Will we ever have voice-acted side stories?

[Jirah]

Gotta say it’s a travesty the raids the “premiere” content isn’t VA and from little I know about Ultimates I’m sure that isn’t either for all the culling and cutting they due to make all content bend backwards for it

[Kolsykol]

Maybe I'm old school, but more often than not I prefer not to have it. For raids and such, however, it definitely helps.

I feel like in RPG's the voice never lines up with my character, either that or they play it too wooden and neutral to try and fit as many fantasies as possible which in and of itself is bad and makes it harder to imagine your character.
It's one of the things I hated the most about Cyberpunk 2077, V never felt like my character.
I get that V was meant to be an established character but they still marketed it with a heavy emphasis on RP and female V at least just didn't make any sense for some backgrounds.
I hated how condescending and sarcastic she sounded constantly too and how she tried too hard to sound tough, her voice acting wasn't bad on a technical level but it was just very clear it wasn't her real voice and it's hard to believe she'd have any friends or that anyone would take her seriously the way she talked.
She sounded very '' performative '' if that makes sense and not natural at all both in voice and how she said what she said.

Female V was a more extreme case but I never rly liked the voice acting for Shepard in the Mass Effect games either it only felt like it limited my character and it was noticeably more monotone than NPC's.
I just much prefer non-voiced RPG protagonists unless I guess it's a character like Geralt in the Witcher.
But if I am being told that it's MY character and that I am creating them myself then it never feels that way when they're voiced.

[Darthgummibear]

Voice acting is incredibly expensive, and this last patch had more voice acting than any previous non expansion patch did.

SWTOR was the most expensive game ever made, (at the time) costing over a 200 million, most of which, from what i remember, went into voice acting, as EVERYTHING has voice overs in that. It didn't recoup profits fast enough for investors and went F2P shortly after to go after quick cash from cash shops.

The reason swtor's VA cost so much was because it was all star power.

[Raoabolic]

When did "gamers" suddenly hate reading in an rpg? I feel like i'm taking crazy pills!

[Minarisweet]

We can't have that there's no way an mmorpg can be fully voiced acted especially one that is story telling focused... *looks at swtor*

[RobynDaBank]

When did "gamers" suddenly hate reading in an rpg? I feel like i'm taking crazy pills!

I mean, it does look awkward in some scenes. I'm remembering the end of Ivalice raid series when the two siblings burst into song and there was... no voice. I was seriously hoping they voiced at least that because it looks so silly.

[Soma_Farkreath]

imma be honest that i need the voice acting to actually pay attention to the story. if there's no voice acting i find it hard to pay attention to what they are saying, weather its my dyslexia or my ADHD it really helps. i feel I've missed a lot due to it not being voice acted

[Deveryn]

I've looked into working as a VA and the cost is probably at least 100/hour just for the actor. Add studio time, which is also not cheap.

Gotta say it’s a travesty the raids the “premiere” content isn’t VA and from little I know about Ultimates I’m sure that isn’t either for all the culling and cutting they due to make all content bend backwards for it

Please watch some playthroughs before weighing in on the value of voice lines. There's a lot that goes on and none of the prior ultimates or their source content even had voice lines. They got their own music track though.

The main story is the premiere content. I think we've seen a little more of that voiced than before. I think it's also worth noting we have our first alliance raid with all original / exclusive tracks.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Honestly I'm quite surprised to see the latest Alliance Raid is partially voiced in their encounters. I loved it.

Voice acting does affects the experience, I would love to have more of them. But I won't keep my expectation high.

[RitsukoSonoda]

When did "gamers" suddenly hate reading in an rpg? I feel like i'm taking crazy pills!

I think they've just been not wanting to read anything. Hence all the "must have voice chat", "I need tutorial video", "Game needs to mark everything for me cause I'm not reading dialogue". Who knows how many of them have agreed to be guinea pigs for various company's experiments because they just click agree on digital agreements without reading them... >.>