Tag Archives: voiceover

20 minutes of SWTOR gameplay O M G

Well folks this is it. The greatest battle in the geek universe has just begun. Bioware vs Blizzard, Warcraft vs Star Wars, light saber vs the Arcanite Reaper (yeah – old school all the way). Bioware threw a glove straight into Blizzard’s face by releasing the long awaited, almost 20 minute long, in game footage videos from Star Wars: The Old Republic. And all this in the wake of Blizzards big announcement at Blizzcon – the next WoW expansion – Cataclysm. Obviously both games will be targeting the same release date and it will be a head to head clash that will probably have a lot of consequences for both sides. If Bioware builds a good game and releases a finished product (and not a buggy mess they are prone to sometimes) it will produce a big dent in WoW expansion numbers. From the looks of the video footage – they are on the right path. This is very exciting because Blizzard will be forced to release the “best they can make” expansion and content, which is a great thing for us gamers. The collateral damage will of course be the gamers’ lives and free time. The wife is looking at me with discontent already and the damn things just got announced.

The videos introduce

  • the conversation interface (everyone that played Mass Effect knows this interface – voice acting is superb!)
  • Bounty hunter class and its style of fighting
  • Smuggler class and usage of cover system in battles
  • exclusive sith warrior combat and light saber action (drool)
  • flashpoint (a story driven event that provides multiple choices and resolves in different ways based on those choices
  • multiplayer dialog system (when in group, different players have a chance to make decisions during a multiple choice dialog)
  • FORCE CHOKE (mega drool)
  • What can be better than one light saber – well of course, two light sabers

This is it. The first Star Trek game that is a MMO and is done right and in true Star Wars spirit.
Enjoy the videos after the break.

SWOTR played by some lucky E3 attendees

News from E3 keep pouring in. People from Kotaku.com had a chance to actually sit down and play the game (lucky bast****). Here are some initial impressions:

I played through a section instance called The Taking of the Black Talon. I controlled a level 10 Sith. …. During interactions with non-player characters your choices not only drive the voice-acted cut scenes, they also drive the story and your experience. In the section I played I first decided to kill a disobedient spaceship captain and the second time decided to let him live. In the resulting first scenario, a new captain takes over and her inexperience leads her to ignore pods ejecting from a ship we’re attacking. Those pods later attach to our ship and I was forced to go repel the invading soldiers. In the second scenario, the captain, happy to be alive, blasts the pods as they approach the ship, allowing me to concentrate on my main task: Taking out a Jedi. …. This is the sort of massively multiplayer experience that I think could bring back a lot of people long lost to the genre. Of course I only saw a small snippet and we have no way of knowing just how far out this game is, so keep an eye out for further developments.

You can read the entire article here.

In other news, the voiceovers for the game seem to be so massive in scale that everything else fails in comparison. Here’s what Bioware people had to say to the reporters at the E3 expo:

When I asked Erickson how many hours of audio they had already recorded he said he didn’t know. But, he added, when the audio team was about a third of the way through the voice work they told him that they had just passed all of the audio found in the full six seasons, 86 episodes of The Sorpranos.