According to the Guinness World Records 2012, Star Wars: The Old Republic has more voice acting than any entertainment project that has gone before. With over 200,000 lines of dialogue voiced by more than 200 actors, there's not much that can really compete.
We caught up with game director James Ohlen just before TOR launched and asked him how Bioware made the ambitious decision to create a fully voiced MMO. "That was really exciting," he said. "I remember showing a demo to Ray and Greg to budget, and actually calculated out "here's how much extra money we're going to spend if we're going to do player voice." I did the demo to them and they were like "we have to go this way."
That was before Ohlen revealed to them the full cost involved, but they still took the plunge. "Ray and Greg are very much about quality so they wanted to. They signed off on an amount. That was a big one I think just because we were gonna be pretty much spent out of time, but we did."
Ohlen didn't give an idea of the amount involved. With over 200 voice actors and 200,000 lines of dialogue, it must have been a pretty huge number. Ultimately, it was worth it. We gave it a score of 93 in our Star Wars: The Old Republic review . For more on how TOR was created, check out our feature on how Bioware wrote Star Wars: The Old Republic .
I've just about finished Balmorra with my Sith Warrior (Juggernaut), and am thoroughly enjoying it, though many of those thousands of lines of dialogue have been cut short by force chokes. How are you finding The Old Republic?
