More voice acting please!

[Alhanelem]

I find most of the english VOs at least "acceptable" (Some of it is "good" but it does suffer from some of them talking slow as others have mentioned, however the one that I reallly dont like is Papalymo who has to have been given the most annoying voice on the planet. SE has done far worse in the past.

owever the Voice acting in FFXIV is some of the worst I've ever experienced.

You haven't experienced much then. It can get a LOT, LOT, LOT worse. FFXIV's is only bad if you compare it to A list movie stars in cinema. Try Typing of the Dead / House of the Dead 2. Fun game(s), but you can NOT find worse voiceovers than that. Even Microsoft Sam sounds better.

Of course a solution is to just use JP voice acting instead, much better.

This isn't a solution because I don't understand Japanese and thus am unable to appriciate its alleged better quality. To me not knowing the language, it's just a bunch of noise. I'd rather hear "bad" (I disagree) voice acting in a language I can understand than supposedly "good" in a language i can't.

I do realize that, I just don't care. Bad dubs can ruin otherwise good games. Best to just change to subs and pretend it's a foreign flick.

His point was, the quality of the "dub" as you put it isn't really relevant when the quality of the source material isn't any better. It puzzles me why you'd still prefer to listen to another language's audio when it isn't actually higher quality than the one that's in your language which you can understand.

FFIXV isn't really "dubbed" either because all languages were being worked on simultaneously- No language is the "original" language- The english/french/german actors weren't simply given the japanese lines to record over them. It's not like the characters on screen are actually speaking japanese and they just recorded over it with english voices (which is what a 'dub' is by definition).

[Aaron_T]

You guys don't realize this but ask any japanese person.
The only reason you think Japanese voice acting is better
is because you don't speak japanese.
If you really did understand Japanese, you would realize....
its just as bad.

[Xieveral]

I'm going to pull the "My immersion!" card. Voices for the first few sentences then mute for the remainder ruins it. Either provide voice acting for the entire scene or not at all.

our avatars should be able to talk. SE should have enough money from our subscription fees to hire voice actors for all the races/sex/voice types.

People would complain that the voice acting ruins their character because "my character would never say that". I think it is better to leave the dialogue to the player's imagination.

[Alhanelem]

You guys don't realize this but ask any japanese person.
The only reason you think Japanese voice acting is better
is because you don't speak japanese.
If you really did understand Japanese, you would realize....
its just as bad.

I figured it's really not half as good as people say it is.

[Fensfield]

Blah, no thanks >.> Besides fact the acting quality just isn't wonderful in the first place, it just isn't worth it. Increasing the amount of voice acting by any significant factor would just make systems even less flexible as the potential number of dialogue options was cut down, and divert funds away from actual game content. Voice acting simply isn't good value for development money compared to systems and content iteration - and that's before the cost is multiplied by however many languages they decide to support.

As for our characters speaking? Ew. No. Please just, no. They're our characters and even with the best VO's in the world, giving them more than the reaction sounds they make now would never fit properly to how the majority of us imagine them, not to mention make any replies given even more painful to watch. Guild Wars 2 did that and I couldn't stand watching any of the cutscenes as a result, I had to skip them because the writing was so violently opposed to how I imagined my characters I felt ill.

Is mute characters the best possible option? No, of course not. But until MMO's can handle dynamic dialogue systems without it consuming 3/4's of the development budget, it's the lesser of two evils besides having the character you created yanked out of your hands and forced to act even more unlike you'd imagine them behaving than these one-track plots developers are so hung-up on already impose.

Of course if I had my way I'd end this whole trend of using implementing a main scenario as an excuse to avoid proper world systems development, and force the industry to actually put some effort into systems that encourage meaningful events and situations to manifest around the players. >.> Or if tech prevented that, just make 'quests' actual meaningful storylines in and of themselves instead of having these sole, stupid 'U R TEH CHOSEN ONE' plots that undermine the entire point of the genre and the concept of a 'quest' being reduced to straightening someone's shoes.

[Aaron_T]

Honestly I'm surprised some of you don't want more voice acting.
I'm even more surprised that you would write such a large post
to disagree with it.

Note, your trying to use a long post to explain to a person
who wants more voice acting, why its a bad idea.

Did not read.

[MeeDeggiThePunisher]

You guys don't realize this but ask any japanese person.
The only reason you think Japanese voice acting is better
is because you don't speak japanese.
If you really did understand Japanese, you would realize....
its just as bad.

I do realize that, I just don't care. Bad dubs can ruin otherwise good games. Best to just change to subs and pretend it's a foreign flick.

[Fensfield]

Honestly I'm surprised some of you don't want more voice acting. I'm even more surprised that you would write such a large post to disagree with it. Note, your trying to use a long post to explain to a person who wants more voice acting, why its a bad idea.

Did not read.

No, I wrote all that because I felt like explaining my opinion for any wanted to know why I felt that way. If you didn't fancy a proper discussion, that's your lookout.

You understood 'Do not want' from my post? Well it's a shame you don't want to read the rest, but that's good enough for me.

But I bet you did, really. >.>

[Thunderz]

did you see the VO in this game...

its all bad

[Noshpan]

All of the English-speaking voice actors makes my soul hurt. I have the audio set to Japanese so I don't have to listen to Papalymo, Yda and Milfinia... or anyone else with a speaking part.