though it’s old news by now, i still can’t get my head around the announcement that star wars : the old republic is to be “fully voiced”. and i’m an audio guy. who loves VO.
warhammer online had probably 1/20th the VO that’s going into SWTOR, and i know firsthand what a logistical nightmare that can be, even *with* solid design, pipelines, oversight, and the rest of it (and i’m not claiming we had that :) ). iteration and polish on anything that involves voice gets greatly complicated, and localization… fuggeddabouddit. i still wake up in the dead of night, sheets soaked through with sweat, crying out “local…LOCALIZATION!…DEAR GOD…GOA…oh god…”.
thing is, even if Bioware does everything right – and odds are, they will – the question remains, is it worth it? is it worth devoting millions of dollars and hundreds of human beings when at the end of the day it’s arguable that for the majority of the playerbase, “fully-voiced” is just a marketing bullet point that they’ll shrug off as they fire up iTunes, kill the game audio, and hop in game?
i mean, people that already dig VO will love it. and maybe there will be some converts – some gamers who for the first time don’t turn off the voice / music / sfx on day one and never look back. and that can only be good for people like me. but will it really attract new players? will it be a factor in player retention? more so than some other area all that money and manpower could have been devoted to? will players who don’t give a damn about VO have to suffer any bloated patches or scheduling delays on account of all this lunacy?
despite the odds, i think they just might be able to pull it off. it’d kind of be neat to see this bold commitment on their part push game audio forward, even if just a little bit. of course the flip side is…a year from now a team of execs might march into my office and say “so…let’s talk about this ‘fully-voiced’ thing…”. cue the nightmares.
after a long hard day of MMO development, there’s nothing like going out with a couple of long-time coworkers for a beer. only (surprise, surprise) that beer turns into 5 or 8, and the talk turns to (surprise, surprise) hashing and rehashing 15 years of game dev glories and failures, studios past and present, and how everything would be if I WERE RUNNING SHIT, MAN (armed with my 20/20 hindsight and just one or two more of these beers). and not really realizing just how loud you’re getting. and that there’s nobody left but the bartender and that waitress doing her sidework (who, admit it, smiled at your jokes only because her tip depended on it). and finding yourself back at the office typing about it. and suddenly becoming self-aware that you’re typing about the fact that you’re typing about it.
oh what the hell…”C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSoft\Launcher\NCLauncher.exe” /LaunchGame=Aion”.
quite famously, there’s this from Blizzard. and i had my own little bit of fun doing this, this, and this while at EA / Mythic. but now the bar has been raised and completely destroyed by CCP with this. extracurricular tongue-in-cheek MMO dev bands may never be the same. (bonus points for pasty white dudes who have no business taking their shirts off, taking their shirts off.)
funny thing about starting work on your next game – just when you think you got everything sorted out on the last one (design/codebase/tools/staff/whatever), you find that only about half of that stuff actually carries forward. and if you’re lucky – if it’s the *good* half – you get to round that out with “innovation” or “progress”. if it’s the ugly half you’re stuck with, you’ll probably be left filling in the gaps with “hacks” or “more insufferable bullshit heaped on the already-buckling house of cards”.
anybody that’s made games long enough has probably experienced the latter for than the former…enough so that when you finally do get the former, it’s the chocolate cake after all those brussel sprouts. and, mmmm…this devil’s-food-with-double-fudge is positively dee-LISH-uss.
flop sweats and blackouts – just two of the phenomenon that my anxiety of public speaking produces. i have a hard enough time maintaining coherence holding the attention of a small group of friends, much less standing at a podium with scores of sets of eyes resting on me, ears hanging on my next stammered word. i am definitely one for whom offline communication (IM, email, blogging, etc.) is a modern day miracle: have a thought, backspace backspace backspace, try again, backspace backspace backspace, get it right, SEND.
but here at the new gig, i have to stand in front of the company from time to time and deliver a “state of the audio” address. into a microphone. in the near-dark. while attempting to type obtuse character strings into a chat buffer with my quaking hands. all in the name of wowing my peers with how awesomely audio is coming along. the days leading up to this recurring ritual are dread-filled, and obsessive preparation manages to simultaneously mitigate the possibility of disaster while ramping up my morbid anticipation of the coming event. and no, picturing my audience naked – 100 game devs – does not help. in any way. at all.
but in the end, it’s worth it. because in the end, it brings audio to the fore, putting it front and center for a moment. one wobbly presentation at a time, audio hopefully becomes a little less of an afterthought, less of the proverbial “red-headed stepchild”. audio devs have long railed against this being their lot in life – our forums are full of threads wherein the importance of game audio is evangelized…to other audio devs. i have to say it’s nice to finally be able to stand up – albeit shakily – and evangelize game audio to the rest of the flock, to get people who have nothing to do with sound *psyched* about the sound and music in their game. well, that may be giving myself too much credit…i don’t think my proselytization has moved anyone to tears or fainting spells just yet. but i’ll keep trying, so long as i maintain consciousness.
i think hearing game/movie music out of context provides some kind of litmus test for how effective it is *in* context. witness – i’ve got a playlist of game/movie scores that i listen to every day (until i can’t take it anymore and switch over to “GRRR!.m3u”) that essentially serves as reference material. and most of it (i won’t name names) floats by unnoticed while i work on non-audio stuff. but a few things constently grab my attention, and leave me pining to experience the game/movie they’re from. when a track from Braveheart, Oblivion, or WoW (among others) comes up, i momentarily snap out of my work-induced fog/focus, and stare off, “mmmm, i wish i was there right now…”.
is it my fondness for the music, or the context that spawned it? or the perfect marriage of both? probably the latter. there’s plenty of scores i still enjoy from games/movies long dead to me. and of course there’s no shortage of good games/movies with shiite music. so it’s a rare treat when once in a while the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and experiencing only one half makes you long for the other.
like any good craftsman, i constantly strive to be the best at my craft. so like any good craftsman, i must maintain a level of awareness of the state of my craft, and the developments therein. which is a bullshit way of saying “i play video games because i have to. no, seriously honey…i have to be doing this right now. it’s for my job. what…you don’t *want* me to be a success? oh i suppose you think this cable bill is going to pay for itself?? (unintelligible raised voices, sounds of crying – male…)”.
so, i just started playing Aion, because i have to. going in, i was braced for the cultural differences i was told to expect – “eastern” MMO sensibilities and aesthetics, not “western” ones (read: WoW). and yeah…BLAM! well, at least audio-wise, it was a “blam”. music & sound effect choices i would have never expected / made for an MMO acosting me from all sides. and that’s…okay. in the spirit of perpetuating my bullshit rationale for playing MMOs in my free time (work-related R&D), i’m going to endeavor to look past my subjective issues – BLAM! – and root out any objective and empirical ones. and that will probably take at least a couple nights a week. no, seriously honey. maybe more…
