EverQuest Sequel Gives Voice To NPCs, Original Turns Five 30
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.
The problem with local files... (Score:1, Interesting)
How this would affect the game, I'm not sure. There are spoiler web sites for every game, including EQ1, but usually somebody, somewhere has to have actually experienced the content before they can post about it. (Some exceptions are things like spells in EQ1, since the spell data is stored locally.) I suspect most players would argue that by giving them access to such a wealth of information, those sites actually enrich their gameplay experience.
However, I still think that getting a key piece of information too soon could mess things up. I guess it all depends on what the NPC's have to say. Say an NPC gives you a quest: "...To imbue your helm with magical protection, I will need a faerie spirit stone. Alas, the fae left here long ago, and I do not know where they have gone."
Say the faeries have gone to a place called Foo, which is where you will find the stone. The NPC's answer text upon successfully bringing him the stone is, "That you for the stone.
Say, however, that the NPC's text was, "Thank you for the stone. I never would have thought the faeries would take up in a place like Foo, but
"Who would've thought that the Vah Shir had been blasted into space, handed technological secrets by an all-powerful alien race, and would one day return in their spaceships to save us all..."
You wouldn't need sound files (Score:2, Interesting)
US$25 million is that much... (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course they have expenses, but MMORPG's can be run at big profit margins (thus the flood of new titles) if the economies of scale work well enough.
I'm just saying they probably didn't have to run out and get any investment capital for Eq2 as they are taking in so much money.
Lastly, I'm just giving a very rough estimate of the money. Many people pay per month at US$15/month but if you pay in, say, 2 year intervals you can pay only US$8.30 per month (IIRC). Heck, they have people on a special server paying (IIRC) US$30/month! Also, the 400,000 figure for accounts is rough, also. They claim to have over this number for years now, but it is well known they have a large quantity of comped (free) accounts. How many I cannot estimate. Further complicating the issue is their "all access" pass. I bet they count that one person paying the fixed ammount as one account on each game, but the money (roughly $20/month but you can get down to $16.67 by the year) is less then the sum of the 3 (4?) subscriptions together.