Will we ever have voice-acted side stories?

[YukikoKurosawa]

So after hearing SE was finally heavily investing in FFXIV, giving the game the budget it deserved at last, I had thought going into EW that they would start putting more money into voice acting. Well when I accepted the very first quest of the MSQ and saw it had zero voice acting, I realized nothing had changed sadly.

Now having done the Role quests, and the new Normal and Alliance raid stories, we see this trend of non-voiced side stories has continued. Not that I have a problem with reading, but it does beg the question. There is so much story in this game, but it is never voice acted if it's not MSQ, which itself is only like 50% voice acted even now. Very few big-budget story games of this level invest so little in voice acting. And while I'd rather they don't go the route of SWTOR and invest hundreds of millions into voice acting everything with high-end actors which results not enough money for actual gameplay content, I do seriously question why they don't invest more into voicing, why they are so strict about not voicing anything outside of MSQ.

At this point I don't really buy that they can't afford it, even considering the number of langauges this game is in. I just want to know what the reason is and if we ever will see that new big budget go to more voice-acting at all? Surely it doesn't cost THAT much money, does it?

[Kolsykol]

Imo I like the way the voice acting works, I think certain scenes make sense to be voice acted but honestly a lot of the time things being voice acted actually makes me pay less attention to the dialogue.
It's just very different when you actually have to read it yourself, you take it in a different way.
Often times the dialogue also suffers because of voice acting because voice acting is expensive, time-consuming and it's hard for a voice actor to voice too many lines ( some of them also voice multiple characters ).
Imo voice acting is actually the major reason why writing in RPG's has gotten worse and so inhuman and overly simplified and dependent on one liners and dialogue choices not lining up or making sense.

The only exception where I'd maybe like voice acting as far as side-stories goes is the Manderville storyline.
But outside of that I like that they're not so dependent on it and trust people to read.

[Vahlnir]

Maybe I'm old school, but more often than not I prefer not to have it. For raids and such, however, it definitely helps.

[Kolsykol]

Maybe I'm old school, but more often than not I prefer not to have it. For raids and such, however, it definitely helps.

I feel like in RPG's the voice never lines up with my character, either that or they play it too wooden and neutral to try and fit as many fantasies as possible which in and of itself is bad and makes it harder to imagine your character.
It's one of the things I hated the most about Cyberpunk 2077, V never felt like my character.
I get that V was meant to be an established character but they still marketed it with a heavy emphasis on RP and female V at least just didn't make any sense for some backgrounds.
I hated how condescending and sarcastic she sounded constantly too and how she tried too hard to sound tough, her voice acting wasn't bad on a technical level but it was just very clear it wasn't her real voice and it's hard to believe she'd have any friends or that anyone would take her seriously the way she talked.
She sounded very '' performative '' if that makes sense and not natural at all both in voice and how she said what she said.

Female V was a more extreme case but I never rly liked the voice acting for Shepard in the Mass Effect games either it only felt like it limited my character and it was noticeably more monotone than NPC's.
I just much prefer non-voiced RPG protagonists unless I guess it's a character like Geralt in the Witcher.
But if I am being told that it's MY character and that I am creating them myself then it never feels that way when they're voiced.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Voice acting is incredibly expensive, and this last patch had more voice acting than any previous non expansion patch did.

SWTOR was the most expensive game ever made, (at the time) costing over a 200 million, most of which, from what i remember, went into voice acting, as EVERYTHING has voice overs in that. It didn't recoup profits fast enough for investors and went F2P shortly after to go after quick cash from cash shops.

[Darthgummibear]

Voice acting is incredibly expensive, and this last patch had more voice acting than any previous non expansion patch did.

SWTOR was the most expensive game ever made, (at the time) costing over a 200 million, most of which, from what i remember, went into voice acting, as EVERYTHING has voice overs in that. It didn't recoup profits fast enough for investors and went F2P shortly after to go after quick cash from cash shops.

The reason swtor's VA cost so much was because it was all star power.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Unlikely for cost reasons.

[Kaurhz]

Unlikely, it's far too expensive, and eventually it'll lack the 'diversity' - Like it would be painstakingly obvious of overlap and I think even with the voice acting we already have, some of the 24-man raid encounter dialogue I believe is also voice acted by people who have been in MSQ previously. I'm pretty sure Byregot is Vauthry at the least. Similarly, Vrtra is Gosetsu. Just as Zenos and Sicard are the same VA -- Honestly this one shocked me... Well done Luke Allen-Gale.

It's just too expensive... But I do think for major side-story quests a little narrative voice wouldn't do any harm, like summarising the sequence of events type deal

[Haruka_R]

Small indie company once again.

[EorzeaWanderer]

I’m in the camp that says voice acting is not strictly better than no voice acting. There are many nice touches of personalization in text you can get with a create-your-own-character game such as this one, the most important one being characters addressing you by using your name! Also GC rank, possible side quest completion, etc.

One thing I think they REALLY need to step up their game on though is alternate responses to your dialog choices. These are extremely minimal compared to other games with heavy conversation and honestly most times I wonder if a person’s response would even be different because what they say seems to be cleverly written to make sense no matter what you actually picked.