Minumum level for full forum access?

I came to the forums to discuss my issues with the lack of voice acting and talk with other players, but I am finding that the forum tells me my level is too low to post a thread or even REPLY to a thread, yet it fails to mention AT WHAT LEVEL this changes, lol. I would think the answer should be under FAQ or the Forum Guidelines or SOMEWHERE. Luckily I discovered this thread allows me to post, so thus I am posting this question here.

I bought the game last year for PS3, played it for a while, and just couldn't follow the story because the cutscenes were awkwardly silent and devoid of the emotion from games like FFXII and XIII. Now, many months later, I see there is a 14-day free trial for PC, so I figure I'll give it a go again. Same issue. So hard to follow along when there is nothing thrilling about the cutscenes and no voices, especially when I work night shift and am tired all the time.

It's SO much easier to follow a story when there is voice and epic music and lots of stuff going on to keep your interest.

I tried to post this in the other forums like Quests, Lore, and General Discussion, but like I said, for some reason the developers decided it would be a good idea to prevent new players from posting in most forums without providing information on what level they CAN start posting in all the forums.

For me, I have to try very hard to resist the urge to just skip cutscenes and quest text because it drags on and there is no excitement. If I want to read a book I'll go read a book, lol. If I am to be visually stimulated with colors and expressions and environments, I want to have music and voices and sounds of nature as well. Music and nature sounds like birds are there, but no voices. It would be like watching an entire season of an anime with just subtitles and no voices at all.

Anyway, that's my problem with the game and why I am posting about this here since it won't let me do it anywhere else. I have minor problems with the horrible character customization options, such as a lack of good beards for all faces and the like, but that I could look past if the story was voiced. I understand voice acting costs money, but they could hire a very small cast who can do multiple voices each. Or screen the the development staff and see if any of them can do voice overs -- they're already on the payroll anyway, lol.

There is voice acting, although very minimal, its there. I would think voices will add a lot of memory issues that older systems would have trouble with. That's also not including the costs needed to pay those voice actors. Considering its in English, Japanese, French, German, and (now?) near future Mandarin/Cantonese (sp?)

As for post limitations, check out the stickies that the forum mods have made. I know I've seen the post restrictions before but that was back when they were switching the beta forums to the current forums we have now.

Is there even any big name MMOs that are fully voiced? I haven't played thay many, maybe a handful of them, but they all seem to have very little spoken dialogue..usually just text boxes. And you're right single player games can use voices for cut scenes because there is more memory set aside for that on a offline game.

The forum posting rules are listed in this thread. I (and several other players I've heard from) agree with you about them being ridiculously restrictive, especially for new players, but that's what they are. There is a workaround for one of the rules: When you initially make a post, it's limited to a maximum of 1,000 characters, but that rule only applies when you initially post it, and not when you edit it. So if you want to make a longer post, you can post the first bit, then edit to add in the rest. (I recommend writing the whole thing out first so you can just cut and paste during that edit. That way you don't leave that first stub of a post hanging there for long.) You still have to hit the minimum level to post in other forums, though. (If you have multiple characters, it's based on level of the character and class you use as your avatar image.)

As to voice acting, there is voice acting in a few scenes, just not very many of them. I wish more were voice acted, but the story is pretty good regardless of whether you're hearing or reading the dialog.

The voice acting is relatively sparse, considering that most A-list titles voice both cinematic cutscenes and their story's in-game cutscenes (side quests are different). The only recent MMOs with Full voice-over I can think of were SWTOR and ESO, and there was considerable controversy over its development budget because of it (it was eclipsed by the scandal that was 1.0 at the time, but there you go).

On the plus side though, you have access to all the language audios. You can change them in the system configuration in the loading screen to play the Japanese, German, French, or English soundtracks. Switching between them does necessitate you to log out, but it's an option if you find the fake british accent too grating.

Otherwise, Niwashi nailed it on the head for the posting restrictions.

@Niwashi
In other Forums, I have seen people quickly "reserve" the next few posts to bypass the character limit and to ensure they have room for additional thoughts they might wish to add later.
The way one does this is to make there primary post and then immediately make another post with the words: "Reserved"

@OP
This game does indeed contain voice acting, but I would rather it be unvoiced for some of the actors. I believe it is the lady minfilia in particular, her voice makes me want to bash my head into the keyboard. To fix this problem I believe you can change the voice acting to Japanese and just read the subtitles. Though I wish they had just initially chosen better actors.

Also, not taking sides here, but they likely are trying to protect there discussion from advertisers and spammers by making a level requirement, maybe it should be a little lower, maybe about level 15-20.

One of the reasons for the forum restrictions is because the Beta Test forum became bogged down with spam threads and flaming and thus SE was forced to implement similar restrictions (which were even more restrictive) there.

So in order to prevent a similar incident on the main forum when the game went live, they added the posting limits here as well. As others have said, you can get around the 1000 character limit easy enough, but the other limits are annoying. But it's SE's forum so they're entitled to how they run it, no matter how restrictive that may be.

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.

For FFXIV, SE went the old DnD route and gave total freedom to how your character is developed - there is little backstory given to the them other than they're an 'adventurer from a foreign land', and then just leave it to the player to fill in the blanks, and name is a part of that. Thus, this requires that voice acting be limited to general story sections where the player is not referred to by name. Or at least, that's what it seems to me anyway.

Given the general lackluster quality of the voice acting (I especially hate Minfilia's voice actress - that is not how I envisioned her to sound at all since 1.0), this is only a good thing I guess. ;)

The voice acting is a bit of a mixed bag. I don't like Minfilia's voice either, nor do I like Yda or Papalymo. But Thancred's voice acting is good, and Merlwyb's is excellent.

Switching to the Japanese audio helps in some scenes. Minfilia's Japanese voice actor is better than her English voice actor, but Yda and Papalymo are annoying in either language. I like Merlwyb better in English.

I play SWTOR as my main. To be honest I'm glad there is limited voice acting in this as I want my character to sound like my character, not like every other character of that class.

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.