A new addon revolutionizes questing in World of Warcraft. All quests get voice output – and it sounds really good.
World of Warcraft is getting a bit old now. Even if there are always modernizations, some content in the structure is still a bit outdated.
A big point of criticism here is that quests are not voiced. The vast majority of quests are still outdated in their presentation: A text window opens with a few sentences of text. Many veterans therefore no longer read the texts at all and even newcomers often just click through quickly and then run to the blue marked spot on the map.
A lot of the story of the game world of Azeroth is lost, which is not surprising, after all, it is not presented in a modern way.
An addon now provides a remedy here, at least in WoW Classic and Wrath of the Lich King Classic.
What is this addon? The addon “VoiceOver” is currently only available for the two classic versions of Classic, but it is extremely impressive. Because all NPC quest texts were set to music by AI.
This is not a “simple” text-to-voice that sounds mechanical and extremely artificial, but much higher quality. Dwarves sound like dwarves, night elves and undead have a slight, mystical reverberation in their voices and there is a distinction between male and female quest givers.
Where can you download the addon? If you want to try out the “VoiceOver” add-on yourself in Classic, you can download VoiceOver from Curse. However, with 1 GB it is extremely large for an addon – but that is purely due to the amount of data that it requires. After all, sound files for hundreds of quests and NPC dialogues are included.
The YouTuber Frostadamus shows what this looks like in practice:
How good is the addon? There are minor bugs. Sometimes the NPCs pronounce punctuation marks, such as “dot dot dot” when “…” occurs in the text. Even if the character’s name is in the quest text, the voice will just say a generic “Person” such as “Hey Person, can’t you help me today?”
But these are isolated cases and the majority of the quests have been drastically upgraded. Even with these minor glitches, the quests are presented in a much more interesting and engaging way.
What does Blizzard say about this? Nothing so far. However, some veterans may remember that Blizzard had already scrapped a similar project in the past. At that time, some fans had made it their task to set all the quests in the game to music. That was forbidden by Blizzard because they didn’t want others to create story content for WoW – and voice over quests fell under that.
In the case of the “VoiceOver” addon, however, the cat is out of the bag for now and shows how well it works with AI voices and what added value this can be for the game world and the story.
Many would probably pay more attention to quest texts that they would otherwise skip completely if they were fully voiced. So far, this is only the case for the highlight quests in the game – and then only for the most important characters.
It remains to be seen whether the addon will also appear for retail (i.e. Dragonflight).
What do you think of such an addon? A cool thing that adds value to WoW? Or should that be forbidden?