SWTOR to be fully voiced

This gun says you'll love my voice acting.

Star Wars: The Old Republic (coming from Bioware this year, in theory) will be 100% voice acted, according to the EA press conference at E3.

100% voice acted, eh?

As claimed, this will indeed be the first MMO to be fully voiced. (Most MMOs do voice overs for introductory text, color commentary, greetings, and background noise - not quests or NPC conversations.) There are a number of excellent reasons for this, mostly relating to "cost" and "ease of future changes." Here are a few of the things Bioware Austin will have to deal with before the fully voice acted MMO is successful:

- There has never been a game where the quests are not edited, tuned, and changed after launch and the flood of launch feedback. Right now, those edits are fast text changes. Changing a voiced quest in a high quality way requires re-recording the actor who originally did the lines. Even if that actor is available, it's expensive.

- Speaking of expensive, they're going to need a lot of actors to handle a fully-fleshed out galaxy of NPCs. Even if each actor can do a few dozen voices, you're still looking at  a significant cast. That's money that will not be available to spend on other elements of game production.

- I expect they're planning to take the Mass Effect approach, where the recorded lines match the tone, but not the exact wording, of the text. Ever watch an anime where the subtitles and the voiceovers don't match? Spending time wondering which version is more accurate to the story you're consuming is sort of fun for a two hour movie, not so much for months of interaction.

- Most people read considerably faster than someone else can talk. For me, any voiceover longer than two sentences is tedious, causing me to smack the escape key or whatever cuts the yapping off. Cutting someone off mid-sentence is not exactly a boost to the immersive factor.

- Bad voice acting can cause people to avoid content. Sounds obvious, but it is difficult to tell what sound bites will eventually cause a player to shove coat hangers in their ears.

- Voice acting used to cover a lack of strong writing is like trying to cover a naked girl with a fishnet in MMOs, because many players turn their game sound off entirely in order to listen to their own music, or to better hear their guild over Ventrilo or Vivox.

Can it be done? Well, certainly Bioware is a company experienced with the challenges of voice acting, and Bioware Austin is staffed with many MMO veterans. They've got the license. They've got the money. If anyone can pull it off, it's probably them.