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EQ2 Voiced By Hollywood Actors
An anonymous reader writes "Sony is going to have well known actors voicing major roles in its upcoming Massively Multiplayer Online Game. Christopher Lee is doing the voice for the Evil Lord Sir Lucan D'Lere, leader of the city of Freeport, and Heather Graham is doing the voice for Antonia Bale of the good city of Qeynos. An interview with Christopher Lee is also available on the Sony site." It will be interesting to see how this affects the fight between EQ2 and World of Warcraft, which are rumored to be coming out on the same day.
I'm in the beta, so I don't want to go and break the NDA but the game is simply amasing all the NPCs have full voice and it really makes a diffrence because it feels more like your there, the graphics are simply stunning and after playing both WOW, and EQ2 I'm having the feeling that sony is gonna keep getting my money....
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This is relatively older news, really..
Unfortionatly, these features are making the game itself HUGE..
In the beta right now, the client download is like 3 gigs..
But I gotta admit. The end result is simply amazing compared to EQ itself..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I'm sure that having celebrity voices will make up for Sony's historical lack of responsiveness to its players, tendency toward leaving significant bugs extant for months at a time, incredible ability to back and fill when their community representatives contradict themselves, and so on.
:)
I played EQ for 2 years and while I did have a lot of fun, I was never especially happy with how they handled customer interaction. It didn't help that every single expansion they released had numerous, major bugs, and unfinished content that would get implemented months after launch, and then immediately get broken by players doing things the developers never thought of. Then they'd rebalance that content, and it would still be broken, merely in a new and interesting way.
Then there was the incredibly variable customer service. GMs were given an extremely wide latitude about how they could do things, which led to a lot of situations where someone did X, and was told it was okay, and someone else later also did exactly X, and was warned/suspended/banned for it. I was a Guide for six months on Brell Serilis (Tovarax Two Tone, troll bard), and we had a cool GM (Hi Oribi!) but a lot of other servers weren't so lucky. Even some of our guides were anal-retentive assholes, while others were easygoing. This kind of thing led directly to the impression that EQ customer service was capricious and cruel. It didn't help that there was no guarantee that a CS person would be online at any given time, so you might have an issue and have no chance of it being resolved before you had to log off.
Don't even get me started about the disaster that is Star Wars Galaxies. (It's not a game, it's an economy simulator with a Star Wars-themed front end.) Unless you saw it, you can't imagine the pandemonium on the beta boards when they announced that the game was launching in 9 days. Everyone thought SOE was nuts. The game was released less than half-finished, and over a year later it's still got huge problems.
I'm sure EQ2 will be pretty and flashy and have lots of cool stuff. But I have severe doubts -- well-grounded in history -- about SOE's ability to keep things good in the long run. Certainly wouldn't mind them proving me wrong.
Meanwhile, World of Warcraft in beta is already a better game than EQ was three years after it launched
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
WoW is hardly a "clusterfuck". You're basing your opinion on two misconceptions.
1) The rest system is not a big deal. It doubles the EXP for kills for a short while, but it's not a free ride. If you don't log on for a whole week, you might gain enough "free" doubled EXP for a single level. (Also, I disagree with your premise is that the point of an MMORPG is to "work" at the game. WoW is not a level grind to be the first Warrior to hit 60. We'll always have EQ for that.)
2) The servers are split as follows: Asia, North America, Europe. There is no case where two people from the same continent will be unable to play with each other. The reasons are partly practical and partly business; aside from language barriers and the late European launch, the non-US servers are being run by different divisions and even different companies. Even considering that, Blizzard has publically stated that there will be some way for guildmates to play with each other internationally some time after the European launch.
Really, these are non-issues. WoW is a very enjoyable game, not a "clusterfuck". I do have some issues with the way that Vivendi is handling the launch, but this is not a SOE-level disaster.
If you would take the time to read the EQ2 dev chats/journals, you would realize that for music they intend to play it once to set the mood. For example, whenever you enter a zone, it plays a music score once, then fades it out. I imagine (haven't checked for sure) they'll be doing a similar thing with voices; you hear it once, then the rest of the time is just text. That way it NEVER gets old.
I've worked in animation for quite a while and I can tell you that acting and doing voiceovers are two different things. Some actors are good at it, but many aren't-- it's a very different set of skills. But I do see why game companies shell out for big names. It gives legitimacy to the product, perhaps not to consumers necessarily but within the entertainment industry. It does help the process of video games being taken as seriously as any other form of entertainment.
As for the money... It just doesn't work that way. We're not going to get a $5 discount because they didn't pay Heather Graham, and that $5 isn't going to hire an extra team of programmers or designers either. There isn't a lump sum to be divided amongst the teams-- a major company is going to budget what it thinks is necessary for each element, and charge whatever it thinks it can get for the end product.
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The problem was E&B started advancing the plot very fast and the voice acting and dev cycle got out of sync.. about 3 month or so into the game they dropped the voice acting, it was really sad because at the time it was one of the things that set E&B above and beyond the rest of the MMORPG's out there....
I really hope SOE can keep up the voice acting it will be very sad to go back to Sir Lucan D'Lere after a big patch to find out the voice was ripped out.