TGIF to everyone and it's this Friday that brings up Developer Blog #10. Today's blog features James Ohlen who is the Creative Director and Lead Designer of The Old Republic, and Shauna Perry, the Director of Audio and Localization for BioWare.

Shauna gives us a look into the process for making the voice overs in Star Wars The Old Republic. Sounds like Bioware is really giving the game a nice touch with all the voice overs that should make the gaming experience much more immersive than typical MMOs. Get the full scoop after the jump.

Source: www.swtor.com

A Few Tidbits on VO's for The Old Republic

• The voice-over is being recorded in 5 different cities (so far); Los Angeles , London, New York, San Francisco, and Toronto.
• By the time the project is finished, we will have worked with hundreds of actors - many on multiple occasions.
• The entire game ‘script’ contains approximately 40+ novels worth of content.
• One of the biggest challenges of the production: consistency in pronunciation across the whole project! You would be amazed at how many ways there are to say “Thul” or “Holo” Projector. An audio pronunciation guide sure has helped :).

Once the editing passes are complete, the conversations are formatted into scripts for the actors. Like all BioWare games, dialogue in The Old Republic is nonlinear. As a player, you can select from a number of different conversation lines which, in turn, lead to multiple options for NPC responses. This creates highly complex scripts (unlike a movie or television scripts which are linear). In studio, all the various permutations of the story must be recorded - and often in a variety of orders. Because the scripts are nonlinear, we have to provide enough context for the actors to understand what is going on. We need to set the scene for them.