Oh dear oh dear, it seems our worst fears about the upcoming Starwars the old republic MMO RPG may be correct, following on from murmuring of bloated content and no actual game from ex staffers, and some less then glowing rumours on the internet, it seems Bioware may be in over their head in the MMO RPG Space.

Eurogamer have recently published a less then glowing preview hands on with STWOR, and it seems all is not well in Skywalker land.

According to Eurogamer “although combat holds the attention, the overall pacing is very slow. There are some languid travel times between strung-out locations and the decision to voice every single line of the script, completely expunging text-boxes from the game, has its most laborious effect during this sort of bread-and-butter MMO gameplay”.

They go on to say “Put simply, the basic missions and forgettable characters at this level aren’t interesting enough to sustain the cinematic presentation. Also, in a persistent multiplayer context, all this chatter has another, oddly immersion-breaking effect. Seeing other players standing around in a motionless, non-interactive trance while they page through lengthy conversation cut-scenes (represented by a buff called, appropriately enough, “conversation stasis”  makes it feel as though everyone is playing in their own world, not yours.”

It seems pacing is a major problem, and voice acting which may work out nicely in a single player game, may not be the best idea in an MMO.

Does an MMO need full voice acting?

 Founder of GamertechTV, and EIC, executive editor of GamertechTV Read more from this author