Dear Square Enix,

[Lunaxia]

Honestly, I couldn't care less about voiced scenes. I'd happily take pre-FFX complete silence and instead have money invested into improving the game itself over VAs. I've never really understood the logic that voice acting somehow improves a game.

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.

Also, this.

[Maeka]

Honestly, I couldn't care less about voiced scenes. I'd happily take pre-FFX complete silence and instead have money invested into improving the game itself over VAs. I've never really understood the logic that voice acting somehow improves a game.

I'm a retro gamer myself, I routinely fire up old classics, especially the SNES (which had a HUUUUUUGE JRPG library!), so I certainly understand the no-VA thing.

However, there are also times where VA makes a scene better if it is done right. FFXIV, the cutscenes that are voiced, are usually done rather well and I more often than not enjoy the cutscenes. I will admit some of the early ARR cutscenes were a little awkward, especially Minfilia and Co. as it seems like it took the VAs a little while to "grow into" their characters and add more emotion and flexibility to their voices and to get more comfortable.

But in Heavensward and especially Stormblood, the VA quality just keeps going up.

As to that poster earlier that mentioned "Doh-muh" ... uh, that's the way it's supposed to be said. We're talking about a foreign/far eastern land and some of their syllables sound slightly different even when you use English approximations.

Did you feel the same way in Heavensward when people were pronouncing all of those French names properly? There were a few I was like "oh, so THAT's how that's supposed to be pronounced" and I even started saying it properly.

[Eloah]

Another thread about this, really? T.T

Enkidoh is right, praise Hydaelyn for her genius.

Anyway, while money is an issue, there are other factors that play into voicing a game. And what she said is true, you'd lose personalization if everything was voiced. But someone did have an idea on how to fix that...

Fixing the name addressing is easy in my opinion. change <playername> to <you> and equivalent words and i don't see any problem with that, why should you?

But honestly, if you think about this statement, would that really work.

For one thing, the personalization is out the window; the second when a pronoun like "you" is used it creates a second person perspective, which is basically addressing you the player, not you the character, which takes you out of the environment. Additionally, You is also used once the subject is know or inferred; "Hey Tom. Can you hand me that book?" "Attention students, if you would kindly form two straight lines, please" see? Another thing, is that the term you, depending on the sentence structure, can become very insulting when used over a long period of time; it's like someone calling you buddy or pal over and over, you begin to question if they know your name or not. I know this is a game, but it'll still happen just might take longer. Lastly, while it is understandable to think this way, this is an English Forum, so it stands to reason that many of us think in English, our thought processes regarding the pronoun "you" might be vastly different from the other 3 languages; no language has a 1:1 ratio.

Plus if you'll notice a lot more bosses are being voiced now.

Also, there are many great games that have little to no voices. The Legend of Zelda anyone, which is like, the #1 franchise in video games, and only recently used full voices.

[Hypnotic13371337]

Some free to play MMO's (Blade and Soul / Guild Wars 2 from my personal experiences) have voice acting for side characters....Not like, side characters in the story or anything, no no no....

Side characters like a dude at a bar/cafe going on about how awesome the drinks are, or characters making a stupid bet about who can kill or get to a certain point before the other, THOSE kind of side characters whos only purpose is to add flavor to the world.....They have VOICE ACTING

[Ghastly]

Solution to all of this:
Only voice everything in japanese and give us subtitles. That way you don't have to hire english, french and german voice actors. Yotsuyu in english sounds so bad. it's like a completely different person/villain.

[Seniade]

That's why Thancred and Yshtola and some others have consistently had the same VAs.

At least in English, Thancred was voiced by Taliesin Jaffe in ARR. For Heavensward, he was voiced by Peter Bramhill.

For Y'shtola, Emily O'Brien voiced her in ARR, and Robyn Addison in Heavensward.

[Jojoya]

The big problem a MMO faces is getting the same voice actors to return for later content updates. How many people were annoyed when the voice acting was different for specific characters between ARR, HW and SB? If they couldn't get all the current voice actors to return to do voiceover work for the patch, would you have been happy with substitute voice actors who sounded very different?

While voice actors get paid fairly high by the hour, the number of hours required isn't that high so the cost isn't that much when compared to the total game budget (or expansion). I doubt money was the issue. Being able to get all the voice actors available to do the work on relatively short notice probably was. It would have been awkward to have some voices the same while others differ.

[Trunks]

At least in English, Thancred was voiced by Taliesin Jaffe in ARR. For Heavensward, he was voiced by Peter Bramhill.

For Y'shtola, Emily O'Brien voiced her in ARR, and Robyn Addison in Heavensward.

Fair enough, my bad, though that's still 3 years. It's been so long since the English VA changes of HW that I'd forgotten about all except Alphinaud's. I use the JP voice acting anymore because... well, Asahi in the newest story quests sums it up. (It's a shame because some of the English VAs really nail it, e.g., Zenos).

[Eloah]

Solution to all of this:
Only voice everything in Japanese and give us subtitles. That way you don't have to hire english, french and german voice actors. Yotsuyu in english sounds so bad. it's like a completely different person/villain.

Admittedly this is an option, I remember playing the game Evolution II and it only had Japanese voices, and they sorta sounded cool...

But, that's just it, i didn't know anything about Japanese so of course it sounded cool. But trust me having had immersion experience, they hate their VA's just as much as we do, lol.

Also in regards to Yotsuyu, her character type doesn't translate as well into English as it is in Japanese; we all know the laugh, but to us, in America at least, that's not a thing. That's why she was better as "you know who" since it wasn't a forced performance, so to speak. I personally don't think it was a bad performance, but because of the archetype in English it comes off as cheesy, so I can see people not liking it. But, the fact that there has been such fan out crying for her, from all languages, does show that her character was written very well. SE made me hate her, love to hate her, like her, love her and well you know the rest. If a character can make you feel anything, even if it's rage, they are written well. Then again there are character that you just fall in love with independently of the story.... PAPA! Come back to me Papa!!! T.T

[Penthea]

Solution to all of this:
Only voice everything in japanese and give us subtitles.

This is a terrible idea. If this happened so many people would be complaining that only Japan get a complete version of the game. And they would be correct.