For the love of the gods, can we PLEASE have an option to turn off our character's voice without...

[Hot Boy.7138]

human male voice is by far the worst to me. If i could turn that off, would be great.

[Gehenna.3625]

I play human female's mostly (and a Norn) and the voice acting, particularly in the vanilla game is horrible. I turned off the sound for that. In a way she sounds kind of motherly, talking to her young children. Luckily this game allows me to play the entire world and completely ignore the story as long as one character has done the main story to unlock the new areas.

It's not just the protagonist that is the issue though. The vanilla story was just generally poorly written in my view. The approach to the story was rather child-like and the lines the voice actors got weren't of much quality either. And well, let's just say that Trahearne was a dead bore to listen to and leave it at that. Just my personal opinion of course.

Now, the expansions had better story lines as such and are a bit more mature. But my latest issue with voices has to be Taimi. Loud and annoyingly upbeat or hyper is what I would call her voice acting. It was kinda funny at first but it's just constantly at the same volume and I turned the volume down to not get a headache. There just isn't much variation in the voice acting. It's almost like she's constantly playing a parody of herself. Again, my opinion but I think her voice acting could use more nuance and be less in-your-face. Her voice sounds a lot better in the moments that she is sad or disappointed and tones things down. The kind of person that in real life you'd avoid most of the time cause they're exhausting to be around, except you got them strapped around your neck via a communicator.

Anyways, like I said, I'm glad I only have to drag myself through the story once. It has little to no repeating value to me due to voice acting / story issues but also because of the disproportionate length of combat encounters, especially boss fights. That just makes me not want to go there again, cause that's also boring. So even when the story is ok and I want to follow it, it just gets disrupted by combat rather than combat being part of the story flow. But yeah, this is the only game I played over the last 20 years where I actually turned the sound off because I couldn't stand the voice acting.

One side note on that. I do want to say that this is not all on the voice actors. When I see the prequel movies for Star Wars, I feel that the acting is very poor in those movies, even actors that are normally good actors like Samuel L Jackson. It's definitely the writing there that made the actors seem like amateurs. So writers are at least as important, if not more important, in bringing forth good characters and the actors themselves have to try to make those lines work. I do enjoy GW2 more than I did before, but it's not because of the story.

[Chasind.3128]

I changed my english voices to German. The voice actors are way better.

The human female voice sounds like a basic white female, it's boring. Why can't they have an accent? The voice actors here didn't care about the quality or it seems that way (sorry, nolan north).

Norn voices- They sound like a voice actor who didn't get paid enough and wouldn't come back to fix everything wrong with the norn voice. Which, everything is awful about their voice. Why couldn't they have Welsh/ German/ Swedish/ Norwegian accents? When my norn gets attacked I used to cringe when she'd wail and moan. Really? Who thought that sounded okay? Thanks german voice actors who made it sound 100000x better!

Asura- they're okay. Just plain.

Sylvari - Atleast they have an accent and the actors sound like they care about the quality they sound

Charr- I'd like more growly/ grumbly voices

[Steve The Cynic.3217]

@"Hot Boy.7138" said:human male voice is by far the worst to me. If i could turn that off, would be great.

I'm no fan of the human male "Nice gear" lines that you get when you gather high-rarity loot, but on the same stuff, Jennifer Hale does an amazing job with the female sylvari's breathless excitement(1). But the one that makes my ears bleed is a norn female when she gets whichever it is of quickness or swiftness, "Quickly!"

But when I ran a second character through the Amnoon parts of PoF, I was amused when listening to Koth Vortena, the casino boss. Er. No. Zalambur, but the voice actor (Ike Amadi) also does Koth (a character in SWTOR's Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion), and he doesn't really do much to make them sound different. The SWTOR female trooper, the female sylvari player character, and Queen Jennah are all Jennifer Hale, but they sound far more different than Zalambur and Koth do.

(1) Breathless excitement might not be appropriate when you've found yet another rare Cleric's Iron Sword of Grawl Slaying, but she does a good job with it nonetheless.

[Steve The Cynic.3217]

@"Chasind.3128" said:I changed my english voices to German. The voice actors are way better.

The human female voice sounds like a basic white female, it's boring. Why can't they have an accent? The voice actors here didn't care about the quality or it seems that way (sorry, nolan north).

The human voice actors (for Tyrians) do have accents. They all have their own version of Miscellaneous West American VII. It's not a strong accent (not like, say, Sayeh al' Rajihd's), but if you don't hear it every day, you notice it. (Obvious exception: Boris the Beast.)

Norn voices- They sound like a voice actor who didn't get paid enough and wouldn't come back to fix everything wrong with the norn voice. Which, everything is awful about their voice. Why couldn't they have Welsh/ German/ Swedish/ Norwegian accents? When my norn gets attacked I used to cringe when she'd wail and moan. Really? Who thought that sounded okay? Thanks german voice actors who made it sound 100000x better!

The Norn most certainly should NOT sound Welsh. Some variety of Scandinavian, for sure, with the actors taught that in Scandinavian languages, the letter written as "J" is pronounced as if it's a "Y". (The storyline heroine of GW1's EotN norn branch is Jora, and that should be pronounced "Yora".) Why does that one Norn woman (Kristyna Sohnstag) in Hoelbrak who's always blithering about steam creatures sound Scottish?

Asura- they're okay. Just plain.

Sylvari - Atleast they have an accent and the actors sound like they care about the quality they sound

They have, indeed, done a good job there, even if the accents are a little erratic. The names are all inspired by British Isles Celtic cultures (Welsh, and Irish mostly), and yet the sylvari don't sound very Welsh / Irish.

Charr- I'd like more growly/ grumbly voices

Yes. Steve Blum does a good job of that for Rytlock, but he's one of the few Charr that sounds like that.

[sasya neko.1985]

and if they just added a pith and tone slider for voices we would not have this problem.....

[Mhina.1827]

I'm with you, OP. No matter what game I'm playing, I'm a creature of habit and always lean towards the human male because that's what I am. This man's voice combined with the dialogue is a cocktail of white knight, straight laced bullshit. There's no swagger, no charm, no silver tongue. And as for the actual TONE of his voice. I as a black man just can't relate to it. I don't sound like that, and I guess I'm one of those people that likes to make my character a distant reflection of myself. A slider would've been nice. Or different voice options.

[AkantorCZ.8952]

Honestly I can't stand female charr's voice. No offense to the actor. It just doesn't suit charr in my opinion. She sounds like some kind of noble righteous human lady. It's like roleplaying your mom or something. Brrr

Only reason I decided to go with female is to have a thicker charr because it better suits agile class. Now I kind of regret.

 

You know I would be perfectly fine with the mute option with subtitles or text bubbles instead!