why not have all quests have a voice over?

really why only some got it, its getting annoying when there lots of text dump and may be 2 sentences are even relevant to the plot. why not at last voice all the msq? this is by far the most financially successful mmo, it clearly can do it. even games like gw2 can and they make maybe 25% of what ff14 is .
what you think of this?:confused:

Voice acting takes time, translation and space on disks. Whilst it is true that some games are near enough 100% voice acted they limit themselves in that way in being able to deliver content simply because it will need to be voice acted, translated and so on. Plain text still needs to be translated but you do not then need to employ voice actors and studios to record it so content can be produced quicker.

Keep the voice acting to set parts I say and text for the rest so we can ensure content keeps on flowing.

The reason is Cost and Work load primarily.

They could spend the money on Voice Overs on everything, or they can allocate the budget and time to other areas of development. Voice overs cost a fortune, yea ffxiv could afford it with the subs and players they have, but they choose to invest the funds in other ways.

I'd wager the time investment might be a bigger hurdle than the cost. Dev team works hard to stick to their planned schedule. Adding voices to everything would surely mean stretching that schedule out, meaning less content over time. The added value of voice acting doesn't outweigh the cost of changing their development cycle.

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Originally Posted by Xatsh

The reason is Cost and Work load primarily.

They could spend the money on Voice Overs on everything, or they can allocate the budget and time to other areas of development. Voice overs cost a fortune, yea ffxiv could afford it with the subs and players they have, but they choose to invest the funds in other ways.

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i think you mistake how this works. its different people that do the voice overs not the devs them self.so time if not the problem here.as for cost this game can do it, as games that dont even do 15% of what ff14 do can.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

I'd wager the time investment might be a bigger hurdle than the cost. Dev team works hard to stick to their planned schedule. Adding voices to everything would surely mean stretching that schedule out, meaning less content over time. The added value of voice acting doesn't outweigh the cost of changing their development cycle.

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then just do it for the msq, don't do it for the filler things.

It takes time and cost money and not all quests need to have voice over.

voice acting is expensive and with the extensive amount of dialogue in this game it wouldn't be practical to voice all of it.

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Originally Posted by SamsaraTrickstar

really why only some got it, its getting annoying when there lots of text dump and may be 2 sentences are even relevant to the plot. why not at last voice all the msq? this is by far the most financially successful mmo, it clearly can do it. even games like gw2 can and they make maybe 25% of what ff14 is .
what you think of this?:confused:

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Because it is expensive to dub everything? You have to pay the Seiyu, who are stars in Japan or well-known voices in English and other languages.

The budget put in too much, it's less budget for other more useful things.

It's nice to have fully dubbed games, but if the time is limited and the budget is put into more gameplay, story telling and quality of life, I say it's okey.

I think it's a shame that outside of MSQ, it doesn't speak, the NPC Shop and others don't say a word, so between the patches that add MSQ and well, it's pretty easy to forget that my game is in Japanese for the voices.

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Originally Posted by White_Wolf_X

It takes time and cost money and not all quests need to have voice over.

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but the msq do.

why people act as if this a small game the cant reach even 50k players?

Consider the fact that we get to name our character, and that almost all non-voiced scenes refer to you by your character's name. If they voiced ALL dialogue, they would never be able to refer to you by name but would have to say she/her/WoL/"hey you" which would get extremely tedious to write around. Not only that, but it would also dampen a lot of the relationships we build with the npcs, like if one of the twins say "thank you for saving me there, John" it acknowledges you as a person, whereas if they said "thank you for saving me there, Warrior of Light" it comes across as much more formal and distant.

You can't really compare to Guildwars 2 as they utilize their budget in extremely different ways;

GW2, for example, is extremely limited in the music department and basically recycles their soundtrack from GW1. That's a huge amount of money saved. Don't get me wrong, it's a fine soundtrack if you're into canned Jeremy Soule (which again, is good, albeit very "background music for studying" vibe imho). They don't utilize a lot of mocap like SE does, they basically have nutcracker-jaw'd characters when they speak.

GW2 does a LOT of things right and deserve LOTS of praise for it, but they are very much apples and oranges to FFXIV.

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Originally Posted by SamsaraTrickstar

but the msq do.

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They called "Main Story Quest" for a reason.

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Originally Posted by Bearded

Voice acting takes time, translation and space on disks. Whilst it is true that some games are near enough 100% voice acted they limit themselves in that way in being able to deliver content simply because it will need to be voice acted, translated and so on. Plain text still needs to be translated but you do not then need to employ voice actors and studios to record it so content can be produced quicker.

Keep the voice acting to set parts I say and text for the rest so we can ensure content keeps on flowing.

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Pretty much. Voice acting is also unfortunately one of the most storage demanding features a game can have.

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Originally Posted by White_Wolf_X

They called "Main Story Quest" for a reason.

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The S actually means Scenario!

*pushes glasses*

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Originally Posted by Iplewhelmed

Consider the fact that we get to name our character, and that almost all non-voiced scenes refer to you by your character's name. If they voiced ALL dialogue, they would never be able to refer to you by name but would have to say she/her/WoL/"hey you" which would get extremely tedious to write around. Not only that, but it would also dampen a lot of the relationships we build with the npcs, like if one of the twins say "thank you for saving me there, John" it acknowledges you as a person, whereas if they said "thank you for saving me there, Warrior of Light" it comes across as much more formal and distant.

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how its a problem. all the games do it. clearly they will not create a naming algorithm .

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Originally Posted by kaynide

You can't really compare to Guildwars 2 as they utilize their budget in extremely different ways;

GW2, for example, is extremely limited in the music department and basically recycles their soundtrack from GW1. That's a huge amount of money saved. Don't get me wrong, it's a fine soundtrack if you're into canned Jeremy Soule (which again, is good, albeit very "background music for studying" vibe imho). They don't utilize a lot of mocap like SE does, they basically have nutcracker-jaw'd characters when they speak.

GW2 does a LOT of things right and deserve LOTS of praise for it, but they are very much apples and oranges to FFXIV.

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you can on the fact that GW2 don't make any wear near as much cash as ff14. people bring the cash problem and its just to show. one more game that dont do as much as ff14 is ESO but can do voice overs. not i don't need any small thing to be voiced but msq.

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Originally Posted by SamsaraTrickstar

really why only some got it, its getting annoying when there lots of text dump and may be 2 sentences are even relevant to the plot. why not at last voice all the msq? this is by far the most financially successful mmo, it clearly can do it. even games like gw2 can and they make maybe 25% of what ff14 is .
what you think of this?:confused:

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Because it is expensive?

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Originally Posted by SamsaraTrickstar

why people act as if this a small game the cant reach even 50k players?

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why are you acting like money grows on trees and they are not given a budget they have to follow.

its not just voice acting in English.

the game is available in Many languages, soi, you pay actors, you pay the translators to put it intio whatever language, then you need QA that understands the language, so make it fit in the given space and not make it seem like the voice acting is going on and on... you seem to be glossing over a ton of costly variables because its magical money raining from the sky.

Sure, SE has money, no doubt, yes, FFxiv does well for them, but in what world would the part that does FFxiv get all the money it makes. zero business unit works that way. they get a budget.. they have to work within that budget, plain and simple.

Cost will be the biggest factor.

SE would need to hire VAs of both sexes for each language that the game is written in, the cost climbs to the many hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.

Bioware put themselves in a corner by doing 100% VA work for SWTOR and because it was expected every expansion and its subscriber count dwindled each year they now make pathetically small expansions every 3+ years because its just too damn expensive . Many of the great British VAs ( performance artists as they like to be referred as) you hear in games come from Theatre / BBC television stock and are part of unions that grant them great salaries inc post release bonuses.

SE would need to hire VAs of both sexes for each language that the game is written in? like they do now? so the same one do more (and get payed more).
why am i acting like money grows on trees? i don't i act as if we paying for this game. problem is the bigger it gets we don't see SE invest more in to it.

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Originally Posted by SamsaraTrickstar

SE would need to hire VAs of both sexes for each language that the game is written in? like they do now? so the same one do more (and get payed more).
why am i acting like money grows on trees? i don't i act as if we paying for this game. problem is the bigger it gets we don't see SE invest more in to it.

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In your OP you said just like GW2 does .

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Originally Posted by SamsaraTrickstar

really why only some got it, its getting annoying when there lots of text dump and may be 2 sentences are even relevant to the plot. why not at last voice all the msq? this is by far the most financially successful mmo, it clearly can do it. even games like gw2 can and they make maybe 25% of what ff14 is .
what you think of this?:confused:

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In GW2 the player character talks in the cutscenes , hence my reply . Two sexes of the player character needs voice lines , and for each language the game is written for.

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Originally Posted by Izar_Chillen

In your OP you said just like GW2 does .



In GW2 the player character talks in the cutscenes , hence my reply . Two sexes of the player character needs voice lines , and for each language the game is written for.

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u see but in FF14 you do not. so it saves this cost.

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Originally Posted by Xatsh

The reason is Cost and Work load primarily.

They could spend the money on Voice Overs on everything, or they can allocate the budget and time to other areas of development. Voice overs cost a fortune, yea ffxiv could afford it with the subs and players they have, but they choose to invest the funds in other ways.

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This isn't a free game, they demand 15 usd monthly (180 usd per year, now include items from Mogstore) the game should already have a better character creator, textures, rework on towns,areas, open world, real gathering instead of shiny objects on ps2 textures, no more loading screens every 20 meters, a better cash shop incorporated in the game instead of open browser, log in, navigate towards 10 menus, log in again, wait 5 hours to deliver item etc.

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Originally Posted by SamsaraTrickstar

u see but in FF14 you do not. so it saves this cost.

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So why bring up GW2 a fully VA'd story from both player and npcs in your OP as an example?

The reason why certain scenes are not VA'd is because those are chosen as awaiting approval ( as in they may or may not rework them) and the scenes which get VA are the ones they set as complete/set in stone and then they go into the scheduling for the actors to voice the roles as they need done well in advance. This was brought up in one of tyheir live letters or possibly a streamer/yoshiP interview.


I would love it if ALL MSQ was VA'd . However its expensive and if they were to have the funds and time it would set a precedent and we would all expect it from then on and if they were to stop doing it , lets say years down the line when the game isnt as lucrative for SE it would piss us off for sure.

"Thank you for that, Samsara. You've set my mind at ease," >> A line that cannot be voice acted

"And here we have her... the Champion of Eorzea!" >> A line that can be voice acted.

Both kinds of lines appear in MSQ, and as such they cannot voice act every line in the MSQ.

On top of what has already been said.

It seems you're not actually looking for answers, and just looking to find something to complain about.

Reading is good for you :D

Wouldn't really make a huge difference to me, honestly. I read faster than I listen and tend to skip over fluff very quickly. Some more voice acting would be nice in certain areas but voice acting the whole thing would be a bit of a waste, imo. You'd have to not only hire an enormous amount of people but it would be pretty half-assed too.

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Originally Posted by Izar_Chillen

So why bring up GW2 a fully VA'd story from both player and npcs in your OP as an example?

The reason why certain scenes are not VA'd is because those are chosen as awaiting approval ( as in they may or may not rework them) and the scenes which get VA are the ones they set as complete/set in stone and then they go into the scheduling for the actors to voice the roles as they need done well in advance. This was brought up in one of tyheir live letters or possibly a streamer/yoshiP interview.


I would love it if ALL MSQ was VA'd . However its expensive and if they were to have the funds and time it would set a precedent and we would all expect it from then on and if they were to stop doing it , lets say years down the line when the game isnt as lucrative for SE it would piss us off for sure.

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as an example of a game that do it but do not have even 25% of the budget ff14 have. i think i did say it. trhe point its not the cost as VA's are not as expansive as you think. there lots of free lancers that are godly good and will work for cheap.

- more expensive
- harder/impossible to make last minute change
- and most of time useless. Voice-over on the placeholder-like cut-scenes that plague 90% of FFXIV quests would be a waste.

I will actually agree with you Samsara.

The MSQ is my favorite part of FFXIV, I just love the story. The voice acting makes it so much better and immersive. If they did voice acting on MSQ alone, I'd be happy. I have a lot of friends who have told me they "can't get into the story" because they end up just mass clicking through the walls of text instead of reading them, and only watch the voice acted cutscenes.

GW2 does an excellent job with their voice acting, and has to have even more actors, since the player even talks in their cutscenes. That's 10 different instances of reading the same lines (5 races male/female). And I'll argue that FFXIV is much more story driven than GW2. It only makes sense to invest in the voice acting for it, at least for the important quests. Every time a cutscene pops up that isn't voiced, I'll read it, but I still feel a twinge of disappointment.

Many of those voice actors can do multiple voices, so could just reuse them to voice minor characters in the MSQ as well. Wouldn't be that hard to do.

I like games with full voice acting, but in this case it's not realistic, and here's why.

Let's take a look at a game called Kingdoms of Amalur. There are 900 NPCS, all with voiced lines. There are 60k lines of spoken dialog. And this resulted in a massive budget, they needed at least 3 millions copies to be sold to break even. When they sold only 1.2 millions, they gone bancrupt and close the studio. And this game has only around 200 sidequests, voiced only in one language, English.

Now, look at FFXIV. It's voiced in 4 languages and has over 2500 quests. It has the most raw text data than any video game in history. They would need an unrealistically big budget to cover it, and they don't have these money. FFXIV works on a fixed budget (that is not so great), set up once a year regardless of sub numbers, and they try to voice as much lines as possible without hurting the development of other game parts.