EverQuest II voice-over trailer Sony Online Entertainment has announced a new feature that will appear in its upcoming online role-playing sequel, EverQuest II: full voice-over.

The new game will feature full-audio speech for all its non-player characters--a first for online role-playing games, which have, until now only featured mostly silent characters that interact with players by sending them text chat messages. (A few games, like Earth & Beyond and Anarchy Online have featured partial voice samples, but not full speech.) Sony Online Entertainment has also provided a new movie trailer, which demonstrates how this full-audio speech will work in the actual game.

EverQuest II will be the sequel to the original EverQuest, one of the earliest and most influential graphical online role-playing games, launched in 1999. The game will take place in the original EverQuest's world of Norrath after a series of disasters have changed the world forever. Players will be able to create a character from an open-ended selection of fantasy races and classes to investigate exactly what caused the events that led up to the disasters. For more information on the game, consult our previous coverage.