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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.
Especially when Sony is behind it. Ugh. I just have problems giving that company my money. I used to respect Sony... No longer. Their actions in the past few years have not been good.
Every once in awhile actors can improve the gaming experience. It was fairly well-done in the latter half of the Wing Commander series, for example. The first couple of games in the series just had pictures with animated mouths and subtitles. It was kind of cheesy, and didn't really immerse the player in the plot. I have 3 and 5, and they added a plot to the game (Hey, kids! It's Mark Hammil! *Applause*). Otherwise, it would have just been a series of flight sim missions. Privateer 2 falls under this category as well, with a relative no-name actor by the name of Clive Owen who is now gaining some recognition on the big screen.
However, if it is poorly done, it can easily detract from a game. I've recently bought one of the Final Fantasy games, and it has quite a bit of poor voice acting and cut scenes that tend to get in the way of the game due to their length. It's all in how the games are done, I guess.
What if they need to record new dialogue for this characters at some point down the road? It's not going to be easy (I would assume) to get celebrities back into the recording booth just to do a few lines every now and then. Then again I suppose they could just hire people to do impressions of the celebs, but still... seems kinda stupid to me.
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These aren't the droids you're looking for.
I have been playing EQ for 5 year. I play with no sound and the lowest level of graphics detail. The reason I play with no sound is because years ago the sound could cause problems or crash. So, i turned it off, and have never turned it on again. The reason i play with the lowest level of graphics is so that i can run two instances of EQ. I have more than one account. One account runs a Bazaar selling character which is in a minimized EQ window. The other is the character I am actually playing. For best results I reduce all the graphics options to the lowest level. Also, I have another computer which is fast, and has a nice graphics board with 128 megs of ram. I tried running with all the highest level of graphics options, but ultimately, in a raid situation, it's too slow. So, over time that machine got reduced to the lowest level of graphics options. The story? What story? When i do quests i don't even talk to the NPCs. Just give my my item, thanks. I know there are some people that actually follow the story, or even try role playing. But, for the most part. EQ is not about the graphics, the sound, or even the story. It's about items, items, items, guilds, raids, items, buying, selling, items, and becoming more powerful. So, why bother with EQ2? I guess only to reserve a good name and be one of the first.
There are 10 types of people in the world... those that understand binary and those that don't.
In the recently released expansion for the original Everquest, titled "Omens of War"( http://everquest.station.sony.com/omensofwar/overv iew.jsp ), SoE (Sony Online Entertainment) introduced a voice system where the sound files reside on the local machine. These sounds were all done by 2 people; 1 male and 1 female. There is also an ability to add your own sound with the caveat that only you will be able to hear that sound (a la Baulders Gate).
The voice system has been generally agreed upon as crap in this expansion. If they were to tweak it so that voice commands could be given during the game, say by your group or raid leader, then it might be worth something. However as another poster said, I never played Everquest with the sound on because the music never used to work on systems running Win2k or XP. Took them 3+ years to get the music to work in Everquest.
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
My disagreement here is getting the name-brand actors. Honestly, I could not care less that Christopher Lee is doing the voice. I just want someone who can do good accents and put proper emotions into their performance. Heck, head out to your local theater and you can probably get voice acting just as good for the price of dinner. At that, some will do it just for notoriety and another entry for the acting resume.
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Kingdom Hearts, the big RPG collaboration between Square and Disney, has several pretty-well-known voice actors in it:
Haley Joel Osment - Sora
David Gallagher - Riku
Hayden Panettiere - Kairi
David Boreanaz - Leon
Mandy Moore - Aerith
Christy Carlson Romano - Yuffie
Lance Bass - Sephiroth
Sean Astin - Hercules
Dan Castellaneta - Genie
I guess this would be the first MMORPG with Hollywood actors, though. Doesn't seem like a real big deal to me.