Voice acting for player characters and NPCs - Your opinion?

I have been giving it some thought as of late and I don't believe I have seen any information on the subject. This brought me here to see if my question could be answered.

As the title states I am curing about voice acting for players and NPCs. Will both have voice acting? I believe it is a safe assumption that players will have the usual grunts and battle cries for during combat but what about during quests? I personally prefer my players character to be text only for immersion and RP reasons. While I like to have NPCs voice acted for the same reason, being able to listen to the NPC tell me their woes and why they need me to help in this quest has always been big for me when playing an MMO. I was never a fan of the whole - walk up to NPC, select talk, they say "hello there!" then text is brought up with the real info on the conversation.

What are your opinions on the matter? Has any info on this been released and I missed it? If you could have it your way, what would that be and why?

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Blandmarrow

I'd like there to be for player emotes and some basic ones for NPCs, much like WoW has.

Cypher

Would love as much voice acting for NPCs as Intrepid can readily afford. Much more immersive to hear dialogue than to read it.
But for the player, probably best to keep it simple with combat vocals and that’s it. And we should be able to customize those during character creation.

George_Black

Costs a lot of money. I dont mind that tgey dont focus on it.
I play mmos for the group gameplay, not the story. When I want story I play single players.

Warth

hard no, waste of money

Lycancoffee

I think that the right way to do this is to give npc’s short (variated) one liners, while giving really important story quest npcs and pivotal major quest events longer voiced dialogue.

It doesn’t feel good “talking” to an npc and getting a silent pop up bubble/window, but I usually end up skipping like 90% of the voice conversations in games like Genshin, SWTOR, and ESO. Who has time for that? I’m saving the world here! I think WoW did a pretty good job of hitting the “sweet spot” with audio file length.

TheHiddenDaggerInn

it does make questing more engaging, however getting voice talent can be very expensive. Now if they had Devs or inrepid emplyee's that wanted to fill that role that could be a way to keep the cost down. I know Kingdom Come used a lot of their Dev team for such a task.

When it comes down to it though, I wouldn't want the game time schedule moved back to add such a feature at this time though.

Warth

Santanico wrote: »

it does make questing more engaging, however getting voice talent can be very expensive. Now if they had Devs or inrepid emplyee's that wanted to fill that role that could be a way to keep the cost down. I know Kingdom Come used a lot of their Dev team for such a task.

When it comes down to it though, I wouldn't want the game time schedule moved back to add such a feature at this time though.

just that the kingdom come voice acting is terrible and a sizeable part of the communiy has complained about it.

I'd rather not have any Voice Acting at all than bad VA akin to kingdom come

nanfoodle

If there is a main story, or large story arcs, I would love to see it voice acted. I dont need every quest voiced acted.

Favst

I hope voice acting will be implemented in cutscenes, the rest is redundant.

bigepeen

I skip most cutscenes, whether or not there is voice acting... So I don't mind if they spend that time on implementing other things.

TheHiddenDaggerInn

Warth wrote: »

Santanico wrote: »

it does make questing more engaging, however getting voice talent can be very expensive. Now if they had Devs or inrepid emplyee's that wanted to fill that role that could be a way to keep the cost down. I know Kingdom Come used a lot of their Dev team for such a task.

When it comes down to it though, I wouldn't want the game time schedule moved back to add such a feature at this time though.

just that the kingdom come voice acting is terrible and a sizeable part of the communiy has complained about it.

I'd rather not have any Voice Acting at all than bad VA akin to kingdom come

well I guess I was 1 of the few that enjoyed it, but it's never been a really big deal to me.

Noaani

Santanico wrote: »

it does make questing more engaging, however getting voice talent can be very expensive. Now if they had Devs or inrepid emplyee's that wanted to fill that role that could be a way to keep the cost down. I know Kingdom Come used a lot of their Dev team for such a task.

When it comes down to it though, I wouldn't want the game time schedule moved back to add such a feature at this time though.

If you want voice acting in order to make the game more engaging, you need professional voice acting.

It's worth pointing out though, the actual vocal talent is less than half the cost of adding voices to a project.

Percival wrote: »

I hope voice acting will be implemented in cutscenes, the rest is redundant.

I'd rather not have cut scenes at all.

These work in single player games, but I am not a familiar of them in MMO's.

Sathrago

Who needs professional voice actors anyways? Steven should have plenty of dnd and pathfinder friends that would love to donate their voice to the game just for the pure fun of it. Get a bunch of friends, pick the ones that sound silly or good and you are ready to go.

Now the big issue like Noaani said is the actual recording and implementation costs.

Rhuric

As long as I can here people go 'WAAAAAGH' when they die, I'm good.

maouw

Rhuric wrote: »

As long as I can here people go 'WAAAAAGH' when they die, I'm good.

What about a giant mushroom?
What sound does a giant mushroom make when it dies?

Sathrago

maouw wrote: »

Rhuric wrote: »

As long as I can here people go 'WAAAAAGH' when they die, I'm good.

What about a giant mushroom?
What sound does a giant mushroom make when it dies?

Im sure there are mushrooms somewhere in the amazon that scream when stabbed.

Wandering Mist

So, the last mmo I played with lots of voice acting was ESO and it is a very mixed bag. The quests can be split up into 2 groups: main story and....everything else. Of course the main story quests have the best voice talent in them including JB Blank as Sheogorath and John Cleese as Cadwell, and is overall much more polished than any of the "other stuff" in the game.

This makes perfect sense of course, as more people are going to be doing the main story than the other stuff. The problem is that the main story is (in my opinion) far far worse than the side or zone quests. So when I played ESO I had to constantly choose between good voice acting in a poor story or bad voice acting in a good story. It was very frustrating.

SnowyPoupa

As much as i want voice acting in game and found it funny in FFXIV that didn't have at all or in major quests(Not even Main storyline had Voice Acting 9/10 times) i agree its very expensive and money must be spend to other parts of the game.
But i will love to have fully voiced over cinematics.
Edit: Also i think that NPCs in the world must be with voice acting and not all have a generic greeting: ZOG ZOG

Merek

Things like voice acting are ignored if done right, if it's bad though, it'll turn the NPC's into a laughing stock. I'd rather they remain mute.

Caeryl

I’ve probably already posted about this, but a game without voice acting is going to feel very dead and dull. I’ll have to play it to know if it’ll be a deal breaker, but for FFXIV the lack of VO ruined the whole experience for me.

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