Guild Wars 2

I like my voice on some of my characters, but on others I really think it doesn’t fit at all. The norn female voice specifically is very grating to me and doesn’t fit who I imagine my character to be whatsoever. I haven’t been able to play a norn past about level 5 because her voice doesn’t fit at all.

My pie-in-the-sky wishlist for this game includes the ability to choose between several voice options (at least three) when creating a character, and a preview of what my character will look and sound like when speaking in cutscenes to make any further tweaks based on this BEFORE making my character, rather than realizing later that my face and voice don’t work together at all and I need to start all over in character creation.

However, I realize that recording that many new voice clips for the entire game and all its possible situations is expensive, time-consuming, and probably takes up a lot of space in the game installation. I have a simpler solution.

I’m requesting an option to disable voiceovers for my own character in story quests. The other NPCs’ voices can play, but let my own character be silent so I can fill in their voice with my imagination, or even speak those parts aloud myself to fill in the blanks.

Lots of people were suggesting “voice packs” as something they would buy at the gem store during the beta weekends. Even if they only include the “PvE” lines (and simply mute our character during the story cutscenes), I would still buy them for a couple of characters (my sylvari necromancer sounds so unbearably nice…).

It would probably take less than a day to record the “open world” lines for each of those voice packs, plus maybe another day or two to format the audio files, and I’m sure they’d pay for themselves very quickly. The issue is whether or not the game engine is designed to deal with that, or how much work would be required to change it.

- Al Zheimer