EverQuest Sequel Gives Voice To NPCs, Original Turns Five

Thanks to GameSpot for its feature discussing plans to give full-audio speech to non-player characters in PC MMORPG sequel EverQuest II. The article points out this is "a first for online role-playing games, which have previously only featured silent characters that interact with players by sending them text chat messages", and elsewhere, a Grimwell Online article mentions a new PC Gamer magazine article specifying "an expected 130 hours of speech across 70,000 lines of dialogue", and revealing that "EQ2 is a $25 million dollar project." This new information comes as EverQuest celebrates its fifth anniversary with a multitude of developer interviews on the official site, as well as the re-activation of all old accounts until April 15th.

Comments

Annoying

[krymsin01]

Is it just me, or does this sound like on of the most annoying ideas put forth in a while? Maybe I'm too slep dep'd, but the idea of hearing some annoying NPC saying "Maybe you can help me!?" over and over again would make me want to shoot my machine after a while...

Re:Annoying

[Austerity Empowers]

No it's far worse if you've played EQ:

Skeletons will now have voices to say: "Aarrreeeeeewwwwwwwwww!"

and almost every single other NPC in the game:
"You have ruined your lands, you will not ruin mine!"

It's their latest xp nerf, no one will get past character select for fear of the voices. I'd be happy if they could just get some background music that didn't make me want to hurl my speakers out the window.

Que ??

[Killjoy_NL]

Will they ship this with the game or will the speech be residing on the EQ servers.
If the latter is the case, you might need a faster version of broadband, right ??

Re:Shhyeahhh... Rrrrright....

[EvilDonut]

The GameSpot article linked in the story was posted yesterday, not april 1st.

*bzzzt* wrong

[Kaashar]

a first for online role-playing games, which have previously only featured silent characters that interact with players by sending them text chat messages" Excellent research there bosco, unfortunately it's wrong. Earth and Beyond had many NPC characters that spoke to players. The only problem was with a MMOG bringing the voice actors back in every few months to re-do changing lines gets expensive.

I am looking for Bonechips

[Anonymous Coward]

"I am looking for Bonechips to lift an ancient curse"...
"thank you for the [5] Bonechips"
"I am looking for Bonechips to lift an ancient curse"...
"thank you for the [5] Bonechips"
"I am looking for Bonechips to lift an ancient curse"...
"thank you for the [5] Bonechips"

30 seconds of that and my wife would be out the door. 90 seconds and I'd be going nuts. More than that, I'd delete it.

Now, all they need to do

[kapella]

is start hiring ractors to play the NPCs - who wants to listen to the same pre-recorded dialogue bits over and over again, anyway?

Actually this isn't a joke

[Tarindel]

The was announced yesterday, and there's a movie at Gamespot

You'll have to be a member (free membership) to get it there, but it's mirrored at other places around the web, including a few fan sites (such as EQii.com).

I watched it yesterday -- it's quite excellent.

You wouldn't need sound files

[dauvis]

If you include a text to voice synthesizer in the client. For example, AT&T has a good demonstration of their technology at http://www.research.att.com/projects/tts/demo.html . Maybe EQ2 will have something similar.

US$25 million is that much...

[ggwood]

...when you consider they have over 400,000 subscriptions each at about US$10/month that is US$48 million per year.

Of course they have expenses, but MMORPG's can be run at big profit margins (thus the flood of new titles) if the economies of scale work well enough.

I'm just saying they probably didn't have to run out and get any investment capital for Eq2 as they are taking in so much money.

Lastly, I'm just giving a very rough estimate of the money. Many people pay per month at US$15/month but if you pay in, say, 2 year intervals you can pay only US$8.30 per month (IIRC). Heck, they have people on a special server paying (IIRC) US$30/month! Also, the 400,000 figure for accounts is rough, also. They claim to have over this number for years now, but it is well known they have a large quantity of comped (free) accounts. How many I cannot estimate. Further complicating the issue is their "all access" pass. I bet they count that one person paying the fixed ammount as one account on each game, but the money (roughly $20/month but you can get down to $16.67 by the year) is less then the sum of the 3 (4?) subscriptions together.