Shouldn't the Crystal Tower Raids have voice acting & be re-worked?

I was thinking ever since it became part of the main story that maybe a update to the voiceless Crystal Tower alliance raid could benefit having VAs just for consistency reasons.

Aside from that

I'm starting to think that the Crystal Tower Raids in comparison to Future Alliance Raids seems really dated by today's standards.

Like for one most of the bosses can't even use some of their mechanics now, and most encounters hit like a wet noodle.

Its all my opinion of course, I think the Crystal Tower Raids could use some loving given its dev age.

most likely won't happen. not at this point unless they think it's worth going back for dev cost vs roi. Yoshi-p is very big on number crunching and if it's not worth it to do, he's not going to sign off on it. There's not much clamor for it anyhow.

As cool as it would be, there is no Point, and I dont personally find it very likely at all.
If they were going to, they would have done it at Shadowbringers where it would have been the most relevant.

Is not that there is no point - there is one, because that raid series is integrated to the MSQ now and every new player needs to experience it - but more likely that it's not an essential work investment compared to more voice acting for their current content or future expansion.

It would be nice, but that is a lot of money and resources that would be used up for older content.

Company POV it's not worth it.

Player wise I'd rather they make new stuff or fix current stuff than revamp old stuff that's serviceable if boring.


If we look at it completely objectively I'd be onboard with keeping the experience relevant and engaging, but that's only in a world where doing this didn't use up resources for up-and-coming content or maintaining current content.

Its not worth to waste money and resources to most popular ingame content.

If they're going to rework CT, I'd rather they turn it into a solo instance with NPCs...including voice over etc.

Maybe turn it into a variant dungeon.

In order to future-proof the game, I think they're going to need to make the core-content MSQ entirely solo-able (with NPCs).

The most recent fight vs. Golbez with his regular position resets attests that it will eventually be an NPC trial, or at the very least it was made with NPCs in mind to keep future reworking to a minimum.

Considering almost all dungeons in 3.x-4.x have had some tweaking/ENTIRE fights redone to allow for NPC parties, I don't think this is as far-fetched as it seems.

Nah. If there's anything they should do to CT (and by extension, 99% of older content) it's rework level/item level sync so that you can't blow through it in ten minutes. I've been playing since 3.3 and I still don't know any mechanic in the entire raid series aside from Cerberus chains, Xande's levitate, and ancient flare on Phelgethon. I'm not saying they need to be hour long slogs with tons of wipes every time, but a hint of challenge (and by extension, fun) would be welcome.

In order for voice acting to make sense for the Crystal Tower raids, players would pretty much have to be required to watch the cut scenes.

I agree that it would make more sense to add voice acting if the instances were going to be reworked for Duty Support. Duty Support for 8-person raids has already been tested in Endwalker. The 24-person raids would take a bit more rework.

make them a part of MSQ roulette instead.

They should rework it in the msq or at the least turn it into its own thing. Once that's done they can actually give us alliance raids that are fine tuned since they won't be msq required.

This falls under the category "would be nice, will not happen".

There should be more voiced content overall. And reworks especially in coil/crystal tower to make that content more visible and less niche. Maybe now 16 is out they might have more time to address that stuff.

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Originally Posted by Ranaku

"would be nice, will not happen".

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Would be nice for consistency. However...

Spoilers below for those not up to EW:

It would take away any mystery remaining about the Exarch.

Even if you go in sure its him, he works pretty hard to make you doubt yourself; and I've seen it work on people. Heck, I recognized the male miqote face from the trailer, knew it must be him, and he still briefly made me question myself when he bald-faced lied to me at one point. It kept me guessing, and not being 100% sure was part of the fun.

Voice acting would take away any doubts the second you hear him in ShB and that would suck the fun out a bit for newbies, imo.

That said, wouldn't surprise me if someone gives those scenes the eleven labs treatment at some point and posts them on youtube. We have enough voice lines in-game for practically everyone besides those who've never had a VA. And you can just use voices from other characters or games for that if you have to.

the only rework CT raids need is plopping them in msq roulette so alliance roulette can actually be mildly enjoyable instead of "oh...I'm level 90 but 1 guy who's hp is suddenly spiking want to be bored for 10 minutes".
Yes we'd probably mostly get Void Ark due to cheesers but at lv60 most of the jobs in the game actually start to be enjoyabke to play.
Like at lv50 on blm your main attack is...fire uno. And you have no leylines or triplecast or sharpcast. What a thrill.

First fix the item level bloat and power creep issues that have made the Crystal Tower raids almost entirely a non-event, then we can worry about cosmetic stuff like voice acting. I want to see people have to learn how to do the platforms on Glasya Labolas again.

Not only Crystal Tower. All raids, and alliance raids should be voiced imho. Binding Coils were voiced, and we just had VA for the first time (outside of combat) since Coils in Pandae so here's to hoping it was a sign of good things to come.

Never going to happen, they should've added VA from the start in raid and other cutscenes but they are very selective and inconsistent on what gets VA like certain raid bosses during the fights and what doesn't.

The last few cutscenes in Coils get VA
&
The Epilogue of the Panda raid cutscene gets VA

Still would love to have the "Burn out the bad!" scene voiced.

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Originally Posted by Alleluia

Would be nice for consistency. However...

Spoilers below for those not up to EW:

It would take away any mystery remaining about the Exarch.

Even if you go in sure its him, he works pretty hard to make you doubt yourself; and I've seen it work on people. Heck, I recognized the male miqote face from the trailer, knew it must him, and he still briefly made me question myself when he bald-faced lied to me at one point. It kept me guessing, and not being 100% sure was part of the fun.

Voice acting would take away any doubts the second you hear him in ShB and that would suck the fun out a bit for newbies, imo.

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Dropped in to say exactly this if it wasn't already said. If you're paying attention to the details, it's pretty obvious who the Exarch is, and having voice work would just give it away completely.

If they were going to do it, I'd want something more roundabout, where some Endwalker 10-deep side quest chain rewarded you with access in the Unending Journey desk to a voiced version of

the cutscene where you meet him for the first time as he's pranking you.

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Originally Posted by kaynide

If they're going to rework CT, I'd rather they turn it into a solo instance with NPCs...including voice over etc.

Maybe turn it into a variant dungeon.

In order to future-proof the game, I think they're going to need to make the core-content MSQ entirely solo-able (with NPCs).

The most recent fight vs. Golbez with his regular position resets attests that it will eventually be an NPC trial, or at the very least it was made with NPCs in mind to keep future reworking to a minimum.

Considering almost all dungeons in 3.x-4.x have had some tweaking/ENTIRE fights redone to allow for NPC parties, I don't think this is as far-fetched as it seems.

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That is something I didn't consider, one day FFXIV won't have that playerbase for CT once FFXIV starts hitting the real slowdown, kind of what happened with FFXI.

Yes please! Voice acting and buffing the bosses would make it much more fun

Maybe once they finish making the rest of Stormblood's dungeons Trust friendly, they'll consider going back and foxing the power creep on certain 8-man and 24-man content.

God, I hope anyway.

Let's be real this is a Square Enix published game, they have more than enough money to fully voice the entire game and I don't know what the excuse even is to only have a partially voiced main story.

I just want them to do away with the pressure plates at the Atomos part. Give them more HP and have them spawn way more adds instead. It would be really nice to be able to do Labyrinth with just 3 people. Especially while speedrunning on alts.

Ideally, Crystal Tower should be reworked, yes.

I think they will rework it eventually to account for it now being required for MSQ. Whether it gets VA or not though... I think that's far-reaching.

Dunno why ppl are so obsessed over having voice acting on everything. Most cases it adds very little and drags out cutscenes because you can read faster than most of these people talk. As for buffing bosses. An easier solution would be to lower the ilvl sync to match the max ilvl obtainable when the raids were first launched.

Revamping CT will not make FFXIV a better game so why ask for them to waste the time and money on such a project?

Voice acting would be awkward since they cut tied with the original VA studio at the end of ARR. Even if Cid was the only one from the quest chain that had a fair amount of voice acting in ARR, it's going to come off very strange listening to him with a different VA for just CT out of all the ARR content.

The only reworking it really needs is a better ilvl sync and maybe putting up a barrier on the end bosses for the sake of new players watching the end boss cutscenes. There's really nothing major out of place within the story when viewed in light of later MSQ events. I think I caught a small discrepancy running through the quests on a new alt a couple of weeks ago but it was nothing that a new player would be likely to remember 3 expansions later.

If a new MSQ starting point is added for new characters, then CT may no longer be mandatory regardless.

Remember that any rework of old content comes at the expense of not being able to make as much new content. It's easy to toss around phrases like "SE is a multi-billion dollar company" but those billions aren't coming from FFXIV alone (FFXIV doesn't come close to a billion a year itself). They have their other titles to support and expenses to meet. Choosing to throw more money at a project does not guarantee a better result or increased player satisfaction (*cough* Warlords of Draenor *cough*).

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Originally Posted by LukaRoselia

Let's be real this is a Square Enix published game, they have more than enough money to fully voice the entire game and I don't know what the excuse even is to only have a partially voiced main story.

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Last terrible excuse they gave was that they use popular VAs, so it's hard to schedule stuff. How about you stop wasting money on popular VAs, just do what Your Name did and find new rising stars which are cheaper and are just as good as any popular VAs are. You even help promote new talents and build loyalty with them.

Excuse before that was that they're too incompetent to make script good from the start, so they cannot change the script if voice lines are already recorded. Ignore the fact that much smaller, and much lower budget games are fully voice acted, including even background characters in world chattering. That includes MMORPGs, which run on patch cycles. All story in GW2 is voice acted, including 10 different voice actors just for all playable races and gender (one of player's VA is even Matthew Mercer).

Another excuse is that they have whole 4 (four!) languages to work with. Ignore the fact that again, many games do more, and every decent game has at least subtitles for 10+ languages.

It's just embarrassing that such high budget game with focus on story is barely voice acted.