The Voice Acting. . .

[Liam_Harper]

Voice acting is a very expensive undertaking. Would it be nice to have each in-game region have a distinct accent? Sure - but it'd cost an immense amount of money, especially when you consider that they're already paying to have voice acting for many different languages.

Indeed and Enix is only a small indie company...

MMO's like WoW manage decent voice actors right down to random humanoid mobs that spot you in the open world. Their world quests and invasions are largely voice acted, side quests, main quests, regular npc's you click on, raid bosses and so on. WoW has some very memorable voice acted boss lines.

FF14's english voice acting is so terrible I switched to japenese and never looked back. If they're stretching themselves across too many languages, it's another example of bad planning, like using the 1.0 game engine. As I've said before, FF14-ARR feels like a game they never expected to succeed and invested minimal budget in and now it's a success they're stuck on improving it. They never made plans to. They had no confidence in themselves as developers, and still don't have any, and are paying the price.

[Theodric]

MMO's like WoW manage decent voice actors right down to random humanoid mobs that spot you in the open world.

Ah, yes - WoW.

It's ironic that it's brought up given the supposed context of this thread when WoW's voice acting largely consists of American accents and little else (bar a few exceptions).

Personally I vastly prefer FFXIV's voice acting - a lot of the 'open world' voice acting in WoW is just various orcs and demons screaming in over the top voices about how the world is going to burn.

FFXIV is a breath of fresh air when so many MMO's lean on American voice acting and little else. The localisation of FFXIV is also a large reason as to why I stick with it.

[ElHeggunte]

MMO's like WoW manage decent voice actors right down to random humanoid mobs that spot you in the open world. Their world quests and invasions are largely voice acted, side quests, main quests, regular npc's you click on, raid bosses and so on. WoW has some very memorable voice acted boss lines.

It's easy for WoW when you have Chris Metzen voicing 90% of your characters and bosses*.

Also, world quest "voice acting" and the generic lines from NPCs gets old very fast and I'm full glad that most games don't follow suit. I can only hear "GREYMANE'S FORCES HOLD THIS WARDENS TOWER! BREAK THEIR RANKS! SHOW NO MERCY!" so many times before I want to puncture my eardrums.

*Only a mild exaggeration. Chris has voiced a lot of characters and bosses, many of whom are uncredited.

Edit: The one thing I did like was some NPCs getting upset with you if you clicked on them too many times. Like Taoshi, a Pandaren rogue, implying that your body will never be found if you persist in annoying her.

[Keridwyn]

WoW has some very memorable voice acted boss lines.

And infamous ones like Sindragosa's 'Betray'.

Over all I think they are improving, slowly but surely. Sometimes I don't understand why a replacement was made, other times it's obvious. As long as they continue to improve I will continue to be okay.

[ElHeggunte]

And infamous ones like Sindragosa's 'Betray'.

Falric: Despair Dis pear... so delicious...!!

[Araxes]

FF14's english voice acting is so terrible I switched to japenese and never looked back.

If you think the English voice acting is bad, you should listen to the German Voice acting. It is so emotionless and hideous that id rather have no voice acting at all. The english Voice acting compared to that is pretty decent.