Thread: DEV REQUEST: Complete voice acting in 4.0 and beyond

Originally Posted by Kling-Klang

No thanks. Waste of money. I would rather them use the money for other fun gameplay developement.

^This, and the actual development team already came out and said ages ago this is the reason why they haven't gone the 'full voiced quest' route (I can't find the thread in question but it was from one of the localization team members explained about it if my memory serves) - it would chew up far too much development time, limit the implementation of new story quests (because they would have to wait before the voice recordings for each tiny piece of dialogue was done), and also eat into development resources which are better spent elsewhere.

Additionally, it was already mentioned earlier in this thread but it's worth repeating, that another reason why we don't have all quest dialogue completely voiced over is due to the fact we are allowed to fully customize our character including their full name, and this becomes their in game identity in the storyline. Because there is simply no way for the development team to know every possible name choice by players, it's impossible to have their name spoken in dialogue.

This is why already in the game when there is a voiced over cutscene, the player's name is never directly mentioned, instead they're just referred to in a generic term ('the adventurer', the 'Warrior of Light', 'Eorzea's Champion' etc) which loses some of that customization (after all, why even give the player the choice to name their character themselves if it's just going to be ignored?).

Either way, I doubt very much we will ever see this game go the 'fully voiced dialogue' route in the future.

No, from me too.

First, there are other things I'd like to see in-game first, like more storage or houses for everyone who wants them.

Second, I'd rather be addressed by name in writing than have my character addressed in some generic term by npcs who should know her really well. It just feels unnatural.

Third, there is the problem of quality and voices changing radically when the original actors are not available for later patches.
I can't tell you how jarring Minfillia's wooden acting was all the way through ARR and how utterly disappointed I was when the Admiral went from sounding like a plausible leader in ARR to a comedy pirate in HW.

Exactly my point Colorful, though I believe the actress who originally played the Admiral wasn't approached for HW (sorry, no idea which thread I read that in). I do take your point about time-constraints affecting the acting, too.

Doing something like this well would cost a fortune and personally, I'd rather see money spent on other things.

I'm fine with the way it is. I voice acting is passable but that's not saying much. I can't imagine hearing everyone else speak, especially lominsans

I rather money be spent on making our characters less static in cut scenes than wasted on voice acting which probably costs way more than that and what ever resources they seem to have problems allocating to this game lately because of SE.

I would prefer they put the money in developing the game more, making it less static and actually implementing things like a glamour log.

The non-JP voice acting is horrible anyway and even the JP is not that great in some cases. Really, use the money in making the game better instead of adding useless fluff.

all major cut scenes that have high production in it are voiced

[ESC] > Skip Cutscene

They could take away the whole text and CS and I wouldnt be able to tell.

I'm all for voice acting in cutscenes, but keep in mind that the dialogue is always being tweaked/fixed (sometimes right up until launch of a patch).
The addition of voice acted lines for ALL dialogue would increase development times, costs, etc. Costs we can mitigate in some way, be it a more costlier sub, etc. But development times are not an easy thing mitigate. MMO's that are multi-lingual, take a fair amount of time per development cycle, especially if they are doing simultaneously releases in each language, which is how SE does things with XIV.

Realistically, I think its best not to implement VA for all dialogue. I dont want to wait 6months to a year per patch for the same amount of content we normally see....