OUR VOICE

[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.