DEVS: Don't waste time with voice acting.

[Alhanelem]

OP: How does voice acting waste any of the developer's time? It's not like the developers themselves are doing the voice acting... They hire other people to do it. Since the voice system already exists, all they have to do is swap the english voice files for the other language ones when that language is selected. Anybody could do that in about 5 minutes.

Maybe *you* don't care if the game has voice acting in other languages than your own, but the people who speak in those other languages might care.

"keep it only to the main storyline or keep it to a minimum." They're already doing that... It's only used in major cutcenes. It's not like they're making every NPC in the game talk- That's impossible to do as the hard disk space that would be required (especially with how much the average NPC has to say in this game) for just ONE language would be way too much.

I hope at least something about the topic goes through to devs because at least for me the existence of voice acting has ruined many perfectly good games.

Good voice acting has also greatly enhanced many games. The elder scrolls and dragon age games especially. NWN was pretty good too, more obscurely, FFCC Ring of Fates had really good voice acting (a bit obnoxious to the untrained ear, but appropriate for the style of the game and the characters). Yes, I know a few games have had voice acting that was done really badly (sometimes notoriously so, e.e. all your base are belong to us) but voice acting doesn't have to ruin a game.

And honestly, FFXIV's voice acting, where it does exist, is pretty good IMO.