Dear Square Enix,

@Trunks: Well, you can turn it back to English, because... well, spoilers I guess. But you know what I mean.

It would be a nice thing if it was added in, but, it's not a gamebreaker for me. I expect that sort of thing in a single player RPG as more of a necessity, but not for an MMO. The VA has gotten significantly better since ARR and I think that's a large step in the right direction already.

Honestly though, reading a few lines of text here and there though isn't that detrimental towards one's enjoyment of the game, in my opinion. It seems kind of nitpicky and a personal pet peeve than an impacting factor that holds the game back.

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Originally Posted by Ryannex

To be honest, they don't have enough money. Voice actors cost a LOT of money, and the time it would take to dub EVERYTHING would cost an extortionate amount and time. If you want to wait extra months for each patch then sure, but it'd overall receive more complaints.

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Soory, but this is inaccurate. There are plenty of voice actors worldwide, SE does not need to hide the most expencive ones.

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Originally Posted by LeoLupinos

Soory, but this is inaccurate. There are plenty of voice actors worldwide, SE does not need to hide the most expencive ones.

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It depends, not every cheap voice actor is "quality" work, but the same can be said for the most expensive ones as well. It's a hit or miss that sometimes, even the least well known, ends up being the better choice. However, it is true that most of the popular voice actors that people use, the ones that you see showing up repeatedly in anime and tv shows, are usually expensive to hire and rightly so, they're the most experienced.

Experienced voice actors usually a demand a higher compensation than the amateur ones, especially if they need to work XIV in their existing schedules.

Eh.

While nice, it's a complete waste of time and money to do that. Please don't.

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Originally Posted by Ghastly

Solution to all of this:
Only voice everything in japanese and give us subtitles. That way you don't have to hire english, french and german voice actors. Yotsuyu in english sounds so bad. it's like a completely different person/villain.

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If you thought the complaints about Japanese favoritism were bad now...

I'd rather they invest the money into something more important, like better servers or even the most basic sort of client security to prevent cheating.

Id rather they got rid of all the filler quest. I don't really need to run to 20 locations for 6 lines of text each.

I actually turned all the voices off. It was accidental in the first place (I just wanted to mute my character's battle grunts, and discovered I'd muted the cutscenes as well) but I find it more enjoyable to read and imagine the characters' voices than listen to the varying-quality voice actors speak the lines, or alternate between voiced and non-voiced scenes. Sometimes it doesn't work so well, but a few times I've tried turning the voices back on and I never leave it that way for long.

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Originally Posted by KeresThanatoio

Id rather they got rid of all the filler quest. I don't really need to run to 20 locations for 6 lines of text each.

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Strong same. It's super irritating when all I want to do is play the new content. Actually just in general.

[deleted-replied to wrong thread]

I'd like to direct this threads attention to a little (amazing) game - Star Ocean til the end of time (star ocean 3). This game had the ability to name all characters and was fully voiced. All voiceovers named all characters by the default name that they should be. Even though the subtitles wrote whatever you had named your characters. Not a fan of this method. and borderline impossible in an MMO as there is no default name for Player Characters.

I wouldn't mind if they went back to some old DF content, and voiced them like for example Xande Boss Fight.

It's only a few lines, it shouldn't be too expensive.

Naaah...

They are already messing with Merlwyb's take on the game because of this.

SE has a lot to fix; including stuff that wasn't eve broke and they tried to "improve" (i.e. Greed only).

We can have a nice story with text.

ok so what if SE dubs every cutscene BUT the only way you can get access to said dub is if you SUBSCRIBE to the DUB patch that cost 19.99 every month on top of your normal subscription. BUT in order to get access to the dub sub you need to also pay a one time fee of 49.99.

Not sure why anybody thinks not voicing your character is cutting corners for this game or that it should be standard. Almost no MMOs voice every cutscene, let alone voice your actual character.

I must say I agree with OP. It's Square Enix...people need to stop BSing here. They have the money to do as they please. True that they may not have the money for maybe THIS game.

Probably saving up for their next cash cow but I do believe they have enough money to pay for voice actors.

Please note, that of course I only wish to see quality voice acting for those HYPE AWESOME moments. If everything was voice line

It would lose that Spark I have for when I hear their voices. You know what I mean?

This thread is full of a lot of excuses. Could they do it? yes they could. Would it have its problems? yes it would but nothing they cant work around. Don't throw out the "its expensive crap either" they made $2.5 billion last year so as the OP stated, they ain't short of money. I personally have no issue with the way it is but enough with the excuses.

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Originally Posted by Darkoray1

This thread is full of a lot of excuses. Could they do it? yes they could. Would it have its problems? yes it would but nothing they cant work around. Don't throw out the "its expensive crap either" they made $2.5 billion last year so as the OP stated, they ain't short of money. I personally have no issue with the way it is but enough with the excuses.

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The operating income of all Square Enix MMOs is about 127,5 Mio. US-Dollar and that mostly because of releases like the FF14 Expansion, but also Dragon Quest and stuff.
Last year (without such releases) it was about 70 Mio. US-Dollar.

In what world do they make 2,5 Billion Us-Dollar with FF14?!

That's almost 14 million people subbing 12 months non-stop for 15 bucks.


Fortnite, generates maybe about 2,5 Mrd. Us-Dollar income a year (currently 250 Mio. $ a month?!)... you know.. Fortnite, the game everyone talks about because they make more money than anyone ever before. I wonder if Epic's players crunsh numbers to evaluate how much Epic "owes" them.

Nintendo made >55 Mrd. US-Dollar income with Pokemon so far... do they owe me a voiced version now, finally?

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

No, I disagree, I do not wish to see more fully voiced cutscenes, let alone the entire main scenario, and that is for one simple reason which is why SE does not already do so (and cost actually is not really a deciding factor despite first impressions).

The reason why not all cutscenes are voiced is because many cutscenes identify the player by name, which is completely impossible to do with a fully voiced cutscene, unless they identify your character in a default manner (which the currently voiced ones already do, identifying your character with generic pronouns or boilerplate terms like 'the adventurer', 'the champion', the 'Warrior of Light' etc). It's no surprise that when SE started to add voice acting to the FF series the player suddenly lost the ability to personalize their party's names, MMOs like FFXIV and FFXI before however it's a necessary component of the game, and thus they couldn't avoid it. Games like Mass Effect and The Old Republic which do have all cutscenes in the game fully voiced usually sacrifice personalization for this reason (requiring the player to have a default name that is what they are actually identified by in cutscenes, regardless of whatever name the player happens to have given them).

So I do not see this changing, and I'm glad, because voice acting in games in general tends to gravitate more towards the good side of "Z-grade bad", and FFXIV is no different.

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^This. While voice acted scenes are nice, it's even more nice to see a story NPC addressing me by my name. Hell, there are some games with voice acted scenes where, if your name should come up during the scene, the NPC will literally become silent for a brief moment where your name would be spoken, and then continue with the rest of their dialogue. With FFXIV, voice acted characters will refer to us almost always as "The warrior of light". While that is probably the best option for voice acted NPCs communicating with a custom character, it starts to feel very... generalized and unnecessarily formal.

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Originally Posted by Penthea

It works in Skyrim because your character mostly works alone. In the main story the main character doesn't build a strong bond with anyone in particular. It's the opposite in the msq. Your character has a strong bond with the majority of the main cast because you work closely with them. It wouldn't make sense for them to never call you by name. Your character has fought, bled and grieved with those people. How could they not be close enough to drop all titles and use their real name? Exactly this happened in FFX and it bugged the hell out of me for the entire game.

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^^^Thank you! After everything we've been through with certain characters, constantly being referred to as "The warrior of light" seems rather silly. Piggybacking off of Penthea, I couldn't agree more. I love Skyrim, and the formality with how you're addressed makes sense in that game. Even the potential followers you can recruit are never emotionally close enough to warrant a first name basis.

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Originally Posted by NephthysVasudan

I find it amusing how people assume that a given company has more than enough money when they are clueless as to how much things actually cost.

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^^^I have to agree with this as well. Voice acting is not cheap at all, and unless people are somehow able to obtain intricate details of SE's expense reports, "Lol SE has money" isn't much of an argument.

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Originally Posted by WilhelmWhite

^^^I have to agree with this as well. Voice acting is not cheap at all, and unless people are somehow able to obtain intricate details of SE's expense reports, "Lol SE has money" isn't much of an argument.

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Yeah...I just hope that kind of foolishness isn't contagious...because its getting far worse than I'd like to admit. People do not think past their fish bowl viewpoint anymore.

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Originally Posted by Darkoray1

This thread is full of a lot of excuses. Could they do it? yes they could. Would it have its problems? yes it would but nothing they cant work around. Don't throw out the "its expensive crap either" they made $2.5 billion last year so as the OP stated, they ain't short of money. I personally have no issue with the way it is but enough with the excuses.

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I didn't think rational thought were considered excuses. I mean, can you cite where you saw that they made $2.5 billion last year? Do you have access to SE's financial and fiscal reports that the rest of us don't know about? Whether or not the company makes enough money isn't exactly relative towards whether or not they could nor want to hire VA's for full-time since at best, everyone is speculating about how much the company makes without having any concrete facts to show for it.

Just because a company seems to make a lot money, doesn't mean they're using said finances effectively or that they can splurge on every single idea the playerbase comes up with.

Just my two cents. /shrugs

If we are waiting for months to get a major patch with main story content, I think the scenes should be all voice acted. Players should get their money's worth and should not settle for piss poor corner cutting. They make a lot of money from this apparent "Cash Cow" so they should have the funds for that, unless their claim about having over "10 Million Subscribed Players" is just a lie. Right now, imo , the quality of the patches are really lacking. 4.3's story was good, but lack of more voice acting is really bad and constantly reading text gets really annoying if I'm paying monthly for a modern mmo. Reading is fundamental, but straining my eyes to read a wall of text from characters is not fundamental. Just saiyan.




P.S: By defending their current flow, you people enable SE to keep their status quo of corner cutting with content quality. Think about that.



/2 cents

More that more voiced acted scene they should Focus on expand the languages at the game is showed, many spanish and italian ppl play It too, even if are only subtitles and skills description with one of the already voice acting are in game Will make tons of ppl Happy.

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Originally Posted by Usho

Reading is fundamental, but straining my eyes to read a wall of text from characters is not fundamental. Just saiyan.

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If you're straining your eyes from reading text on a screen then either you've been playing for way too long or your screen is too small, in which case you might need reading glasses. That ain't any companies fault really. There's also a feature to blow the text up. If you need every line read out to you, I'd consider that pure laziness honestly.

Then again, most of the playerbase already doesn't read their tooltips.

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Originally Posted by Usho

P.S: By defending their current flow, you people enable SE to keep their status quo of corner cutting with content quality. Think about that.

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If the majority of players prefer the status quo then there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and you are wrong for trying putting them down for choosing that. Your thoughts on content isn't the only one in the world, think about that.

People have to also realize large portion of sub money goes to SE other projects, just a small portion goes back into FFXIV.
Mog Station itself for example the money goes to pay the artists that create that content.

While I think that having more voiced scenes would be great, I think we would all benefit more if they put more motion in scenes. Or have our characters maybe touch another character. I know this last one is rather difficult with all the height differences but it'd be a nice touch to maybe pat Alphinaud on the head when he's being a good boy or something basic (or a yank on his clothing if you're a lala which come on that would be adorable). In short I want our scenes to be a little more dynamic. I mean they are getting better but I feel they could push it a little more and its more feasible than voice acting.

Also I like seeing characters say my avatar's name. If everything was voiced then that would be lost =/

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Originally Posted by Trunks

Fair enough, my bad, though that's still 3 years. It's been so long since the English VA changes of HW that I'd forgotten about all except Alphinaud's. I use the JP voice acting anymore because... well, Asahi in the newest story quests sums it up. (It's a shame because some of the English VAs really nail it, e.g., Zenos).

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Yes, unless you use the English dubbing, you don't notice who stayed and who went from ARR into HW and beyond. From what I was told, all of the old English voice actors for ARR were switched out, except for the ones that were introduced to carry on the torch for Heavensward story, such as Aymeric and Haurchefant, because of scheduling conflicts. I could be wrong on the reason, but the fact remains that 99% of the old list are gone after ARR ended. The only exception so far in voice change that I know of is Yugiri because of the tragedy that happened to her first English actor.

I'd rather they spend XIV's money hat on mechanics and game systems where XIV has remained below standards because of "lack of resources", than on additional VA or floating whatever other development hell boondoggles.

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Originally Posted by Limecat

I'd rather they spend XIV's money hat on mechanics and game systems where XIV has remained below standards because of "lack of resources", than on additional VA or floating whatever other development hell boondoggles.

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"Below Standards"? Whose standards? Yours?

Why are you playing, then?

The game's mechanics and systems are mostly good IMO. It'd be nice if there were a little more to do, but the stuff that IS there is reasonably fun. Really hoping HoH is going to add something that's not time-gated.

That's really my only beef with the game: The only fun things to do are either time-gated or come with ridiculously long waits (if you're a DPS). The one thing that ain't, PotD, has already been done to death.

EDIT: I suppose there is Eureka... but eh. Trying to do Eureka's Challenge Logs to get a few levels before jumping on the NM train is obnoxious as WHM or PLD so I'm trying to get RDM on 70 and it frustrates me that there's a lack of non-daily XP options that don't involve waiting 30min for a dungeon run.

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Originally Posted by Darkoray1

This thread is full of a lot of excuses. Could they do it? yes they could. Would it have its problems? yes it would but nothing they cant work around. Don't throw out the "its expensive crap either" they made $2.5 billion last year so as the OP stated, they ain't short of money. I personally have no issue with the way it is but enough with the excuses.

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So you mean they had to spend EVERYTHING on FFXIV?