As a long-time MMO player, I love the way developers tend to go slightly crazy when it comes to Halloween events. I used to get all giddy back in the day, when Everquest first started running huge, multi-zone treasure hunts during the holiday, and to this day I always look forward to seeing what the creator's of my favorite MMO titles come up with to celebrate the 31st of October. It looks like Cryptic doesn't plan to disappoint.

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]

On a completely separate note, how about that voice acting? The Price is Nolan North, who you might remember from everything, including Nathan in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, one of the best acted games ever. A bit more polished than I imagined, but I trust the direction North went with. Eilika is voiced by Kari Wahlgren, who was Haruko in the anime FLCL, so she is full of win, plus you gotta feel for a voice actor who has to say "sluice gates".

Sonic Chronicles — being the first Sonic game I've been excited for in years — is looking pretty solid. Bioware CEO Raymond Muzyka and President Greg Zeschuk give us insight into some of the things the team has been thinking about when combining a Sonic game and RPG-style play. The game will hit stores September 30th.

Ethical Parables in Tabula Rasa

Players of most massively multiplayer online role-playing games today usually aren't faced with any great variety of missions that really impact your character or how you play. The most you're faced with is what kind of reward you'll get or, at most, which of the two factions you'll support against the other. It doesn't really have any effect on you in the grand scheme of things and you'll probably forget about the whole thing in a month or so. Instead of that static, boring type of storytelling, we wanted to create a more immersive story with Tabula Rasa, one that the players could interact with, where their actions could have long reaching consequences. We call this form of story-telling interaction the ethical parable and it is one of the hallmarks of a Richard Garriott game.

Ethical and moral dilemmas are something we definitely wanted to incorporate into the design of Tabula Rasa from the very start. The entire goal is to give you pause and allow you to think about the choices that they make in order to accomplish a mission. This way, at times, you will not be limited to one single path but may have multiple paths. We want you to think about the larger story and how your actions can affect this story down the road. Now you have the ability to play the game the way you want to play it. This in essence is the parable—a type of story that allows you to explore moral lessons or decisions.

We won't be throwing these ethical parables at the players in every mission, but we definitely want players to get a taste for them early on in the game. We've placed a few on, the first major landmass that players will encounter in Tabula Rasa. One of these early missions involves the delivery of pharmaceuticals to soldiers on the front lines. While the supply commander, a rather straight-laced and stand-up kind of individual, would rather these pharmaceuticals be distributed to the soldiers in a formal, organized system, there's a man who stole a whole bunch and has been selling them to the soldiers for a nice profit. Your decision to either turn in the thief, or help him distribute the stolen goods, not only affects the mission outcome but determines how the NPC soldiers will interact with you from then on.

Another mission of note is for players with levels in the mid-teens. As you progress though the game and are redeployed to Foreas Base, you're told that the AFS has a Bane prisoner who is currently undergoing interrogation. This will start a chain of missions as the Bane prisoner reveals more and more information, allowing you to attack the local Bane base, kill a key Bane soldier, deal with some traitors, and possibly even defend the prison from attack.

At the end of this mission chain, you're now left with the choice of what to do with the prisoner. On one hand, he's one of the evil Bane, who wiped out most of humanity and forced people like yourself to fight for survival on a few scattered alien worlds. It doesn't deserve to live... or does it? As a mere soldier, the Bane was just doing what it was supposed to do, no more and no less, and cannot really be held responsible for what the leadership of the Bane did to Earth. What would be the harm in letting him live, and more importantly, what more could you learn from him? If you were a prisoner, wouldn't you want to be treated humanely, instead of being executed for telling you what you wanted to know?

These are a couple of examples of the parables we will present in Tabula Rasa. Some of them will have little or no long-term impact, and others may influence the way you experience the game. We want to give you the choice to play the game the way you want to, without hemming you into one specific path. This way, we've created a better, richer, more immersive game experience for you to enjoy.

OMG, I want to play this game, but could they have made this developer's diary any less interesting? It was like watching some bad science film in high school. Ambient Occlusion, object translucency, depth sprites, dynamic fire and smoke... whatever just show shit blowing up.Brian Crecente