World of Warcraft Classic, being a throwback to the nostalgic days of 2004, shouldn’t exactly be a hotbed of technical innovation. However, despite its retro nature, World of Warcraft Classic just beat the normal retail World of Warcraft to the punch where a specific feature is concerned: Full artificial intelligence-powered voice acting.
Granted, it doesn’t come from Blizzard itself, and instead comes from an addon — but regardless of the source, it’s a pretty impressive achievement. Called VoiceOver, it makes a much more immersive experience while playing, and even goes as far as to take into account the race and gender of the NPC in question, so you’re not hearing gruff Night Elf women and fairy-like Tauren men. It even replays in the quest log, so you can check what needs to be done while you’re out in the field, away from the NPC in question. As you might expect, the voice acting itself can sound a little stilted and unnatural — but considering this is a one-man operation, that’s easily forgiven.
If you’ve played any World of Warcraft in the almost 20 years since its launch, you’ll know a large part of the gameplay involves reading often long quest logs. In the many years since the first launch of World of Warcraft, reading those logs has become less and less important, as addons, and later, Blizzard itself, added quest markers to show you where to go to complete a quest. However, in the Classic version of the game, the lack of these quest markers means it’s a lot more important to read quest logs to know where to go to complete it. As such, having a voice that reads the text to you can be an important addition for those who struggle with reading text in general, or large sections of text in particular.
There’s a lot of anxiety about the role of AI in game creation, and for good reason. However, in cases like this, where voice actors would not be used in a mass sense, there’s a good reason to use AI to promote accessibility. However, there is still a worry that adoption of this tech could lead to issues for professional voice actors down the road. While AI isn’t likely to replace a human as the main leads of a story, those random guards who have one or two lines, and would previously have been voiced by a paid actor? That job could easily be jeopardy if AI is able to create those two lines to a sufficiently high quality.
VoiceOver is currently only available for the vanilla version of WoW Classic, but but versions for the game’s expansions could be a possibility. Evan Pierce, the creator, is also running a fundraiser for $2,000 to expand the project.