Star Wars: The Old Republic is officially a record breaker - if you ever saw the TV show, feel free to start singing the theme song. It’s not in there as the world’s most awesome game like many of you would have liked and I’m not sure it’s beat the excellent start World of Warcraft had (it seems that’d be the sort of thing they’d be bragging about), but it does boast “the largest entertainment voice acting project ever,” which in itself is an impressible achievement. Some critics are claiming that this is game-changing; others are saying that it’s just a slightly updated version of the tried-and-true quest system we all know and begrudgingly love.

The Old Republic: Voicing the Universe

What we think of it, whether it’s amazing or not, doesn’t really matter; carrying out the work on the audio portions of this game was an impressive feat and something to be celebrated. Bioware must have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars - millions of dollars perhaps – on adding an audio component to characters you meet on your adventures. There are 200,000 lines of recorded dialogue performed by hundreds of voice actors and actresses, all of whom are bring something new to a galaxy far, far away. 200,000 lines is a hugely shocking amount and, just for the sake of argument, I figure we should do a little math.

I think it’s fair to presume that the average line in The Old Republic is anywhere between three and ten seconds long; I’ve not managed to play the game yet so that’s a guess, but seems like it could cover almost every average line. Chances are there are several longer conversations, several smaller, but we’ll do that range just for fun. We’re looking at anywhere from seven days’ worth of audio to above around the twenty four hour mark. In theory, which could be wildly wrong depending how accurate these figures are, you could spend all day just listening to the voice acting in this game and hardly have any time for sleep.

Comparision with other titles

Compare this with something like Skyrim, for instance, and that’s when the true scale of this game comes out. If you’ve played Skyrim, you’ll know how much conversation you’ll hear roaming around the world. If there are people nearby, you’ll hear them talking and yet it was revealed not long ago that that game had “only” 47,000 lines of dialogue and a tiny 70 voice actors – not even a quarter of the amount used on the Old Republic. Sure, the Old Republic doesn’t have ex-Jedi with serious knee injuries, but in this situation I think a little give and take is in order.

With a huge amount of voice actors (some of whom we’ll identify in a minute) and a huge amount of lines come a huge amount of writers and, on the Internet Movie Database, there are currently 16 writers listed as having worked on the game. I presume that there are a huge amount more that aren’t “important” enough to be listed on the IMDB and that there will be people submitting lines that might not even be credited in the game, a game this size will have had input from all sorts of people, not all of them necessarily writers.

Actors involved

Most of the writers that are listed on the IMDB though have some impressive credits to their name: Jennifer Brandes Hepler worked on the Dragon Age games; Chris Hepler is credited on Mass Effect 2; Arron de Orive, credited with “additional story ideas,” has experience in MMO storytelling with both Tabula Rasa and Star Wars Galaxies under his belt, as well as writing Metroid Prime 3; Drew Karpyshyn seems to have worked on all of Bioware’s titles since Knights of the Old Republic. Others are less noteworthy, either having worked on perhaps Dragon Age or Mass Effect or just having worked on the Old Republic.

Voice acting is not only numerous, but has some great people behind it as well: Grey Delisle, recently the voice of Catwoman in Arkham City (and plenty of other interesting roles), plays the female Bounty Hunter characters; David Hayter, Solid Snake, plays the male Jedi Knight; Nolan North is the Jedi Consular; Catherine Taber is a Star Wars regular, having played Padme in the Clone Wars series, films and games since it began and Mission Vao in Knights of the Old Republic – I could go on for paragraphs about the standard of the voice actors alone, I could probably fill an article with each single one’s achievements, but I won’t.

Fantastic Voice actors in a single game

What I will say is that quality doesn’t come cheap and to be able to list off so many fantastic voice actors in a single game is an amazing thing. Those mentioned are only the first group I noticed from the first page, hardly scrolling down, there are others worth a place in this article: Steve Blum, Kath Soucie, Jennifer Hale, Timothy Omundson, Tara Strong and more. It’s like a who’s who of the video game voice acting world and it speaks volumes that Bioware didn’t fill the game with A-lister actors in an attempt to really sell the game: “Brad Pitt as Chewbacca’s Great Grandfather fifty times removed – Only in The Old Republic.”

Is it a big enough jump in terms of catching people’s imagination that it was worth all that time, effort and money? 24 hours of audio is likely to have taken years to record, mix, remix and fit into the game and it’s likely that there’s hundreds of hours more sat on a computer hard drive somewhere for future expansions, mistakes, cut lines and forgotten stories; it’s an absolutely immense project and was it worth it? The general consensus seems to be yes, it was worth it; it makes a distinction that the game benefits from.

Is it something we’ll see more of in the future? It seems unlikely, very few of the studios developing MMOs could afford to put so much into a single game – remember that we’re only talking about the voice acting here, acquiring the rights to John William’s music and composing new incidental scores (As well as recording, mixing, etc) would have cost even more. With the success of The Old Republic, however, it wouldn’t surprise me to see partially-voiced games start to become the norm over the next five years or so.

So if The Old Republic is remembered for nothing else than for its entry into the Guinness world records and the reason behind it, it won’t be a bad thing. It’s paved the way for bigger games in the future (it probably won’t be long until it’s been topped) and, given the rumours that we’re moving into a new generation of consoles soon, it’ll be interesting to see how console game-makers take what was learnt in The Old Republic and run with it in new directio