Lack of voice acting is really hurting the emotion of the story

[Fynlar]

There is definitely something wrong with people who have the opinion of "I don't want it, so you can't have it either."

No, we just recognize that going back to put (multiple!) voices to our character all throughout the story up until now would be a lot of work and a lot of $$ investment that we think is better spent elsewhere.

Obviously if they added voice acting to the WoL, there would be an option to turn it off.

You don't really know that, to be quite honest. There's a number of bothersome things they introduced that we are not able to just "turn off". One such thing off the top of my head is acheivement notifications when moving to a new zone.

[Kiryoku]

Except our character usually only talks 3~5 times per zone, and usually with very short or clipped responses. Even factoring in the amount of races and sexes, three lines for each would probably still be about as much dialogue as a single Scion would have.

It wouldn't even have to be for everything, but its very jarring to me when a cutscene has both spoken dialogue and silent dialogue. Sometimes back and forth multiple times. Or if a cutscene is supposed to have massive emotional impact and your character can't show emotion because that would take away from the player's idea of how their character should act.

[RivinStormfang]

One of the things that turned me away from Guild Wars 2 is the fact that the player character is fully voiced. It completely kills any connection I try to make with the character, because it's no longer mine, it's the game's character that I'm given control of. When games are made with preset rosters of characters, that's fine, but if I'm allowed to make my own character, I want them to be my own character.

In Mass Effect, for example, you're able to customize Shepard, but it's still Shepard, and the game gets to define who Shepard is. That's not what FFXIV does, though; you get to make your own character, and by keeping them silent you get to choose your character's own personality. I wouldn't like to have that taken away from me after the game has already given me that type of character.

[Komarimono]

I think adding a voice would cause more damage then what it could possibly add. They would have to add several if not dozens of different voices to each race to match the voices we picked at character creation. Then they'd have tweak it, edit it, recast it, sync it, reanimate the facial features etc etc. To in the end, no matter what, end up with a voice someone wouldn't enjoy.

SWTOR's cost was mostly due to voice acting as well if I remember right. Still is a major source of their costs with each new expansion. And while it is nice to hear you speaking, later on you wish you didn't sound as you did, since you didn't pick it. No matter your race, you sound the same as anyone else from that class. Was a major annoyance in the end.

[Kiryoku]

One of the things that turned me away from Guild Wars 2 is the fact that the player character is fully voiced. It completely kills any connection I try to make with the character, because it's no longer mine, it's the game's character that I'm given control of. When games are made with preset rosters of characters, that's fine, but if I'm allowed to make my own character, I want them to be my own character.

In Mass Effect, for example, you're able to customize Shepard, but it's still Shepard, and the game gets to define who Shepard is. That's not what FFXIV does, though; you get to make your own character, and by keeping them silent you get to choose your character's own personality. I wouldn't like to have that taken away from me after the game has already given me that type of character.

I can't choose my character's personality though. Regardless of what I want (to thank that character, to stop being closed minded to that character, hug that crying character or comfort them) my character will always be a brick wall of no emotion compared to a Scion.

[HyoMinPark]

There is definitely something wrong with people who have the opinion of "I don't want it, so you can't have it either."

Obviously if they added voice acting to the WoL, there would be an option to turn it off. Therefor satisfying the desire to see lips moving without sound. But no.. the desire to have silence doesn't stop there. You all do not want people like Kiryoku, the OP, or myself to have it. Not just you, but we can't have it, period, end of discussion, screw what we want. I would say what I think about that if it didn't violate a dozen forum guidelines.

Also another thing that doesn't make sense is for cutscenes to be half voiced and half silence. That never made sense to me, but again it seems many here are desiring us not to have something so disjointed for not even personal selfish reasons, but Malevolent ones. I can understand selfishness, or greed. But simply saying no to something that doesn't affect you in any capacity is wrong.

You also have to think about this from a logistics perspective.

How many different voices are there for a character? 12 in the character creation. For each race and each gender. Sure, some are shared, but a lot are not.

So, are they to hire VAs to match those different voice types? Okay, so now we’re looking at potentially 12 different voices per gender (male and female for all races save Viera/Hrothgar) per race (Hyur, Miqo’te, Au Ra, Viera, Roe, Elezen, Lalafell and Hrothgar). That’s a lot of voices. You also need to consider they will have to be translated into 4 different languages (English, Japanese, French, and German). It’s no small undertaking. That would effectively be 168 different VAs to match the 12 options each race and gender have, and multiply that by 4 to account for the 4 different languages this game is localized in to: 672 (!) voice actors just to voice our character. Now, it’s likely that they would crunch that number down by a lot, but then we run into the next problem...we would all subsequently sound the same due to having only a handful of options. That’s also fairly low-quality, in my opinion. Not to mention the audible discrepancy one would hear between their character’s combat/emote voice and their speaking voice.

Even if they trimmed it down and had 1 voice per gender per race, that’s still 14 different VAs for a single language—56 VAs once you get each language localized—and that can cost a pretty penny. It’s just not feasible. To do this, they’d have to hire fairly low tier VAs, more than likely, because higher tier VAs can be pricey. And, let’s be honest, is it worth the investment? I don’t think so. Not when I’d rather their funds go towards other things—like perhaps increasing the development staff so that we can have more features developed without time crunches. Yoshida has repeatedly stated that his team is understaffed, and that’s why they can’t always do some of the things we want—they simply don’t have the bodies to allocate.



This isn’t even considering how jarring it would be for players that have played the silent protagonist for years to suddenly have their character be given a voice—one they may not even like. English voice acting in this game, for some reason, has most characters sounding British. And while I love British accents, it’s not the accent/voice that I would have chosen for my character (who is not even canonically Eorzean, much less British—she’s originally Korean and I just brought her into FFXIV because she was my most used character when I started this game).

I don’t think this option would be a positive addition. And to allocate resources to it would mean we’d have to give up other things. I’d rather not give up the other things for voice acting I don’t want and probably won’t even like. But that’s just me.

[Mirhd]

Absolutely not. I like my character not being voiced, that way I can imagine what she says, how she sounds, her inflections, and so on. Like most, I have a specific personality for my character, and she likely would not react the way someone elses' would. VA would kill that and add next to nothing to the experience, and I'm clearly not alone in this view.

The extra time/money spent recording multiple voices is another factor... it's just an unnecessary expense, and I'd rather they focus on other things.

[Tsukino]

There are two main problems with this. One everyone else has stated is that it will actually worsen a lot of people's experience and ties to their character if they end up not sounding right.

The other is that the voices for all PCs right now are all the same across all versions - provided by Japanese voice actors. Not only would they need to get ahold of a bunch of people who originally provided voices and then never any other voice work for the game, the localization teams would suddenly need to hire like 100 different voices to voice both their emote/battle stuff and all story voices. A practical impossibility.

[RivinStormfang]

I can't choose my character's personality though. Regardless of what I want (to thank that character, to stop being closed minded to that character, hug that crying character or comfort them) my character will always be a brick wall of no emotion compared to a Scion.

That's exactly what allows you to choose their personality though. Yes, in-game your character is pretty stiff and unemotional (although they do react a bit, unlike in, say, an Elder Scrolls game, where your character doesn't react to anything in any way, ever), but those moments give you a blank slate where you can create your own interpretation of how your character reacted to the situation. If the characters reactions had to be voice-acted, then all of those reactions would have to be predetermined, and you no longer get to create your own interpretation of those moments.

It also leads to weird moments like in Guild Wars 2 where the voice actors changed between expansions and the player characters suddenly had different voices. It's already awkward to hear the Scions' voices changing every so often; for player characters it's especially immersion-breaking.

[Mirassou]

I guess I'm alone with this.... snip - due to spoiler .... My own character just lowered the quality of the whole thing.

I really think you should edit your post and add a spoiler tag for this - just saying "Spoiler" in the middle of the sentence really doesn't work - especially in a thread about voice acting. (No mention of spoilers given)
I know something now that I did not know before.