My Eyes Hurt! LOL

[BluntGamerChick]

To be honest, i dont know if you are false or right, both a really large companies. BLizzard focus on some games (Diablo, SC, Warcraft, Overwatch, Hearthstone and Heroes of the storm). Even if now it is "Activision-blizzard" it get in many ways 2 different entities that walk together. But we should speak about this big entity, and with activision there is much more games.

BUT SE is not small (clearly not indie as you said). Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Hitman, Tomb Raider, Nier (and previously drakengard) and so much more. Like Activision, SE gets a lot of title they publish (not create). That gives even more money.

What i want to say, we get a size for SE or Activision-blizzard (or capcom, ubisoft and so much others) where the bigger is not the matter. they get more than enough. FFXIV give them really many money. enough to get some stability about this game... but will come back to it later...



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_XI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft

2002 vs 2004

So SE is older in MMO business. (And FFXI is not close yet, without being as big as WoW, it continue to live, getting money to the company today. )



This is the main matters. The feel (we dont have proof) that most money we give to FFXIV (subscription + cash shop + retainer subscription + soon app subscription + soon app mogcoins) dont go to FFXIV but FFXV, KH3, FFVII, and any other thing they need money for.

Or the feeling is due to reality... Or due to the fact the team is paid too much for the work they are doing. The matter is not that SE is smaller than blizzard. The matter is how they use their money... simply



TO answer about the voices in WoW, it began at Vanilla (everyone can remember Whitemane resurecting her "hero" or ragnaros saying his famous sentence!) It was not a lot, and we didnt have in game cinematic.
Burning crusade added more voices, and WOTLK (2nd expansion) gave the cutscenes.
The game began with 3 langages (English, German, French). Fast Spanish came. And today, Russian, Chinese, Italian, Portugese, and others, dont have the list in mind. I also dont know if all get voices. (nearly sure to those i did just list). I also dont remember when came which language. but at release, only 3.

I THINK I LOVE YOU! Your Awesome.

[KDSilver]

Voice acting is expensive, from what I've heard. Get all the characters with a voice (currently) and then multiply by 4 (since there's English, Japanese, French and German voice acting).

French and German voice acting are waste of money honestly.
Eng/jap like a lot a game is enough.
Yes that's a MMO, and MMO tend to have a lot of voice acting but really, I don't think that's necessary.

Most of them actually even play with eng or jap voices so...
If they'd decide to save money on something else, it would be a good choice.

[LalaRu]

Anyone that (more or less) can read English but is clueless on understand the spoken Language, is grateful of those text. Not everyone born True Original American (or other (some flavour of)English-speaking country).

[HyoMinPark]

Distinct paragraphs are your friend, my dude. When people write walls of texts like this, and ignore their ENTER key to make distinct paragraphs, I find that far more painful than any NPC text in this game. I'd rather read texts without the strange voice-acting. That way the text - in my head, anyways - fits the situation more. Some of the voice acting in this game doesn't suit the atmosphere of the scenes sometimes. At least for English.

To be fair, I didn't read the whole thread, but that's necessary as I was commenting only on your initial post and didn't see the abrasiveness within.

The abrasiveness is in post #2, where OP calls everyone "basic *itches". If that's not an uncalled for abrasive comment, then I don't know what is.

[Kamatsu]

Did we play different versions of Warcraft? Because WoW is just as text-heavy as FFXIV, you just don't notice because it's typically presented so passively when NPCs are speaking to you--unless they have chat bubbles on, most people don't even notice the quest NPC was talking to them until they've already gone running off towards the objective (whereas in XIV you're rooted in place whenever you're conversing with an NPC, so you have no choice but to read the text or power through it). The vast majority of WoW dialog isn't (fully) voiced either, outside of really important story bits, so it's just like FFXIV in that regard.

WoW does technically have "more" voice work than XIV, but as 90% of it is just short (oft-repeated) lines or simple quips from NPCs I don't know if I would count it. It also helps that Blizzard reuses the same voices a lot (I swear, Chris Metzen was responsible for 90% of WoW's voices before he retired--he's awesome though, so that's fine).

I played WoW from 2005 till 2014 or so. Anyone who thinks FFXIV has more text than WoW does.... has probably only played the recent expansions. There's a reason WoW players are known as "click & quest" players - because of the reams of text each and every quest gave you, with *NO* voice acting. People didn't want to read walls'of'text telling the sob story of why they wanted you to collect 10 pig asses or 20 bear claws... so they'd click the NPC & click "accept" asap and race off to kill the 10 boars, 10 wolves, or whatever was required.

Yes the NPC's had VA lines - they would repeat the same lines over and over, and these same lines were copy'pasted over many, many NPC's. Only the cutscene's and main story NPC's & quest's actually got worthwhile VA'ing work done with them. None of the side-quest's or such - in fact that is something FFXIV does better than WoW did, at least up to WotLK/Cataclysm, as FFXIV does actually use voice work for quite a few 'side' quest's.

I'm still also shaking my head at people's insistence that SE somehow has similar financial liquidity and ability as Blizzard. SE is a fraction of Blizzards size, and they are an extremely liquid company... so they have to be a lot more careful with money spent due to this. They aren't "some big millionaire company that can just do whatever they want" - they are a well recognized name brand, but a name brand does NOT imply they have unlimited resources to back them up; check the history of Atari & THQ and you'll see exactly this.

The only thing that I've seen that is a reasonable issue is the fact that SE is pumping the money they make from FFXIV into making other games, rather than re-investing in FFXIV. However at the same time... if they kept all their eggs in the 1 basket and if/when it fails... they'd be dead as a company. They HAVE to produce other games and get other games making them money. Till their other games/franchises are a stable enough income for them, they have to try and min/max what they re-invest in FFXIV to keep it running and keep ppl subbed, while leaving them enough funds to continue developing other games to increase their non-FFXIV revenue.

SE as a company does NOT have the assets or wherewithal to stay afloat if FFXIV goes away - which many might see as a reason to re-invest more into it, but that would be a very short-termed view. Long term SE needs it's other games/franchises to be successful and produce ample enough income before they can really re-invest more back into FFXIV or it's sequel (if they decide to go that route instead, due to all the technical issues with FFXIV). So this means they will keep funneling as much money as they can from FFXIV to keep making other games/franchises. Yes as a FFXIV player this irks me, but I fully understand why they are doing this.

Also to those who suggest "Oh, just find some cheapy voice actors!"... there's a thing called "Quality Control". You might want to look that up. The saying "You get what you pay for" is extremely apt - pay for cheap VA work, and you'll have the forums complaining about it. Just look at when SE have changed VA's in the game... people are not happy with the changes, even if the VA's they are now using are good.... if they brought in shoddy VA into the game ppl would complain a LOT more than if they only voiced the major components like they are now.

[Nestama]

snip

Yeah no. That's a terrible idea.
Sure, you gotta start somewhere with your career, but for something like FFXIV, I feel SE would be looking for someone with a few years experience in voice acting/acting in general. The last thing anyone wants is Chaos Wars.

Edit: seems OP won't be able to post for awhile.

[Sigma-Astra]

I see a lot of posts got deleted....that's a shame, I wanted to see what happened after my post early this morning.

[HyoMinPark]

I see a lot of posts got deleted....that's a shame, I wanted to see what happened after my post early this morning.

A bunch of nonsense that was more painful than the opening post to read through.

[Sigma-Astra]

A bunch of nonsense that was more painful than the opening post to read through.

I know, but I wanted to see the kind of replies I'd get after work! D: My fun is ruined! T_T Huuuuuuu~

Especially after pointing out that nothing they used were metaphors.