OUR VOICE

[SorceressVal]

Please hire a general voice actor for male and female player characters its been years we waited everyone agrees its about time we stop nodding and start talking its not so hard to get 1 male 1 female per race and have them read lines the game is surely profitable enough. if a game like swtor can give us a voice then i see no reason a mega giant like square enix cant .

[BiffWellington]

I don't think it'd be quite that simple. Every race/sex combo gets to choose from a number of different voices; they'd have to have that many voice actors, rather than one male and one female, or your character would sound jarringly diffent in and out of cutscenes. Besides, you wouldn't want a Roe and a Lala to have the same voice, right?

Also, not all members of a race will speak in a similar way; consider Guydelot, an Elezen you befriend while doing Bard job quests. He speaks with a rough-sounding Cockney accent, not the fancy courtly accent used by most Elezen you meet.

It'd be nice to have an actual speaking voice for your character, but I don't think it'd be practical in this game.

[Rongway]

Two genders per race per language. That would be 56 voice actors that they'd have to hire. Each expansion is in effect its own game, as far as quantity of content goes, so these 56 voice actors would each have to voice four games' worth of cutscenes. That's a lot of time that the sound team would have to spend updating back content. They wouldn't find it worth it.

And even if they did, you'll never get all the highlander players to agree that the one voice they chose for highlander males is good.

[Gula]

Please hire a general voice actor for male and female player characters its been years we waited everyone agrees its about time we stop nodding and start talking its not so hard to get 1 male 1 female per race and have them read lines the game is surely profitable enough. if a game like swtor can give us a voice then i see no reason a mega giant like square enix cant .

Who's we? Where is this everyone? Your personal friends? I sure am not ready to stop nodding stoically.

[Arrhin]

Honestly I wish we just had more dialog, even in text. I do like it when we get some choices even if the effect is net nuthin outcome wise. Let us be able to express ourselves a bit more, even if it doesn't matter.

[MorbolvampireQueen6]

y our voice option is near pointless outside 4 emotes ....it would be one thing if it gave us dialong instead of us just standing there making faces and we don't get a choice of what face we get to make. or let us type out a select message that our character says out loud with the voice we picked

[Iscah]

The stoic nods get a bit tedious, but silent un-subtitled "talking" is fine. I'd rather "fill in the blanks" and imagine what my character would say in the situation, than have the exact words given to them.

It's different in a game where the main character has speaking lines and a fixed personality from the beginning, but it doesn't really work here when there is such a vast choice of character designs. Are you well-spoken or rough? Polite or rude? Excited or restrained?

If they introduced such a thing now, unless your concept of your character matches the personality the writers give you (after all this time of working it out for yourself), it's going to seem wrong and out-of-character.

[Hasrat]

Has there ever been an MMO with a voiced player character? Genuine question, never played or otherwise investigated enough to know. I would expect the broader character customization gets, the less likely voice acting becomes.

[Jaywalker]

Has there ever been an MMO with a voiced player character? Genuine question, never played or otherwise investigated enough to know. I would expect the broader character customization gets, the less likely voice acting becomes.

MMO I have no clue, but can say there are voice actors in some Bioware games with character customization. The games have flaws, but voicing multiple dialogue options across many possible races and appearances didn't seem like a huge issue imo. Dragon Age: Inquisition has two male options and two female.

For FFXIV don't think it would work as well because like people have said the number of voice options is INSANE, and I get the sense the nonverbal thing is also to minimize any need for VA translations. It might be nice to be able to hear some of the non-verbal bits in cutscenes occasionally, like if your character laughs or cries or hmms thoughtfully or something. Idk if that would be logistically a big hassle or not though.

I mainly enjoy when we get more written dialogue options though, been loving those a lot. Seems like SE figured that isn't such an issue so they can throw it in more.

[Kalise]

Has there ever been an MMO with a voiced player character? Genuine question, never played or otherwise investigated enough to know. I would expect the broader character customization gets, the less likely voice acting becomes.

I depends on what you mean by "Voiced"

For example, WoW had each race having a unique voice. Mostly for giving error commands like "I'm out of mana" or "It's not ready yet!" (If you didn't disable those).

Or doing stuff like /joke where your character would spout a race specific joke.

In actual quests, your character never actually said anything. Though, to be fair, the times when characters actually said things aloud in that game were in their pre-scripted CG cutscenes that never included the player characters.

This set a precedent for all the "WoW Clones" too, which had a similar design.

If I recall correctly, SWToR had fully voiced player characters even in cutscenes. Though, it was limited to some pre-sets based on gender (Irregardless of race).

As for FFXIV:

It would be too costly to do.

Especially given that they would need to do more than 1 voice per gender:race combo due to the fact that we get to choose a "Voice" during character creation which gets used during combat as well as for certain emotes.

Since, the case is that the majority of the money that FFXIV makes, does not go back into the game, instead SE uses it to fund other games, such as making DLC for FFXV or developing the FFVII remake.

So, hiring all of those voice actors would be really expensive. Especially if they wanted it to fit in well, which would require retro-active implementation (Since it would be really odd if we were silent for tons of content then all of a sudden had a voice randomly) - Including re-writing some scenes that reference how "Quiet" we are due to our penchant for merely gesturing most of the time.