Mists of Pandaria: Dave "Fargo" Kosak interview

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

3-19-2012 @ 6:14PM

Pyromelter said...

"we make sure we still have really good writing, that if you take the time to read the quest text, you're getting a lot out of it... but you don't need to read the text all over again. And WoW lets you do that really quickly, very fast-paced. Other games that do the voice acting and lots of decisions in the dialogue, well, you do a lot of standing around."

Kudos to Mike Sacco for asking the question about voice acting, and this is a great answer. Kind of a burn on voice acting, but not in a real mean-spirited way. I still haven't played SWTOR, but I have played Mass Effect, and other games with dialogue trees. I kind of find them annoying because I always want to hit the "correct" answer, even if there is no correct answer. Plus the overall story tends to not be affected much, just kind of how your character looks, or maybe you gain or miss out on some odd bonus piece or something.

I can't speak for everyone else, but I'm definitely a fan of fast-paced questing. One of the things I do is I usually do a quick scan of the quest text, so even if I don't read it specifically, I get a general idea of why I'm killing these mammoths over here, or why I need to check in on the Cenarian outpost in Terrokar, etc. Plus, I like not having the pressure of picking the "wrong" answer in a dialogue tree.

Let's face: I hate dialogue trees. Just give me the story and let me be the damn hero :P. Maybe give me one decision at the end of the game, like Dark Souls, where I can choose to sacrifice myself for the good of the world, or whether I can rule the world myself. That's enough choice for me :D

Oh but yes, excellent question Sacco and +1 to Kosak for a really good answer.

3-19-2012 @ 6:30PM

Andre said...

Definitely agree. Leveling in SWTOR felt a lot slower because of this. You -can- spacebar through the dialogue, but it leaves you a lot more lost than when you don't read quest text. Another good thing about quest text is you can read it while running towards your objective, something you can't do with voice acting.

3-19-2012 @ 6:37PM

Dominic said...

I started playing SW:TOR this weekend, and OMG was questing PAINFUL! Every quest you were met with a voice acted character who wanted you to answer 4-10 multiple choice questions before you could accept the quest and then again before you could turn it in. Sure, the story is interesting, but I played for 10 hours and only got to level 13. I felt like 6 hours was spent listening to NPCs, 2 hours running from point A all the way to point B over on the other side of the planet and 2 hours actually killing stuff... I want to kill stuff. So, 80% of my time was wasted as far as I'm concerned. WoW's way of doing it suits me much better.

3-19-2012 @ 7:57PM

Schadenfreude said...

I love Mass Effect like fire, but I do get tired of having to sit through everyone's dialogue-- I have subtitles turned on and I often read them but skip through the voice.

3-20-2012 @ 9:25AM

Noah said...

TOR's voiced quests have their ups and downs. If you like plowing through zones very quickly and don't care about the story, you're probably going to have a very hard time leveling in TOR. That game is all about the story; it's not like WoW, where's there's plenty of lore, but on the grand scheme of things we get involved in very little of it during leveling. In TOR (in particular the Jedi Knight, who is basically the chuck norris of the galaxy), you're the big hero or villain, and the fate of your entire faction is on your head, so it's much much more story-oriented, which means it's going to take more time to listen to the voice-acting and get into the story. However if you do have the time, it's a really eye-opening experience. After 3 and a half years of WoW, where the coolest story moments you get are cutscenes and raids, this was truly something else entirely.

3-20-2012 @ 10:49AM

robsmith77 said...

It's a shame we can't have both, with an option to turn on/off the voice acting.

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