A couple of weeks ago I forked over far too much money for my first gaming PC. I get heart palpitations when I think about having to do anything more complex than turning it on or off, but hey, SWTOR!

It’s a lot like if BioWare took World of Warcraft, polished it to a glossy sheen and then plunged it into a Star Wars bubble bath. Lots of familiar mechanics but everything feels more momentous, like me beating down 20 more soldiers and blowing up 20 more glowing boxes will actually help the Republic take down the Sith. I must be a sucker for detonating glowing boxes.

Chicks, man

Yesterday I hit level 23 on my rock-chucking, wind-passing female Jedi Consular. Yes, I’m playing a girl. Normally in MMOs I’m strictly into dudes (why doesn’t sound that right?) but in SWTOR it’s all about the voice acting. I love David Hayter in the Metal Gear series –– “I’m no hero, never was, never will be.” –– but word on the forums was that he and fellow voice actor champion Nolan North deliver painfully generic performances in SWTOR. The insane amount of dialogue in The Old Republic means I’ll be hearing my little person speak for hours over the time I play, so I refused to settle for an OK performance. I almost went male Bounty Hunter because of its actor’s amazingly deep, testosterone-y voice, but the consular play style fit me better (I was pure mage in WoW). The variety and quality of voice work in SWTOR puts even Skyrim to shame. I looked them both up on IMDB and with about 300 credits, SWTOR has more than four times as many listed voice actors as Skyrim. Even on my rinky dink earphones (I forgot to buy speakers for my computer – d’oh), the tiniest roles carry enough emotion and nuance to belong in a major motion picture. Even the jibbar jabber aliens sound good.

No going back

The other day I downloaded demos for Rift and Guild Wars, two MMOs that I always wanted to play but couldn’t because of the no PC thing. Both had fuzzy graphics and relatively clunky controls compared to SWTOR, but it was the deafening silence that turned me off both. I’ve leveled to 80 on WoW and completed enough quests to save Azeroth dozens of times over (that place owes me big time). I did all that with barely a peep from the hundreds of dwarves, elves, humans and gnomes who asked for my aid and the absence never bothered me. But after playing SWTOR for just a couple of weeks, I don’t know if any other MMO will feel complete without a voice begging me to clear out that bandit hideout or recover this invaluable cheese wheel. Not every voice acted quest in SWTOR is amazing, and I still hit the space bar to skip through the end sometimes. I use subtitles because I don’t want to miss any important details. But the very act of hearing an impassioned plea to clear out the spice peddlers from Nar Shaddaa means I’m far more likely to remember that one throw away quest than the gravest mission I ever completed during my years in Azeroth. But hey, maybe that’s just me. Are you enjoying the voice actor work in SWTOR or do you not care? Do you think BioWare screwed over itself and the entire industry by getting people like me hooked on the expensive feature? Let me know in the comments!