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Limited voice acting lets them spend more time (and money) on developing new content. Given the choice between more voice acting in old content and getting newer content, people are going to want the new content. Requiring voice acting for new content would push the release back, because it's basically being released as soon as it's finished. Voice acting for every language would take some time.

Also, I find voice acting in US games to be really hit or miss anyway, and this one was mostly a miss for me. Sure, I can set the audio to JP for better acting, but I don't actually pay much attention to it anyway since I can only understand a tiny bit of it. Also, when playing this sort of game, I generally turn off the sound entirely so I can watch a show or listen to an audio drama while I play.

Well, they could write out the script ahead of time and record the voices for several major expansions ahead of time as if they were recording an entire season of Young Justice or something. Then when they have the cutscenes and gameplay and content additions ready for an expansion, they already have the voice files sitting on a hard drive to be transferred over. I would love if they brought in Christopher Sabat to play at least three male characters -- one with a Piccolo-like voice, one with a Vegeta-like voice, and one with his normal, Yamcha-like voice, lol.

If this was a low budget free-to-play game, I'd understand, but they are getting $30-$40 for digital and hard copies sold, plus $15 a month from EVERY player. The site says there are two million active players, which means they are making $30 million every single month from subscriptions alone. I understand a lot of money goes to maintain the various servers and to the payrolls of the staff, but still. $30 million a month -- $360 million a year, not including actual software sales -- and they can't afford voice actors? LOL.

Another thing to remember though is that they had to choose which were most important to VO and which could remain Speech Bubbles because adding VO takes a lot of time, time that would have initially pushed back the re-launch. Time that would push back the content patches. It was stated that more VO would be coming. It wasn't stated on being old or new content.

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

As for voice acting, it's something that's always going to be divisive. One possible reason though for the fact only certain story cutscenes are voiced is because frequently npcs refer to your character by name, thus as the vocal cast have no way of knowing exactly what the player will name their character, it makes scenes where the player is named impossible to have spoken dialogue. Because of this, games that feature full voice acting usually then just refer to the player's character by a generic title (like in The Old Republic, or are forced to use a placeholder name (like Commander Shepherd in the Mass Effect titles, therefore cutting out a lot of freedom in how the player develops their character.

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This too is a major reason though. In some, they can just use the generic Adventurer, or another phrase given at late game, but many of the non-voiced Main Story Quests use your character name far to often. And unlike in many other games, leaving a blank where the name would go while speaking is breaking immersion. Other ideas have included recording all of the class/job names and insert that depending on what you were at the time, but that would take 3-4 times the programing work to pick up the right sound file not to mention the extreme increase in memory. Doing this for class/Job quest though would be very nice, and I hope they revisit it at a later date.

Oh yeah, I forgot to address the name issue. There is the idea of just speaking over the name:

Spoken: "Hello again, my dear friend! How have you been?"
Written: "Hello again, my dear friend Cid! How have you been?"

Spoken: "Listen, we need to find the ones responsible!"
Written: "Listen Cid, we need to find the ones responsible!"

That does break immersion, like you said, but could still work. You could also have some characters call the player by a nickname, or a title, as previously mentioned.

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Originally Posted by Zagstinator

plus $15 a month from EVERY player.

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Not true. It doesn't diminish your overall point, but you only pay that much if you pay for the full account one month at a time. There are also the basic accounts, legacy accounts, and discounts for paying 3 or 6 months at a time. I'd be surprised if they got $15 a month from the majority of their players.

Anyway. Personally, I wouldn't mind if they just scrapped VO completely. Voice actors are never as good as my imagination. But if they're going to have it, I do wish they'd use it more often and/or more consistently. Just because it's so jarring when it does happen.

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Originally Posted by Bixby

Personally, I wouldn't mind if they just scrapped VO completely. ... But if they're going to have it, I do wish they'd use it more often and/or more consistently. Just because it's so jarring when it does happen.

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I find the cutscenes that are split into sections disconcerting, the sort where you'll start in a cutscene that's not voiced, have it transition into a continuation cutscene with the same characters that is voiced, and then transition back to not being voiced, all within what should logically be thought of as a single scene.

For me, it's just impossible to be fully immersed in a world when a majority of the story is silent. I just tried out the open beta of ArcheAge, and couldn't get into that either because I hate reading just text for the story. That's why I also couldn't get into WoW and other games.

The two Major reasons FF14 lacks Across the board Voice acting.
One is Money
Second is Money , And Here is Why!
The game is aimed more at getting as many players into One game, cross platform, cross servers, Multiple Languages.
Plain and simple.
Yes other FFs have been Wonderful movie type experiences, but this one is bridging that language gap.
Use the Auto translate option if you have not yet ( there is a quest for it :P ) and you will see, hopefully, why they were not able to budget for 14 plus voice over cut scenes.