Dear Square Enix,

[Larsille]

you have more than enough money.

pls dub every Main Story Quest for 5.0
I was so hyped for the "pls make sure you have time for the next event" in 4.3 and it isnt even voiced yet.

Hopefully it will be voiced soon after i wrote this.

What do you think? i think this should be reasonable with all the money they got from us by now.

[MistakeNot]

you have more than enough money.

pls dub every Main Story Quest for 5.0
I was so hyped for the "pls make sure you have time for the next event" in 4.3 and it isnt even voiced yet.

Hopefully it will be voiced soon after i wrote this.

What do you think? i think this should be reasonable with all the money they got from us by now.

Adding voice acting is quite expensive, and also makes it a lot harder to adjust things afterward. The desire to use the same voiceactors for each patch also makes scheduling harder.
So adding voice to all new MSQ is actually not all that reasonable. Would be nice - certainly, but too expensive to happen.

[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.

[Larsille]

Fixing the name addressing is easy in my opinion. change <playername> to <you> and equivalent words and i dont see any problem with that, why should you? There´s not a big difference between a you/WoL and the playername. As long the dialogue is written in a way that its actually engaging. It also works in skyrim and similar games with no voiced protagonist. Fallout New Vegas has one of the best dialogues and your protagonist is also silent like the WoL.
If ESO and GW2 can fully voice MSQ which are "F2P" or "B2P" so can FFXIV. Even Mess Online can manage to develop an almost fully voiced MSQ.
Saying its to expensive for them is kinda like white knighting for them so they can be lazy in that development stage.

We have the second biggest playerbase and a subscription model. It is not to expensive for them. Its an issue of net income growth. Stop telling yourself they dont have enough money for that. The last quest in 4.3 was a real bummer because it had no voice acting. I was looking forward seeing an awesome 20-30 minute cutscene and suddenly i had to read one of the most important scenes in the newest addition to the story. That doesnt make sense, like at all.

We all expected more voiced cutscenes and Yoshi-P told us that they would make more and more voiced cutscenes. The last 2 quests are very dialogue heavy compared to the rest of the patch. So for me it doesnt make sense at all. It is the first time im dissapointed by the overall presentation of the story. Its just lazy on their end.

[Aluja89]

No wonder SE gets away with cutting corners when there are so many apologists around.

I agree OP.

[Vaer]

Not really money although that is a big part of it. More like the amount of time (single player games can take as long as they want) that it would take to voice every single line and QA it in 4 different languages while writing the script for a game that releases content every 3 months.

The other games have barely any text, maybe a couple word sentences here and there. FFXIV says something that can be said in 1 sentence in 3 paragraphs.

I don't mind if they add more voice overs but I understand why they don't.

[ElHeggunte]

No wonder SE gets away with cutting corners when there are so many apologists around.

I agree OP.

Being rational makes you an apologist, does it?

[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.

[Aluja89]

Being rational makes you an apologist, does it?

What rationality? All I'm seeing are excuses they have no way of knowing.

Money? It's Square Enix lol.

Writing/localizing issues because of a name? Right, like they have no way around this.

[Larsille]

Being rational would be that we all could agree that they finally do more voice overs as they promised us. The amount of voice-overs since Heavensward is almost the same. (subjective feelings)
GW2 can manage to do voice overs for their most important quests with their 3-4 month patch cycle (which includes the living world quests which are like a MSQ) they also give random npcs with no quests for you a voice.
And i dont think GW2 has way more revenue or even more net income than SE. GW2 is also distributed in several languages across the world. ESO has voice over for every quest even if they arent MSQ. And im sure this game gets also new quests every few months.
And here as well i doubt ESO can beat FFXIV in terms of revenue or even net income.

I stand by it, the last quest was a development choice to be lazy imho.