EverQuest Sequel Gives Voice To NPCs, Original Turns Five

Thanks to GameSpot for its feature discussing plans to give full-audio speech to non-player characters in PC MMORPG sequel EverQuest II. The article points out this is "a first for online role-playing games, which have previously only featured silent characters that interact with players by sending them text chat messages", and elsewhere, a Grimwell Online article mentions a new PC Gamer magazine article specifying "an expected 130 hours of speech across 70,000 lines of dialogue", and revealing that "EQ2 is a $25 million dollar project." This new information comes as EverQuest celebrates its fifth anniversary with a multitude of developer interviews on the official site, as well as the re-activation of all old accounts until April 15th.

Annoying

[krymsin01]

Is it just me, or does this sound like on of the most annoying ideas put forth in a while? Maybe I'm too slep dep'd, but the idea of hearing some annoying NPC saying "Maybe you can help me!?" over and over again would make me want to shoot my machine after a while...

Que ??

[Killjoy_NL]

Will they ship this with the game or will the speech be residing on the EQ servers.
If the latter is the case, you might need a faster version of broadband, right ??

Shhyeahhh... Rrrrright....

[CaptSisko]

Posted on April 1st. The sheer amount of data that's going to be traveling over your internet connection to do this kind of in-game speech makes it seem a little bit 'fishy'.

Re:Shhyeahhh... Rrrrright....

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh...the samples would come on the install disk, and the only thing that would come over the net would be a "NPC #4732 play speech sample #11235" instruction.

Now, all they need to do

[kapella]

is start hiring ractors to play the NPCs - who wants to listen to the same pre-recorded dialogue bits over and over again, anyway?