Classic Conversation Presentation
Alliance content is presented in what we've dubbed the "Classic Conversation" format, which may look strikingly familiar to fans of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic:
These conversations use a distinct letterboxing format, as well as a distinct font styling to set them apart visually. These conversations are characterized by their more character-centric nature, both in terms of storyline and cinematography.
Story character narrative lines in classic conversations are fully voiced as you have all come to expect. Player responses in classic conversations are presented as an open-ended list of response options, displayed in full (as opposed to in paraphrases), and are not voiced. The classic conversation format allows us to give you a much wider array of choices and potential outcomes, as well as more specific, complex, and subtle character reactions to your choices.
And thus concludes one of the more interesting experiments in MMO history: The Total Commitment to Full Voice Over that was, and still is, the single most distinctive feature of the original game.
At long last they finally admit that VO work is the bane of their content generation pipeline. So in order to produce content for the Alliance system at a more viable rate, they're just dropping the character VO entirely (thus eliminating 90% of the VO work in most scenes), and going with straight silent text.
I can't help but feel a bit sad now that they have condemned all those old side quests to obscurity as invisible "exploration" quests. In hindsight, it's nothing short of amazing --- stunning, really --- that every single mundane side quest in the base game had its own fully voiced cutscene for intros and turn-ins.
Those dozens of boring old side quests that we've all grown accustomed to hurriedly spacebarring our way through after the fourth or eighth or eighteenth time seem like real treasures now. They're relics, really, of an decadent approach to content development we will not see the like of soon again, if ever.