Jul 10, 2009 10:20 AM
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In a blog post on the Star Wars: The Old Republic website, director of audio and localization Shauna Perry talks about the challenge of recording voice overs for every character in a massively-multiplayer universe.
When they first announced that The Old Republic would be fully-voiced during E3 2009, those of us involved in the more massively-multiplayer side of gaming collectively gasped. The average MMO title has players interacting with hundreds of different characters over the course of the game. Providing real voices for each of those characters as well as the player characters themselves is a monumental task.
As I said, The Old Republic is the size of at least 10 KOTORs recorded back to back. Basically, it takes a very large team all focused on the same outcome - producing the most VO assets ever produced at the highest quality possible. There are dedicated internal teams at both LucasArts and BioWare, and externally, there are also multiple studio audio engineers and post production teams. On any given day, there can be over a dozen people working specifically on The Old Republic voice-over and that doesn't include any actors!
And there are hundreds of actors working on the project, with recording spanning four cities - Los Angeles , London, New York, San Francisco, and Toronto. The most staggering statistic? When last we checked, the game had surpassed the amount of dialog in the entire run of The Sopranos. According to Perry, the script for the game as it now stands contains enough material for more than 40 Star Wars novels. That's completely insane.
Check out the full blog post to get an idea of how much work poor Shauna is being put through in order to make Star Wars: The Old Republic the most talkative MMO ever created.
Developer Blog #10 [Star Wars: The Old Republic]
Send an email to Michael Fahey, the author of this post, at fahey@kotaku.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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