What's with the lack of voiceovers in the continuation of the main story

[Kule]

For the expansion they should bring back the localisation team that did FFXII, still imo the best voice acting in any Final Fantasy.

They have the money now from all the subs to do the game justice in English.

[Astarica]

Voice acting is cheap unless you're getting someone who is already a celebrity to begin with. If you look at the works a particular voice actor done (English or Japanese), you'll see plenty of no name game/Anime along with the big name stuff. Sure, that guy probably expects to be paid more for a bigger game, but it's not like he charges $1 million for a marquee title and $100 for a game you've never heard of.

I'm okay if the game has no voice acting but obviously the game does have voice acting somewhere. It almost feels like they had a few lines just so that they can say they have voice acting.

[Autumnfire]

Speaking of which…. what the heck happened to the narrator?

[SilverRhythm]

This game has one problem, lack of emotions.

Inconsistent VA for NPC and also our very own characters.

The worst part for me still is, whenever we are doing the main scenario, NPC questions us and all we do is just "Nod". Gets me sleepy during each cutscene seeing my character just nodding to everything they say lol.

[MysticNeko]

The English VAs are pretty bad by current game standards... as much as I would like to hear voiced dialogue, I'd really rather some talented people fandub it or something, and let SE put that money into making the game better.

You can change the voice dialog to the Japanese language (and probably others I haven't tried) That's what I did. Sounds awesome hearing their Japanese voices and I really enjoy the voice acting. Realistically though, I want to see more voice acting. So many scenes would have been better with VA. They need to either have none at all or go all out and have more. The main story line should have va for every cut scene imo. It just seems so weird for them to have some but then further in you have less and less.

[Enkidoh]

It's pretty obvious the whole reason for the inconsistent amount of voice overs in the game is simply because it's a concession to allowing the player to create their own name for their character. Notice how modern Bioware games like The Old Republic or Mass Effect actually still lock your character into a partial default name? It's because it's that name that your character is canonically referred to in voice overs.

The level of voice synthesis technology at this time simply cannot replicate any name created by the player. Hence because the story frequently has npcs calling your character by name, those scenes cannot be voiceovered (for the ending particularly, SE got around this by simply

having npcs call the player by the generic terms 'champion' or 'Warrior of Light'

).

So yeah, it's clearly a design choice SE made - and they went for the 'give players more freedom with how they create their character at the expense of fully voiced cutscenes and dialogue'.

[AzumaKun]

Who cares?

[FelisC]

The VA that was in the game before was distracting, inconsistent and terrible. I'm glad it's 0% VA in 2.1, and I hope it doesn't come back unless they intend to actually do it properly.

[frostmagemari]

Not one line is voiced. Not one.

Was SE unable to secure long term contracts with the VO staff or something? You may or may not like the voice overs, but you should either have them throughout the storyline or not at all. Be consistent.

I wish someone at SE would weigh in on this. Other games with voiceovers did have them added to new content that came out.

You act as if even half of the main story is voiced...

I mean, i want full voice-overs too, but it isn't really proper to say this is a problem in the continuation of the main story... This is a problem from page one of the main story script.

The English VAs are pretty bad by current game standards... as much as I would like to hear voiced dialogue, I'd really rather some talented people fandub it or something, and let SE put that money into making the game better.

I'll definitely agree with this. They chose poorly for the English VA's, and it sounds like they phoned in half the lines; And i agree with the fandub, get Teamfourstar on this thing *nods* then they'll have good voice overs and 'star' power :P

It's pretty obvious the whole reason for the inconsistent amount of voice overs in the game is simply because it's a concession to allowing the player to create their own name for their character. Notice how modern Bioware games like The Old Republic or Mass Effect actually still lock your character into a partial default name? It's because it's that name that your character is canonically referred to in voice overs.

The level of voice synthesis technology at this time simply cannot replicate any name created by the player. Hence because the story frequently has npcs calling your character by name, those scenes cannot be voiceovered

(for the ending particularly, SE got around this by simply having npcs call the player by the generic terms 'champion' or 'Warrior of Light').

So yeah, it's clearly a design choice SE made - and they went for the 'give players more freedom with how they create their character at the expense of fully voiced cutscenes and dialogue'.

In WoW, there were several voiced scenes where people were talking to you and usually no moniker was given to you because it was obvious they were talking to you (or about you), so they left your name in print but didn't actually say anything close to a name or a title half the time; Then, when they were talking to other NPC's, they made sure to voice their names to make it obvious they were not talking about and/or to you now.

So it worked out to be something like this for most conversations...
What you read - "U'tabia's back! Hurray!"
What you heard - "You're back! Hurray!" or "She's back! Hurray!"

There's numerous ways to get around voice problems when you have variable main characters, Square just took the laziest route and simply didn't voice half the things.

[Defmetal]

Yeah and Old Republic did voiceovers for all classes and genders. SE only has to do it for 1 class per say, simply Warrior of Light or Adventurer, or champion, whatever you are in the story. It really isn't that expensive in the grand scheme of things. Not with 1.5 million players paying $10-15 a month....

One week covers all voiceover costs for all content until an expansion.