bigger Names" do cost a little more, but still, when you figure in how much they are paid on average versus how much content is recorded, it is pretty small overall and BioWare did not ONLY hire the big names either.
Second, your over exxageration of the cut scene length has already been dispelled by BioWare. Most cutscenes are1 minute to 2.5 minutes long. Only a very few are longer for greater story impact. That length is also counting the time it takes people to make decisions (on average). So basically the cutscene will take about as long as it does to read a wall of text anyways. Also, via the spacebar, you have a "Fast Forward" button built in so if the one to two and a half minute dialogue is just too long for you, you can skip parts of it.
Other than that, I can't disagree with your opinion because it is your opinion and I have my own.
"If half of what you tell me is a lie, how can I believe any of it?"
gw 2 is buy to play as such star wars woint lose a market share to them. Players may stop playing tor but it wont be because of gw2 it will be for other reasons
that said i think story and choice will change how people feel abotu mmos. especially blocks of text. While an mmo should be about playing with others. Which tor has everything else any themepark mmos has to socialoize i dont see why so many think this game is a single player game.
There story continues into multi player areas also which i think will be cool. As u get to see what others choose when u lose a roll for who gets to talk will make converstaions with npcs in group a fun thing to do.
the reason people hate pugs is because in wow u get alot of idiots who will cut and leave at teh wrong time or just make life miserable when u run wiht them and i play wow still and love it. But sometimes the people u pug with are jerks and its a pain.
So, here's the thing. The author killed his article about 2/3 the way through. Paraphrasing ... "Questing will change forever except ... it's still structured like every other theme park MMO out there." o.O
Can I get less this guy and more Isabelle please?
I never played GW and I'm not a fanboy, but GW2 is the only MMO in development that looks like it's going to change the general MMO design paradigm. Rift pushed dynamic events, but became stale and less dynamic over time. If GW2 fully fleshs out what Rift was trying to do and can live up to half the hype, it's going to blow TOR/WoW2.5 out of the water.
I used to want more story in my MMO, but the way WoW and TOR are pushing the market, why play an MMO? They've basically beocme a combination of single player RPGs and hub/spoke instanced content where you spend little of your time in the game world at the level cap. That doesn't interest me anymore.
I agree with this article and what Bill failed to mention was the voice acting in AoC which in my opinion hurt the game because it was only on the starter Island. Every single player in the guild I was in at the time said the the same thing as they left the starter Island and entered the rest of the world only to find out there was no more voice acting for NPCs "WTF?". It was a massive downer for everyone to go from voice acted Npc's to reading text and it pissed everyone off.
Bill I hope you have already joined the rest of us rabid fanbois in pre-ordering SWTOR and if not WHY NOT?
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
If anybody is asking, as the game plays right now, the scenes look exactly like mass effect in the way you choose your answering and all that. I don't mind cut scenes, but do you know how many would be inside a MMO if every quest had its own cut scene.
Just imagine:
Quest is to collect some meat from the creatures...
"In a land of chaos, everyone needs meat, but you my friend, only need 10 pieces to satisfy this man and collect you money"
Just my 2 cents from playing the game.
Visit the new DCUO fansite, the Gotham Library at GothamLibrary.com.
So far, imo, nothing beats voice interpreted quest givers in Tortage ... but only there unfort. And in any game I miss a lot that. You could also skip there and just pressing buttons, but less likely. And besides all .... text was much more concise. when i see quest description covering nearly whole screen is much less likely I will read all.
VO is great and yeah it makes the quests have a new feel, but if you are still doing the same old quests is it really different?
do you think VO will make players listen? it wont stop those rushing to max. it wont catter to the PvPers. Honestly I have played TOR at the shows and cons and my personal opinion on the matter has declined the more and more i try it out.
I thought at first it was a whole new way to tell a story, and it still is, but i alos thought the questing would change, but it really hasn't. The game feels like a hub to hub game but i heard these voices once in a while. I may be wrong but I really don't know
I speak from my WoW experience, but as anyone who played that game knows the questing style changed dramatically between Burning Crusade and Wrath and finally Cataclysm from mostly picking up kill quests with rare questlines to almost completly storyline progression, truely a theme ride MMO.
And it seemed fun at first. But the problem is that style of questing has zero replayability and that's a bad thing in a MMO. People played WoW for years because they could reroll another character, another faction and have a different experience picking new zones, new quests each time and just grinding if they felt like it.
But now the second time and every time after is a chore. And that's why i don't play WoW anymore.
And it's not like it's the first game to try it. AoC did, for the whole start of the game it was voiced and fat good that did them. Just because it's voiced and has a storyline it dosen't mean you want to do it again, in fact the opposite the second time around, it feels forced.
And it's not just about rerolling here, who wants to run an instance 20 times for the Laser Rifle of Sith Slaying and go through the same dialog options 20 times ? Ugh..
This style of questing may be the norm for single player games but MMOs need to provide content and keep player attention for months and years. I think a year down the line it's problems and limitations will become clear or the devs will stand there scratching their hads wondering why everyone is bored and quiting all of a sudden.
OMG! Thank you.
Too many people here have zero clue and only froth at the mouth protecting this game, yes it'll be fun for a month or two, then watch the mass exodus just like AoC.
With all due respect, I think the only clueless person is you. Many things caused a mass exodus in AoC shortly after launch, but if questing style was one of them, it was only because most people absolutely loved Tortage, the starting area, with its fully voiced over quests and story arcs, and were deeply disappointed that the rest of the game was mostly done in the traditional way of text dialogue.
Guild Wars 2 will have much of it's NPC dialogue voiced. Possibly not as much as TOR, but they also have done more to get away from the traditional quest structure by replacing quests and quest givers with Dynamic Events. GW2 puts more stress on providing brief voiceovers, then leaving it to things actually going on around the character to fill in the rest; I'm sure TOR does some of this, but they seem to rely more on heavier use of voicovers and a some what more familiar quest structure.
That's not to take anything away from TOR, both games will contribute much to shaping the way questing is handled in future games. I just think it's remiss to single out TOR when GW2 offer almost as much use of voicovers, along with a very different and innovative take on how to provide content in the game world.
I'll be playing both games and I'm excited about different things for each title. However, the scope of innovation in GW2 is just a bit more impressive to me. If both games pull off what looks good on paper and so far in demos, the two combined will really shake up MMO design for ever.
Originally posted by Milkopilko you want to see changing certain things about MMOs forever? look at Guild Wars 2, not star wars
Dynamic events could've been truly game changing. But unfortunately, Anet doesnt have the guts to do it proper. Offering only one way to do an event is a big letdown. I understand that they want to keep the game carebear, but imo, they are taking a good idea and pigeon holing it. Some other dev will step up and make dynamic events that have multiple choices, maybe even *gasp* conflicting choices. When that happens, I will take notice.
Esport pvp is a plague that has seeped over from fps and rts into a genre where it doesnt belong. I loathe it. It kills the spirit of mmorpg pvp. Small scale instanced fights where lore doesnt matter, faction doesnt matter. It sucks the life out of a virtual world. Shit they are even going as far as just having servers fight in a 3 way. Parallel universes? lol so trashy and shallow.
Cash shops with cosmetic items and customization items is another plague. It takes away unique opportunities for crafters and it bypasses a player driven economy. Give unique looks and customization back to the crafters. Keep the in game exchanges to just between players not players buying from devs in game ffs.
Personal story is a FORCED SINGLE PLAYER GAME. You cannot group up to do your personal story. You run around in an instanced part of town and say hi to npcs that you met on your single player only personal quests. Why the frak is this in an mmorpg? At least TOR lets you group up.
Yet another MMO with drag n drop crafting and node farming resources....are you kidding me? They make a dynamic event system for their entire game world and fail to incorporate resources into it? Phased nodes.. thats the best they can come up with. So you can loot or buy (from cash shops) items that improve stats or add unique skins. While crafters get the shaft making generic items that you can improve through said cash shop. Heres an idea: how about doing the EXACT opposite of that. Why dont we buy generic weapons and armor from cash shops and let the crafters make interesting skins and desirable stats? Seriously, they really just need to look at what their doing with crafting and literally do the opposite. It would be a huge improvement.
My years of MMORPGs told me: if a game (especially one that's not released yet) is told to have something revolutionary awesome at new, it will be mildly interesting, at best. And normally it's just the same stuff as before in a different color.
you want to see changing certain things about MMOs forever? look at Guild Wars 2, not star wars
Dynamic events could've been truly game changing. But unfortunately, Anet doesnt have the guts to do it proper. Offering only one way to do an event is a big letdown. I understand that they want to keep the game carebear, but imo, they are taking a good idea and pigeon holing it. Some other dev will step up and make dynamic events that have multiple choices, maybe even *gasp* conflicting choices. When that happens, I will take notice.
Esport pvp is a plague that has seeped over from fps and rts into a genre where it doesnt belong. I loathe it. It kills the spirit of mmorpg pvp. Small scale instanced fights where lore doesnt matter, faction doesnt matter. It sucks the life out of a virtual world. Shit they are even going as far as just having servers fight in a 3 way. Parallel universes? lol so trashy and shallow.
Cash shops with cosmetic items and customization items is another plague. It takes away unique opportunities for crafters and it bypasses a player driven economy. Give unique looks and customization back to the crafters. Keep the in game exchanges to just between players not players buying from devs in game ffs.
Personal story is a FORCED SINGLE PLAYER GAME. You cannot group up to do your personal story. You run around in an instanced part of town and say hi to npcs that you met on your single player only personal quests. Why the frak is this in an mmorpg? At least TOR lets you group up.
Yet another MMO with drag n drop crafting and node farming resources....are you kidding me? They make a dynamic event system for their entire game world and fail to incorporate resources into it? Phased nodes.. thats the best they can come up with. So you can loot or buy (from cash shops) items that improve stats or add unique skins. While crafters get the shaft making generic items that you can improve through said cash shop. Heres an idea: how about doing the EXACT opposite of that. Why dont we buy generic weapons and armor from cash shops and let the crafters make interesting skins and desirable stats? Seriously, they really just need to look at what their doing with crafting and literally do the opposite. It would be a huge improvement.
shall I go on?
Dynamic events are already much more intensive to create than quests. And they need to create so many more of them because unlike quests, they don't run all the time. So having multiple outcomes that people aren't even going to see unless they stand around and do it again (and purposely try to engineer a different outcome) is a poor allocation of resources that could be used to just create a different event instead. It's not about keeping it carebear, it's about going way beyond what any other MMO has done and made it all but completely impossible to grief someone else. As far as conflicting choices in DEs, look toward world PVP where players from one side will try to escort a caravan or whatever and another faction will try to take it.
When you have a griefless PVE world but also want 3 faction PVP, I don't know how else you do it except put it in a parallel universe. However trashy and shallow it might be, it also allows an entire server to participate without being broken up into factions, it gives people something permanent to fight for (their W/L record), and solves faction balance/population problems by changing the matchups every 2 weeks so they're as fair as possible.
We don't even know what the cash shop will offer, probably just in town costumes. Crafted armor will certainly have unique skins. We don't even know if crafters won't also be able to make their own in town costumes. I know some people don't like any cash shop, but I personally am not going to complain that the first AAA B2P MMO in history will also have a vanity cash shop.
You CAN invite other players to take part in your personal story. Also, if you don't want to do the personal story, don't do the personal story, it's not forced. As I've said on several occassions, dynamic events are 100% better than quests when it comes to the kind of open world leveling "tasks" in MMOs. The only place I can think of where they don't do that is an individual arcing quest line (you can do a huge group chain like leading up to the Shatterer but not solo). Everything about GW2 except for the personal story is about putting the MMO back in MMORPG. The personal story is about putting the RPG back in MMORPG.
Crafting is at least a little different because it tries to eliminate grind and repetition and adds a discovery aspect. As far as gathering goes, even that has a communal aspect. Everybody gets a shot at a node so they can't be griefed. Everybody has every gathering profession automatically so that nobody feels like they're holding other people up or waiting on them, everyone wants to fight toward the node and stop and mine it. Cash shop items don't improve stats, it's a vanity shop, and as I've said before, we don't even know that they'll sell armor skins or even what they're going to sell at all. And buying generic cash shop items, really, who would ever do that? Crafted items will have their own skins and be equivalent in power to dungeon gear. You can probably craft stat boosters as well.
Please do.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it."-Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
Call me a troll or whatever, but its still the same thing as wow kill these and deliver this EQ2 did the whole voice over thing and it just replaces the text boxes thats it... nothing else, seriously u want something different? GW2 changing everything there is to a MMO i dont wanna start another troll/fanboy uproar its just my opinion but look at it closely for a sec...
Writing that voiceover "will change questing forevere" is overblown and ignores precedent. If the argument is that Bioware writes better dialogue.... then how consistently and how well they can produce new content remains to be seen
I would love to see more of this in future mmos. However there are too many add kiddies that just want everything "now" and are already whining on the star wars forums that they don't care about the talking. These are the same yahoos that just accept quests without reading a single word and just follow the bouncing ball to the mob zone and look at the numbers while they kill things.
I like the lore. I like the immersion. I read every quest.
All systems in a MMO are inter-related, they all work together or the game sucks.
Bioware is giving TOR a more "action packed" combat experience then a WoW/EQ2/Rift by eliminating auto attack and speeding up the pace of combat, having the player constantly fighting more then one enemy at a time, etc.
The proof is in the pudding, as they say - watch the videos.
If you "speed up" the combat then you have to slow down the non-combat in order to keep the perfect balance of proper pacing.
Guild Wars 2 is doing the same thing.
Bioware is slowing down the non-combat pacing by using tons of VO - obviously not the only reason they are using VO the major reason is clearly story with a big nod towards immersion.
But pacing is definitely a factor.
Games like WoW - most player skip the quest text or skim through it, so you have to keep the combat very near constant - moving from one fight straight to the next straight to the next becuase each individual instance of combat is incredibly boring.
Again, it's all about pacing.
Pacing is what gives a game the right "feel" and for these kinds of games it's all about travel time and combat time and combat intensity and the "down time" between.
WoW moves content into quest hubs where you get a group of quest, go out and grind through them quick, come back to the hub, get another group of quests. Rift does this too.
It's incredibly lame and boring and the very exact definition of a grind, unfortunately for their "design" staff who majorly crapped the bed there.
Because it's so non-stop grind grind grind the combat has to be the same boring pull 1 mob, run through the exact same rotation, pull the next mob etc.
Bioware is completely changing the pacing, and the story is definitely a big part of that, as well as the combat pacing.
I read a few pages of comments. Forgive me if this has been covered already. I think the OP is meant to emphasize that VO questing will influence AAA MMOs. Not Independent developers.
Many have said it more eloquently than I - The reason this WILL become a AAA MMO standard is because of the cost of development. Your Mortal Online, Darkfalls, Salem, etc. will give the sandboxers plenty of content anyway because they win on player freedom. The player makes his/her own way more or less (until the "uber builds/macros are posted online).
The AAA MMO will always cater to the casual gamer - because there is a ton of them. The classic sandboxer are loyal, dedicated to the genre, but they are not enough to sustain a AAA budget.
Casuals play single player games a lot. So they will gravitate to a game that lets you solo. Voice over stories, cutscenes and instances are the casuals standard feed. They will play the MMO now and get sucked in. The more catering to the individual, the better.
Speeding up combat can be a good thing as you are turning that aspect of the game into a button masher which gives players an FPS feel for the combat which will feel sorta fresh. It will make EQ2 and WoW seem a bit dated. WoW basically in combat went from being fast to cool-downs on a lot of class actions to improve balance...it is at the pace FF is now, and that is slow since it is aimed at pure PvE audience almost.
Bill, I agree with you completely on this as this is what I feel will set SWTOR apart and make it a hit, as well.
I can't tell you how many times I've been in an MMO in which those I'm questing with albeit friends or just someone I met in game, isn't reading the quests and/or has no clue as to what is going on with the storyline. Now I consider myself to be a fast reader so it's not like those around me are reading faster. They are simply right-clicking on the quest-giver and clicking "Accept".
Not sure if these games just attract that type of crowd or if it is just that the storylines in some games just isn't compelling to others, but suprisingly a lot of people that I play these games with appear to hate to read quests. *shrugs*
if people can't be bothered to read the quests etc.. and yes.. most don't.. then its even less likely that they'd spend even more time waiting listening.. WoW handles it pretty well with the brief line of text on the 'tracking' option for quests, and highlighting beasties you might need to kill for something - they've done their level best to idiot proof their game....
stands to reason that Bioware will most likely have to do the same kind of thing with SW;TOR...
When they have to make a choice based on that dialogue, then I believe that changes everything!
The problem with games like WoW and the point that some seem to be missing here, is that in other MMOs there is no interaction with quest givers other than clicking on the NPC and accepting the quest. In those other MMOs, once you've killed the trash mobs or collected "x" items, the interaction stops and you simply hand-in the quest. SWTOR goes a bit further than just voice acting, by giving you choices that change what happens in the game. So with SWTOR, the interaction continues long after it has ended in other games. Just like in a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, it requires you to make a choice. I wish I could give you more info or an example of this, however, the NDA prevents me from doing so. Keep in mind, it's not just the VO that is the game-changer here, it's the choices you character is making affecting the outcome.
All I can say is that I implore you to try questing in SWTOR once it releases and then come and tell me that you still feel or find the old-style quest method used in games like WoW still as exhilarating or entertaining. Let's just say that I won't be holding my breath.
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You're wasting your time. No matter how many times you tell these people that TOR's VO is more than just an NPC reading quest text to the player, they still don't get it.
We'll just have to wait for release, and let them find out for themselves.
Comments
I'm pretty sure, to mimic story and voice overs to the extent that TOR has done it, would require an extremely large amount of funds that most publishers can't, or are not willing to match.
I think story will find it's way into questing in the larger scheme of things, but full voice acting isn't exactly necessary or advisable for a company with a limited budget.
Only things I really disagree with is the supposed cost of voice acting and the length of cutscenes.
First, the costs of VO are actually pretty low considering the amount of content that can be completed in one day of recording. The "Bigger Names" do cost a little more, but still, when you figure in how much they are paid on average versus how much content is recorded, it is pretty small overall and BioWare did not ONLY hire the big names either.
Second, your over exxageration of the cut scene length has already been dispelled by BioWare. Most cutscenes are1 minute to 2.5 minutes long. Only a very few are longer for greater story impact. That length is also counting the time it takes people to make decisions (on average). So basically the cutscene will take about as long as it does to read a wall of text anyways. Also, via the spacebar, you have a "Fast Forward" button built in so if the one to two and a half minute dialogue is just too long for you, you can skip parts of it.
Other than that, I can't disagree with your opinion because it is your opinion and I have my own.
"If half of what you tell me is a lie, how can I believe any of it?"
gw 2 is buy to play as such star wars woint lose a market share to them. Players may stop playing tor but it wont be because of gw2 it will be for other reasons
that said i think story and choice will change how people feel abotu mmos. especially blocks of text. While an mmo should be about playing with others. Which tor has everything else any themepark mmos has to socialoize i dont see why so many think this game is a single player game.
There story continues into multi player areas also which i think will be cool. As u get to see what others choose when u lose a roll for who gets to talk will make converstaions with npcs in group a fun thing to do.
the reason people hate pugs is because in wow u get alot of idiots who will cut and leave at teh wrong time or just make life miserable when u run wiht them and i play wow still and love it. But sometimes the people u pug with are jerks and its a pain.
So, here's the thing. The author killed his article about 2/3 the way through. Paraphrasing ... "Questing will change forever except ... it's still structured like every other theme park MMO out there." o.O
Can I get less this guy and more Isabelle please?
I never played GW and I'm not a fanboy, but GW2 is the only MMO in development that looks like it's going to change the general MMO design paradigm. Rift pushed dynamic events, but became stale and less dynamic over time. If GW2 fully fleshs out what Rift was trying to do and can live up to half the hype, it's going to blow TOR/WoW2.5 out of the water.
I used to want more story in my MMO, but the way WoW and TOR are pushing the market, why play an MMO? They've basically beocme a combination of single player RPGs and hub/spoke instanced content where you spend little of your time in the game world at the level cap. That doesn't interest me anymore.
If you don't worry about it, it's not a problem.
I agree with this article and what Bill failed to mention was the voice acting in AoC which in my opinion hurt the game because it was only on the starter Island. Every single player in the guild I was in at the time said the the same thing as they left the starter Island and entered the rest of the world only to find out there was no more voice acting for NPCs "WTF?". It was a massive downer for everyone to go from voice acted Npc's to reading text and it pissed everyone off.
Bill I hope you have already joined the rest of us rabid fanbois in pre-ordering SWTOR and if not WHY NOT?
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
CS Lewis
Super solo story during leveling just to hit raiding endgame ... whats the point of it ?
If EA/BW succeeds in getting players to give a damn about the story, that in of itself would be the biggest innovation this genre has ever seen.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
Because even the endgame areas have "Super stories" as well, not just raiding?
"If half of what you tell me is a lie, how can I believe any of it?"
If anybody is asking, as the game plays right now, the scenes look exactly like mass effect in the way you choose your answering and all that. I don't mind cut scenes, but do you know how many would be inside a MMO if every quest had its own cut scene.
Just imagine:
Quest is to collect some meat from the creatures...
"In a land of chaos, everyone needs meat, but you my friend, only need 10 pieces to satisfy this man and collect you money"
Just my 2 cents from playing the game.
Visit the new DCUO fansite, the Gotham Library at GothamLibrary.com.
So far, imo, nothing beats voice interpreted quest givers in Tortage ... but only there unfort. And in any game I miss a lot that. You could also skip there and just pressing buttons, but less likely. And besides all .... text was much more concise. when i see quest description covering nearly whole screen is much less likely I will read all.
VO is great and yeah it makes the quests have a new feel, but if you are still doing the same old quests is it really different?
do you think VO will make players listen? it wont stop those rushing to max. it wont catter to the PvPers. Honestly I have played TOR at the shows and cons and my personal opinion on the matter has declined the more and more i try it out.
I thought at first it was a whole new way to tell a story, and it still is, but i alos thought the questing would change, but it really hasn't. The game feels like a hub to hub game but i heard these voices once in a while. I may be wrong but I really don't know
you want to see changing certain things about MMOs forever? look at Guild Wars 2, not star wars
With all due respect, I think the only clueless person is you. Many things caused a mass exodus in AoC shortly after launch, but if questing style was one of them, it was only because most people absolutely loved Tortage, the starting area, with its fully voiced over quests and story arcs, and were deeply disappointed that the rest of the game was mostly done in the traditional way of text dialogue.
Guild Wars 2 will have much of it's NPC dialogue voiced. Possibly not as much as TOR, but they also have done more to get away from the traditional quest structure by replacing quests and quest givers with Dynamic Events. GW2 puts more stress on providing brief voiceovers, then leaving it to things actually going on around the character to fill in the rest; I'm sure TOR does some of this, but they seem to rely more on heavier use of voicovers and a some what more familiar quest structure.
That's not to take anything away from TOR, both games will contribute much to shaping the way questing is handled in future games. I just think it's remiss to single out TOR when GW2 offer almost as much use of voicovers, along with a very different and innovative take on how to provide content in the game world.
I'll be playing both games and I'm excited about different things for each title. However, the scope of innovation in GW2 is just a bit more impressive to me. If both games pull off what looks good on paper and so far in demos, the two combined will really shake up MMO design for ever.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
Esport pvp is a plague that has seeped over from fps and rts into a genre where it doesnt belong. I loathe it. It kills the spirit of mmorpg pvp. Small scale instanced fights where lore doesnt matter, faction doesnt matter. It sucks the life out of a virtual world. Shit they are even going as far as just having servers fight in a 3 way. Parallel universes? lol so trashy and shallow.
Cash shops with cosmetic items and customization items is another plague. It takes away unique opportunities for crafters and it bypasses a player driven economy. Give unique looks and customization back to the crafters. Keep the in game exchanges to just between players not players buying from devs in game ffs.
Personal story is a FORCED SINGLE PLAYER GAME. You cannot group up to do your personal story. You run around in an instanced part of town and say hi to npcs that you met on your single player only personal quests. Why the frak is this in an mmorpg? At least TOR lets you group up.
Yet another MMO with drag n drop crafting and node farming resources....are you kidding me? They make a dynamic event system for their entire game world and fail to incorporate resources into it? Phased nodes.. thats the best they can come up with. So you can loot or buy (from cash shops) items that improve stats or add unique skins. While crafters get the shaft making generic items that you can improve through said cash shop. Heres an idea: how about doing the EXACT opposite of that. Why dont we buy generic weapons and armor from cash shops and let the crafters make interesting skins and desirable stats? Seriously, they really just need to look at what their doing with crafting and literally do the opposite. It would be a huge improvement.
shall I go on?
My years of MMORPGs told me: if a game (especially one that's not released yet) is told to have something revolutionary awesome at new, it will be mildly interesting, at best. And normally it's just the same stuff as before in a different color.
Let's play Fallen Earth (blind, 300 episodes)
Let's play Guild Wars 2 (blind, 45 episodes)
Dynamic events are already much more intensive to create than quests. And they need to create so many more of them because unlike quests, they don't run all the time. So having multiple outcomes that people aren't even going to see unless they stand around and do it again (and purposely try to engineer a different outcome) is a poor allocation of resources that could be used to just create a different event instead. It's not about keeping it carebear, it's about going way beyond what any other MMO has done and made it all but completely impossible to grief someone else. As far as conflicting choices in DEs, look toward world PVP where players from one side will try to escort a caravan or whatever and another faction will try to take it.
When you have a griefless PVE world but also want 3 faction PVP, I don't know how else you do it except put it in a parallel universe. However trashy and shallow it might be, it also allows an entire server to participate without being broken up into factions, it gives people something permanent to fight for (their W/L record), and solves faction balance/population problems by changing the matchups every 2 weeks so they're as fair as possible.
We don't even know what the cash shop will offer, probably just in town costumes. Crafted armor will certainly have unique skins. We don't even know if crafters won't also be able to make their own in town costumes. I know some people don't like any cash shop, but I personally am not going to complain that the first AAA B2P MMO in history will also have a vanity cash shop.
You CAN invite other players to take part in your personal story. Also, if you don't want to do the personal story, don't do the personal story, it's not forced. As I've said on several occassions, dynamic events are 100% better than quests when it comes to the kind of open world leveling "tasks" in MMOs. The only place I can think of where they don't do that is an individual arcing quest line (you can do a huge group chain like leading up to the Shatterer but not solo). Everything about GW2 except for the personal story is about putting the MMO back in MMORPG. The personal story is about putting the RPG back in MMORPG.
Crafting is at least a little different because it tries to eliminate grind and repetition and adds a discovery aspect. As far as gathering goes, even that has a communal aspect. Everybody gets a shot at a node so they can't be griefed. Everybody has every gathering profession automatically so that nobody feels like they're holding other people up or waiting on them, everyone wants to fight toward the node and stop and mine it. Cash shop items don't improve stats, it's a vanity shop, and as I've said before, we don't even know that they'll sell armor skins or even what they're going to sell at all. And buying generic cash shop items, really, who would ever do that? Crafted items will have their own skins and be equivalent in power to dungeon gear. You can probably craft stat boosters as well.
Please do.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
Call me a troll or whatever, but its still the same thing as wow kill these and deliver this EQ2 did the whole voice over thing and it just replaces the text boxes thats it... nothing else, seriously u want something different? GW2 changing everything there is to a MMO i dont wanna start another troll/fanboy uproar its just my opinion but look at it closely for a sec...
EQ2:
The actors used for these parts included Hollywood stars such as Heather Graham (as Queen Antonia Bayle) and Christopher Lee (as Overlord Lucan D'Lere). Wil Wheaton, Dwight Schultz, Richard Horvitz andDanica McKellar are also part of the cast. According to SOE in October 2004, EverQuest II featured 130 hours of spoken dialog recorded by 1,700 voice actors.[citation needed] More dialog has been added since release as part of regular game updates. In September 2005, EverQuest II: Desert of Flames added player voice emotes.
Writing that voiceover "will change questing forevere" is overblown and ignores precedent. If the argument is that Bioware writes better dialogue.... then how consistently and how well they can produce new content remains to be seen
I would love to see more of this in future mmos. However there are too many add kiddies that just want everything "now" and are already whining on the star wars forums that they don't care about the talking. These are the same yahoos that just accept quests without reading a single word and just follow the bouncing ball to the mob zone and look at the numbers while they kill things.
I like the lore. I like the immersion. I read every quest.
It's all about pacing...
All systems in a MMO are inter-related, they all work together or the game sucks.
Bioware is giving TOR a more "action packed" combat experience then a WoW/EQ2/Rift by eliminating auto attack and speeding up the pace of combat, having the player constantly fighting more then one enemy at a time, etc.
The proof is in the pudding, as they say - watch the videos.
If you "speed up" the combat then you have to slow down the non-combat in order to keep the perfect balance of proper pacing.
Guild Wars 2 is doing the same thing.
Bioware is slowing down the non-combat pacing by using tons of VO - obviously not the only reason they are using VO the major reason is clearly story with a big nod towards immersion.
But pacing is definitely a factor.
Games like WoW - most player skip the quest text or skim through it, so you have to keep the combat very near constant - moving from one fight straight to the next straight to the next becuase each individual instance of combat is incredibly boring.
Again, it's all about pacing.
Pacing is what gives a game the right "feel" and for these kinds of games it's all about travel time and combat time and combat intensity and the "down time" between.
WoW moves content into quest hubs where you get a group of quest, go out and grind through them quick, come back to the hub, get another group of quests. Rift does this too.
It's incredibly lame and boring and the very exact definition of a grind, unfortunately for their "design" staff who majorly crapped the bed there.
Because it's so non-stop grind grind grind the combat has to be the same boring pull 1 mob, run through the exact same rotation, pull the next mob etc.
Bioware is completely changing the pacing, and the story is definitely a big part of that, as well as the combat pacing.
I read a few pages of comments. Forgive me if this has been covered already. I think the OP is meant to emphasize that VO questing will influence AAA MMOs. Not Independent developers.
Many have said it more eloquently than I - The reason this WILL become a AAA MMO standard is because of the cost of development. Your Mortal Online, Darkfalls, Salem, etc. will give the sandboxers plenty of content anyway because they win on player freedom. The player makes his/her own way more or less (until the "uber builds/macros are posted online).
The AAA MMO will always cater to the casual gamer - because there is a ton of them. The classic sandboxer are loyal, dedicated to the genre, but they are not enough to sustain a AAA budget.
Casuals play single player games a lot. So they will gravitate to a game that lets you solo. Voice over stories, cutscenes and instances are the casuals standard feed. They will play the MMO now and get sucked in. The more catering to the individual, the better.
off to work..
Speeding up combat can be a good thing as you are turning that aspect of the game into a button masher which gives players an FPS feel for the combat which will feel sorta fresh. It will make EQ2 and WoW seem a bit dated. WoW basically in combat went from being fast to cool-downs on a lot of class actions to improve balance...it is at the pace FF is now, and that is slow since it is aimed at pure PvE audience almost.
When they have to make a choice based on that dialogue, then I believe that changes everything!
The problem with games like WoW and the point that some seem to be missing here, is that in other MMOs there is no interaction with quest givers other than clicking on the NPC and accepting the quest. In those other MMOs, once you've killed the trash mobs or collected "x" items, the interaction stops and you simply hand-in the quest. SWTOR goes a bit further than just voice acting, by giving you choices that change what happens in the game. So with SWTOR, the interaction continues long after it has ended in other games. Just like in a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, it requires you to make a choice. I wish I could give you more info or an example of this, however, the NDA prevents me from doing so. Keep in mind, it's not just the VO that is the game-changer here, it's the choices you character is making affecting the outcome.
All I can say is that I implore you to try questing in SWTOR once it releases and then come and tell me that you still feel or find the old-style quest method used in games like WoW still as exhilarating or entertaining. Let's just say that I won't be holding my breath.
You're wasting your time. No matter how many times you tell these people that TOR's VO is more than just an NPC reading quest text to the player, they still don't get it.
We'll just have to wait for release, and let them find out for themselves.