Dear Square Enix,

[NephthysVasudan]

^^^I have to agree with this as well. Voice acting is not cheap at all, and unless people are somehow able to obtain intricate details of SE's expense reports, "Lol SE has money" isn't much of an argument.

Yeah...I just hope that kind of foolishness isn't contagious...because its getting far worse than I'd like to admit. People do not think past their fish bowl viewpoint anymore.

[Sigma-Astra]

This thread is full of a lot of excuses. Could they do it? yes they could. Would it have its problems? yes it would but nothing they cant work around. Don't throw out the "its expensive crap either" they made $2.5 billion last year so as the OP stated, they ain't short of money. I personally have no issue with the way it is but enough with the excuses.

I didn't think rational thought were considered excuses. I mean, can you cite where you saw that they made $2.5 billion last year? Do you have access to SE's financial and fiscal reports that the rest of us don't know about? Whether or not the company makes enough money isn't exactly relative towards whether or not they could nor want to hire VA's for full-time since at best, everyone is speculating about how much the company makes without having any concrete facts to show for it.

Just because a company seems to make a lot money, doesn't mean they're using said finances effectively or that they can splurge on every single idea the playerbase comes up with.

Just my two cents. /shrugs

[Usho]

If we are waiting for months to get a major patch with main story content, I think the scenes should be all voice acted. Players should get their money's worth and should not settle for piss poor corner cutting. They make a lot of money from this apparent "Cash Cow" so they should have the funds for that, unless their claim about having over "10 Million Subscribed Players" is just a lie. Right now, imo , the quality of the patches are really lacking. 4.3's story was good, but lack of more voice acting is really bad and constantly reading text gets really annoying if I'm paying monthly for a modern mmo. Reading is fundamental, but straining my eyes to read a wall of text from characters is not fundamental. Just saiyan.




P.S: By defending their current flow, you people enable SE to keep their status quo of corner cutting with content quality. Think about that.



/2 cents

[shao32]

More that more voiced acted scene they should Focus on expand the languages at the game is showed, many spanish and italian ppl play It too, even if are only subtitles and skills description with one of the already voice acting are in game Will make tons of ppl Happy.

[Sigma-Astra]

Reading is fundamental, but straining my eyes to read a wall of text from characters is not fundamental. Just saiyan.

If you're straining your eyes from reading text on a screen then either you've been playing for way too long or your screen is too small, in which case you might need reading glasses. That ain't any companies fault really. There's also a feature to blow the text up. If you need every line read out to you, I'd consider that pure laziness honestly.

Then again, most of the playerbase already doesn't read their tooltips.

[Kurando]

P.S: By defending their current flow, you people enable SE to keep their status quo of corner cutting with content quality. Think about that.

If the majority of players prefer the status quo then there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and you are wrong for trying putting them down for choosing that. Your thoughts on content isn't the only one in the world, think about that.

[Maero]

People have to also realize large portion of sub money goes to SE other projects, just a small portion goes back into FFXIV.
Mog Station itself for example the money goes to pay the artists that create that content.

[Anselmet]

While I think that having more voiced scenes would be great, I think we would all benefit more if they put more motion in scenes. Or have our characters maybe touch another character. I know this last one is rather difficult with all the height differences but it'd be a nice touch to maybe pat Alphinaud on the head when he's being a good boy or something basic (or a yank on his clothing if you're a lala which come on that would be adorable). In short I want our scenes to be a little more dynamic. I mean they are getting better but I feel they could push it a little more and its more feasible than voice acting.

Also I like seeing characters say my avatar's name. If everything was voiced then that would be lost =/

[Sekkei]

Fair enough, my bad, though that's still 3 years. It's been so long since the English VA changes of HW that I'd forgotten about all except Alphinaud's. I use the JP voice acting anymore because... well, Asahi in the newest story quests sums it up. (It's a shame because some of the English VAs really nail it, e.g., Zenos).

Yes, unless you use the English dubbing, you don't notice who stayed and who went from ARR into HW and beyond. From what I was told, all of the old English voice actors for ARR were switched out, except for the ones that were introduced to carry on the torch for Heavensward story, such as Aymeric and Haurchefant, because of scheduling conflicts. I could be wrong on the reason, but the fact remains that 99% of the old list are gone after ARR ended. The only exception so far in voice change that I know of is Yugiri because of the tragedy that happened to her first English actor.

[Limecat]

I'd rather they spend XIV's money hat on mechanics and game systems where XIV has remained below standards because of "lack of resources", than on additional VA or floating whatever other development hell boondoggles.