If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook then you’ve no doubt heard that I participated in the Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) Game Testing Program this weekend. Being an avid gamer and HUGE Star Wars geek, it was a lot of fun to be able to play the game a month before its release and give my feedback. It was also very interesting get some hands on time with the first ever fully-voiced massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). That’s right, SWTOR boasts hundreds of thousands of lines of dialog voiced by over 70 actors. A daunting task, especially considering its player/non-player character (NPC) interaction system.
But this is business as usual for BioWare, who has been producing fully-voiced RPGs with complex conversation systems for the past decade. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic brought about the first appearance of the dialog wheel which meant non-linear dialog for NPCs, but the player character didn’t actually speak the selected line. Mass Effect 2 gave the player character a voice, but having both male and female versions of Commander Shepard meant the additional lines were twofold. Now Star Wars: The Old Republic ups the ante by introducing a whole slew of other variables.
Consider this: You and 3 friends are fending off enemies who are trying to board your ship. You fight your way to the bridge and encounter the captain. Obviously, he has some orders for you and your party. But this isn’t your old-school, NPC monologue where the player stands by as a silent recipient of information. Nay, nay. Throughout the encounter, your party has the opportunity to respond or ask questions. At these points in the conversation, each player selects what they would like to say from a list of 3 choices. The players’ choices differ depending upon their class, race, alignment, history, etc. Once every player has made their selection, the game randomly selects one of the players lines to evoke and the conversation continues from there.
As a gamer, I think this is a pretty neat feature. As a software developer AND a voice actor, this makes my head spin! You see, there are 4 possible character races and 2 genders so 8 voice actors are involved with each line of player dialog. The player typically has three options of what to say next during a conversation and each of the 4 character classes has its own set of dialog options. So during a simple, 10-line conversation between an NPC and a group of players, over 100 potential lines of dialog need to be recorded. If you start to factor in the players’ alignment (light-side, dark-side or neutral), decisions they made in the past and if the NPC’s next line depend upon the line actually evoked by the players then the combinations become staggering! But while this might be a headache for producers and audio programmers, it means nothing but good things for gamers AND voice actors.
