Star Wars: The Old Republic will be the most expensive MMO ever created. Period. With complete control of the Star Wars license and by providing a fully-voiced MMO in three different languages, EA is clearly putting all they’ve got into this title. The BioWare team used as many voice actors as possible, giving each character a unique voice in the game. Not only that, but characters have different voice interactions, meaning you’ll hear different things when different characters talk to each other. And did we mention the content? This game’s got a lot of that too. We did some digging to see just how much effort is going into this seemingly mammoth game.
“We have literally thousands of roles which are voiced in our game,” said Gordon Walton, BioWare co-studio director. “which are done by many, many hundreds of voice actors, so there’s not like not one voice actor doing 2,300 people. They’re doing a few roles, and those roles tend to be pretty damn different too.
“I think that what you’re going to see is that it’ll be engaging,” he continued. “We’re not drawing men off the street to do our work. We’re drawing professional talent, kind of across the board. You’re going to see a high-quality experience that, if we hit our mark, will be compelling the entire way through, not just partially through your class story…We want to keep people engaged. We want them to actually buy in and feel the emotion that is possible with the kind of games that we build at BioWare.”
“We don’t get repetitious, and we really get the right voice behind every role because all those characters in the game have to be emotionally compelling,” commented BioWare co-general manager Gordon Walton. “And if some are good and some are not so good, it’s not going to work. Everything has to be good or great.” Talking about the game’s overall content he added, “We’ve already determined our game has more content than all the BioWare games ever made at one time…we have tons of hand-crafted content, so every class story has hundreds of hours of entertainment involved in it, which means it really is KOTOR 3 through 25.”
It looks like BioWare is planning on integrating the excellent singleplayer experiences they are known for into an MMO-based game, a more narrative experience if you will. It sounds convincing, but does it have what it takes to compete with the genre’s big names, even with an authentic Lucas Arts experience? There’s still no word on a pricing structure — if any — for the game, but it will likely start out around $10, give or take, in order to compete with the elephant in the closet, World of Warcraft.