Star Trek Online dev questions fully voice acted SW:TOR

Doesn't give 'that big a bang for your buck'.

Voice acting all of the text in the hotly anticipated MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic doesn't give "that big a bang for your buck".

That's according to Craig Zinkievich, executive producer at Cryptic Studios of rival MMO Star Trek Online.

Canadian developer BioWare's garnered a great deal of attention for its decision to fully voice, in multiple languages, Star Wars: The Old Republic. Traditionally, MMOs use text to convey story and dialogue.

Zinkievich, however, believes that it may not be worth all of the trouble.

He told VideoGamer.com: "You put voice over in the game and the very first thing players want is the ability to skip through and get back to the action.

"Whether or not they have any mechanics like that - whether or not it feels good in the game, or whether or not it ends up breaking up the action, whether or not it breaks up what's going on to a point where people don't like it - it'll be interesting to see how that pans out."

Zinkievich continued: "It adds something to the game, but I don't think that VO-ing all of your text provides for that big a bang for the buck in terms of immersion.

"What we want to make sure we do is be able to have a pipeline, is be able to make content and get that content out to the player as soon as possible after launch, and continue to update the game and continue to do things to the game. Putting that big huge VO section right in that pipeline makes things a little bit more difficult in terms of getting content out."

Despite his views on voice acting, Zinkievich describes SW:TOR as a "pretty exciting game". He also reckons both BioWare's MMO and Cryptic's will provide "vastly different experiences".

"To me it looks like a pretty exciting game," he said. "In the end the two games will end up being vastly different experiences. Star Wars: The Old Republic right now looks cool and I'm excited to play it, but it also looks a little bit more like a standard MMO, to me, at least, wherein at Cryptic we are trying to push the bounds of the moment to moment gameplay.

"You've seen what we did with Champions. Within Star Trek, with space combat, with ground combat, it is not standard MMO. We're looking for gameplay that breaks that mould. That being said, I think it's pretty interesting some of the things The Old Republic's doing."
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