My Perfect MMO part 6: MMO VO

This article is sparked by Ryan Schwayder's post a few days back on Nerfbat.

In it he asks his readers what they think about the use of Voice Over for NPCs in MMO's while making it clear that from his (game developer) point of view, it's not worth the effort and costs involved. Especially when it comes to making minor changes to existing content.

I love Voice Over, when done right it adds so much to the experience.
Of course the opposite of that coin is that if it's done badly, it can really distract.
But in a game like Mass Effect (where finally Bioware decided to give the player a voice too, before you were always quiet) it really adds to things, along with the cutscenes and the overall cinematic quality of the game. It's so much nicer to have things explained to you in VO than having to plow through tons of text without a clue as to what is important. Mass Effect still has a lot of background story tucked away in 'databases' and whatnot for whoever wants to really dig into the lore, but the essential 411, the exposition as it's called is given to you in a much more palatable format.

In Age of Conan it also helps a lot with exposition and such during your time in Tortage.
But here the practical issues start to crop up as well. There's a big downturn in immersion between Tortage and the rest of the world. In part is that after Tortage the world doesn't revolve about you anymore (suck it up trooper, keep going) but it's also in part due to the dropping away of intense VO.
Once you leave Tortage only about one in 20 dialogues is Voiced Over. Funcom is expanding on that as they've said, but because they 'have' to do it in three languages this takes time and money. Time and money they might be better off spending on increasing content density across the board. personally I would have gone for English only with subtitles. But I'm Dutch we're used to that (nowadays many of us prefer English subtitles over Dutch ones) . Germans and French people are used to localized voice over tv, have their own localized keyboards e.t.c. While having Dutch VO would probably be magic circle bursting for me, so used am I to English VO, it's too much of a stretch for most German and French.

Looking at these two games, I'd say it's essential for Single Player RPG games, but probably too much of a good thing for MMO's. That doesn't mean I think VO should not be in MMO's at all, just not as a means to make Quest dialogue more interesting. Let's face it, 90% of players click through that text without a glance and wait for the objectives to appear on the quest tracker.
Will those listen to every monologue by the NPC? How many yarns about acquiring 10 rats do you want to listen to yourself? Several MMO's use what I'd call Limited VO. Meaning there's an auditory greeting when you approach an NPC, or insults thrown at you as you run through town (EQ2: Freeport) or other one-liner effects. All of that is fine and I feel every MMO should have that.

What I think nearly every MMO could do with as well is more of what I'd like to call Exposition VO. Maybe include a bit of scripted camera-work for a cut-scene alike experience.
You could prompt this at zone entry (in the case of instanced worlds like GW) but the way I envision this it'd be one or more NPC's around each Quest hub which you can initiate conversation with. These will tell you a bit of a story, some of the local history, the current situation and, if the game supports phasing, how your actions have changed it. The scripted camera work I alluded to could be a bird-eye view of an overflight of the general location, pointing out some of the hotspots, stuff like that.

This would be totally optional. You can approach said NPC at your leisure, or ignore them altogether. Additionally any kind of background could be given the VO treatment. Any organizations in your MMO that have a role in the world and a more than one parargaph story to them? Those are the things you want to give Voice Over Exposition on. Many games have tomes of knowledge, not in the sense of the WAR Tome which is more a personal Wiki. Add the ability to have those tomes read to you rather than having to stand still and read through an often too-small for comfort window while Stuff Is Happening around you. Click on the audio snippet for you and you can listen to some cool voice actor (contact Bioware for a list of some great ones) tell you about this or that while you're running off in search of those Ten Rats.
These are voice over 'texts' that aren't as subject to tweaking as actual quest dialogue but it's the important stuff that players might miss out on yet need for their quest solving. And it's offered in a more easily acceptable format that doesn't have to break up the game-flow.

Sorry, my often promised 'Classes article' in the My Perfect MMO chain has yet again found another topic to hide behind :-)