border said:
It takes one guy an hour or two to write out quest text and it takes up kilobytes of storage space/bandwidth. Recording quest audio dialogue takes forever by comparison, especially if it's going to be different voices for every possible combination of class/gender character. Bandwidth for mandatory content updates is not really free either.
Voice acting won't limit the quality of content, it will limit the quantity of quality content
I would rather have more quality than alot of generic quantity.
But also think that is not true, of all things what is going to take the longest to produce is the actual game content, not the audio/writing portion as most of that is handled by other people than those actually working on the game itself. The audio/writing stuff only adds really to production costs, but shouldn't really affect time.
With TOR we are likely going to see content updates more similar to WoW's with several months before any new content is released, unlike other MMOs coming out lately that try to push out lot of little content on regular monthly basis and such. For such a high profile and expensive game, it shouldn't be a burden for them to be able to add new content on a timely basis. The real factor is if the game is successful enough that it will bring in the revenue to support big content updates.
What they have in mind is great, but it depends on the game being successful, but once again, this is no different from any other MMO really as continued support is dependent on success generally.
border said:
The people who are interested in story are going to abandon the game as they complete the content and new stuff is being churned out at a snail's pace. I guess this is more a problem with their business model than the game design though. Appealing to people more interested in story than character progression will result in pretty sharp spikes in subscriptions. It's easy to dangle a carrot for raiders, harder to do so for people interested in narrative -- at some point they're just going to experience a fatigue with this particular setting and universe.
Never really stopped other people from playing other MMOs who churn out new content on 3-6 month basis only. How is the fatigue going to be any different from those who have spent 6 years or so playing the same game that had no story? Again the key here is that this game does well enough that they can continue to provide both traditional MMO experience for those "hardcore" and those wanting story.
But also remember a key thing they are also going for with TOR is that they hope players want to play other classes to experience all the different stories. Unlike any other MMO, each class has unique stories, quests, dialogues, as well as the assortment of exclusive companion characters who also have their own unique stories and quests attached to them as well, along with two different game factions to experience. They are trying to make the game more unique for each play with different classes instead of it being the exact same experience just with an alt character.