Restrictive voice options

[bunnee]

Something I've always felt was weird was how restrictive the voice selection is. For example, I want to play a hyur midlander but I find that I can't have the same voice that my miqote has because it's not available to hyur despite there being no real reason for it to not be available. I understand that some liberties have to be taken, a roe with one of the high pitched lalafell guy voices would be jarring to say the least but some voices being race locked despite not having any real difference in sound seems kinda wack. Is this just something I should get used to or should I fight the powers that be?

[Hestzhyen]

Get used to pointless restrictions. Voice selection is only the start, sadly.

[LineageRazor]

Well, look at it this way. Different races have different animations for things like laughing, cheering, and so on and so forth. The voice acting has to match those animations. This means, you can't simply take the recording made for a Miqo'te female's laugh, and apply it to a Midlander Hyur - the sound and the movements wouldn't match up. Instead, you'd need to have the voice actress for the Miqo'te do a SECOND recording for the Hyur. Now, multiply this by all the races, and by all the voiced emotes and battle animations, and voice acting costs and time really start to pile up.

There are basically two ways to cut costs, then. One way is to have the same set of voices do all the races, but have only a few of them (say, eight men and eight women). The other, which I believe the game went with, is to have a different set of voice actors for each race, but have them voice only those races (so, more than fifty men and fifty women). The first solution would solve your problem (well, assuming you were lucky enough to find a voice that you liked from the limited selection), but the latter allows for a much wider variety of voices in the world - it's just that to get a specific voice, you're locked into a specific race.

As with ANY project EVER, there's a limited amount of resources to spend, and the developers need to decide how much to invest in each aspect of the project. If you blow most of the budget on voice acting, you have to cut back in other places. For player character voices, they hired a set of actors and actresses for each race, and only paid them each enough to voice that race. The sacrifice was flexibility (being able to choose any voice for whatever race you like) for diversity (a greater variety of voices in general).

All that said, though, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that at least some of the actors and actresses hired DID voice multiple races, so a mix of the two solutions. Sadly, if that's the case, it would seem that your preferred voice didn't do those particular two races.

As for whether you should fight the powah - honestly, it sounds like a waste of effort. They're unlikely to change things up now, and even if they were willing there's no guarantee they could hire the same men and women again (voice acting is not a lucrative career, and it's certainly possible that the folks involved have moved on to bigger and better things).