Darth Hater

Star Wars: The Old Republic News, Interviews, Media & Podcast

  • Five Reasons You Should Play Republic

    Choosing which class to play is a big decision when starting an MMORPG, but for Star Wars: The Old Republic it goes hand-in-hand with choosing your faction. The classes on both factions are essentially a reflection of one another, but their aesthetic and animation differences can be big determining factors for some players. For other players, it’s about the stories, the lightsaber, and the voices that make the difference. Here are a few reasons why playing the Republic faction might appeal to you.

  • SWTOR Enters the Guinness Book of World Records

    One of the most innovative and captivating aspects of Star Wars: The Old Republic is the voice over acting found within the game. As reported by Massively, the Guinness Book of World Records has recognized SWTOR as the largest ever voiced over entertainment project. With over 200,000 lines of spoken dialogue and hundreds of actors involved in the project, SWTOR is not only one of the largest video games ever produced, but among one of the largest entertainment titles of any kind.

    MassivelyAt over 200,000 lines of recorded dialogue, the game has scored a record for having the largest amount of voice acting not only for a video game but for any entertainment project. The record appears in the Guinness Book of World Records Gamer's Edition, on the stands now in the US and on sale in the UK on the 19th.

     

  • Jennifer Hale Confirmed as a Voice Actor in The Old Republic

    Last week Aeli, a poster in the official forums, created a thread about gaming voice over veteran Jennifer Hale doing work for Star Wars: The Old Republic. The possibility of Jennifer Hale being part of the project should come as welcome news for players looking for quality voice acting in their games. As the voice of Bastila from Knights of the Old Republic and female Shepard in Mass Effect 1 & 2, her skills literally speak for themselves. She would certainly be a welcome addition to TOR, so we decided to check with BioWare and LucasArts to see if she would indeed be included in the cast. Here is their response:

    Yes, in the April issue of PC Gamer (UK) during an interview with James Ohlen, we did confirm that Jennifer Hale is one of the Voice Actors for Star Wars: The Old Republic.

    With this official confirmation, we can now start our own list of who we will be listening to when players finally get their hands on the game. It looks like the audio team at LucasArts were not joking when they said the voice work is going to be high quality.

  • BioWare's Ben Cloward on Facial Animation

    A thread on the official forums highlights a lecture by Ben Cloward, Senior Technical Artist at BioWare. The session, entitled Automated Emotion: Facial Animation in Star Wars: The Old Republic, goes into detail about the methods used by BioWare to generate facial animations for the huge amount of dialogue in The Old Republic. Calithlin, who attended the session, shared his experience with the community.

    There were a lot of topics discussed, but the main focus was on getting all the facial animation for the dialogue to be generated by software, rather than completely hand-keyed. (If done by hand, it would take four animators TEN YEARS of work around the clock, 24/7, no breaks, solid work to get it all done for every bit of dialogue.)

    More after the jump.

  • Will Voice Overs and Choice Stop Power Gamers?

    There are many more play styles in the realm of MMORPGs then most other genres. The free form design inherent in most MMOs encourages players to discover their optimal path to enjoyment, and this is most clear in the leveling process. Today, we are going to focus on a very specific group of MMOers that enter a new zone and consume every quest in sight like locusts moving across farm land. These "Power Gamers" move with the sole purpose of leveling as quickly as possible with little if any regard for story or lore. Could The Old Republic's increased focus on narrative choice and immersion through voice acting stop this type of power gaming?

  • The Voices of Star Wars: The Old Republic

    We now know some of the people who will be voicing characters in SWTOR. For as much as the information has been confirmed is up to your own judgement. Due to the information being released on IMDB we cannot confirm that they all are accurate. Hat tip to Petrosis on this find.

    Juliet Landau - Unknown
    Michael Bower - Various
    Mark Moseley - Various
    Charles Halford - Various
    Nan McNamara - Various
    Erik McDowell - Jaxx / Bengel Morr / Jex (voice)
    Adrienne Wilkinson - Syreena/Gianna/Master Satele Shan (Removed earlier from the IMDB listing, might not currently be on the project, source)
    Courtenay Taylor - Netula Pahn/Lady Aitalla/Kalda Biss/Casey Rix (Removed earlier from the IMDB listing, might not currently be on the project, source)
    Lance Henriksen - Master Gnost-Dural, Keeper of the Jedi Archives. (Confirmed)
    Steve Blum - Bounty Hunter (Confirmed)
    Jennifer Hale - Unknown (Confirmed)

    The only people we seem to know for sure that are on board are Lance Henriksen due to his work on the time line videos on the SWTOR website and Steve Blum who has been confirmed but not listed on the IMDB page. This is still early and when there's an update to it I will bump the post up to keep it up to date.

  • MMO Report talks voice acting

    The MMO Report, a G4 show, talks about Bioware's latest developer blog in their latest episode. If you're interested in checking out the very short mention of the game, blog, and their perspective, check the embed below:

  • Developer Blog #10

    Developer Blog #10 discussing voice over production work in Star Wars: The Old Republic with Shauna Perry is now online. It is quite an interesting blog to read for those looking to learn more about the way voice overs in video games get recorded and the people behind them. We found the most important thing of note (to us) in the article was a quote from Shauna Perry:

    The entire game script contains approximately 40+ novels worth of content.


    How much does that script weight in paper form? You could probably seriously or fatally hurt someone with that thing
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