A new addon revolutionizes questing in World of Warcraft. All quests now have voice output – and it sounds really good.
World of Warcraft has aged a bit by now. Even though there are continuous updates, some content is still a bit outdated in its structure.
A major criticism is that quests are not voiced. Most quests still present their content in an outdated way: A text window opens with a few sentences of text. Many veterans no longer read the texts, and even newcomers often just click quickly through and run to the blue marked spot on the map.
This leads to a lot of the storyline of the game world of Azeroth being lost, which is not surprising, as it is not presented in a modern way.
An addon now provides relief here, at least in WoW Classic and Wrath of the Lich King Classic.
What kind of addon is this? The addon “VoiceOver” is currently only available for the two classic variants of Classic, but it is extremely impressive. All NPC quest texts have been voiced by AI.
This is not a “simple” text-to-voice that sounds mechanical and extremely artificial, but significantly higher quality. Dwarves sound like dwarves, night elves and undead have a slight, mystical echo in their voices and there is a distinction made between male and female quest givers.
Where can you download the addon? If you want to try the addon “VoiceOver” yourself in Classic, you can download VoiceOver on Curse. However, at 1 GB for an addon, it is quite large – this is purely due to the amount of data it requires. After all, sound files for hundreds of quests and NPC dialogues are included.
How this looks in practice is demonstrated by the YouTuber Frostadamus:
How good is the addon? There are minor errors. Sometimes NPCs pronounce punctuation, like “Dot Dot Dot” when “…” appears in the text. Also, when the character’s name appears in the quest text, the voice simply says a generic “Person”, for example, “Hey, Person, can’t you help me today?”
But those are isolated cases and the majority of quests are drastically enhanced because of it. Even with these small errors, the quests are presented in a much more interesting and engaging way.
What does Blizzard say about it? So far, nothing. However, some veterans may remember that Blizzard had previously shelved a similar project. At that time, some fans took it upon themselves to voice all quests in the game. Blizzard prohibited this because they did not want others to create story content for WoW – and voicing quests fell under that.
In the case of the “VoiceOver” addon, the cat is now out of the bag and shows how well this works with AI voices and what added value it can bring to the game world and the story.
Many would likely pay more attention to quest texts that they would otherwise completely skip if they were fully voiced. So far, this is only the case for the highlight quests in the game – and only for the most important characters.
Whether the addon will also be released for Retail (i.e., Dragonflight) remains to be seen.
What do you think of such an addon? A cool thing that enhances WoW? Or should it be banned?
