geldonyetich :
Technically, EQ2 does have voices for their PCs. You specify the type of voice you have on your character sheet, and there’s these emotes that people barely ever use which say things like, “CHARGE!” or “Heal Me!” However, that’s a far cry from voicing every single dialogue of plot – maybe that’s Bioware’s goal.

Yup, it is fully voiced for the PCs, like Sheppard in ME.

In SWTOR the Player Character will have a voice as well, like Bioware did for Commander Sheppard in Mass Effect.

EQ2 only had voices for the NPCs.

For the record, I dont even read the quests, I just simply accept and then goto X spot and farm X mob for X drop, as needed.

Noel Walling :Ouch. I hope there’s a pretty wide selection of player voices.

I want my avatar to sound like Pee-wee Herman.

xzzy :

Owain :Maybe this will serve as an incentive for game companies to develop more realistic voice synthesizers.

Several universities have built entire programs around the research of speech synthesis, and they’ve yet to develop something that sounds natural. I don’t think at this point a game company could do much better.
Unless you are populating your game with robots. Then speech synthesis is ready to go.

Actually, some of the syntheziers, while still distinguishable from real voices (just as 3D graphics don’t look like the real world objects), are quite good. The biggest problem they have is that they don’t convey much emotion, and sound like bored (or overly-chirpy) telephone operators.

And now for shameless plug for said universities: Every year they run a friendly competition to see who can produce the best text-to-speech voice, all generated from the same recordings of a real person. They put the listening test on the web so people (aka: you) can listen to the voices and rate them from 1 (completely un-natural) to 5 (sounds like the real thing). If you have a chance, please take this year’s test at http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/blizzard/blizzard2009/english/register-ER.html . Every section of the test includes samples from each of the 17(?) research organizations that submitted voices. Some of them are very good.