No Voice Overs on the Isle Of Refuge

Hey there,

I just decided to return to the game once again and wanted to start a new character on the EU server but when I start playing the game on my new character I am greeted with the Far Journey instance as it should but none of the characters are voiced anymore! I reinstalled the game from scratch and am still having the same issue. I completed the instance to see if it was just that zone but when I talk to the first quest giver on the Isle of Refuge, she is also mute. One of the reasons why I loved this game early game content was the immersion that the world gives with its music and voiced over NPC's. Have these voices been removed from the game or is there something wrong on my end?

Hope someone has an idea as I am really excited to play this game again but I really want to up the immersion and nostalgic vibes to the max.

It's not on your end. There haven't been voice overs for years.

There are still voice overs within the game. The problem becomes that if we need to change the text or make a new version of the zone that works a little differently, we can't just go and find the actor who did the voice over and have them rerecord. That is not even possible in some cases (sadly). So in a lot of cases, the voiceovers have to be just removed for some NPCs.

That is very unfortunate. I was really looking forward to immersing myself back in to Norrath. Oh well I guess I will have to make do. Thanks for the reply

No, its a problem with the EU server. The voice overs on the Isle of Refuge (only an example, same goes for Qeynos for instance) are still in the game,on the US servers you hear them. As soon as you switch to EU - gone. (Wich is funny as both servers are english language now).

I /bug reported this several times already. Worst answer I got: Half of the EU server population doesnt speak english anyway so this is no bug - closed. Argh, that one hurt.

I am actually playing on the EU server and this is really putting me off from the game. I was pretty sure it was all working when I was playing on Stormhold a while back so was kinda confused why so much voice overs were removed. Does this mean that basically playing on EU servers is playing a lesser version of the game??? I really like this game but honestly this is a major put off from continuing on my characters now.

I just went on the US servers and can confirm that there are no voice overs on EU servers while on the US servers the NPC's are fully voiced! Is there anyway to fix this as when i switched regions i noticed in the list of files that were updated were a huge amount of voice over files! switching back to EU server again removes these files...

You could play on a US server.

Its not really the point though. EU players are paying the same amount for a lesser version of the game. But all that aside, my issue is that I play during EU timezone so it makes staying up for guild activities more difficult once I get to high enough level to do guild activities. It seems to me that its a bug and should be fixed. The question is whether Daybreak are aware of the bug and have simply placed it in the WNF category or if this is likely to be patched at some point. Confirmation of this would be nice as I am trying to decide if its worth investing my time in the EU server or not. Or even whether I continue playing or not.

It looks like Gninja already provided you that answer in the third post on this thread.

What Gninja was talking about was the issue of removing voice over because of changes to writing. What I am talking about is the removal of voice overs for EU clients ONLY. That has nothing to do with what Gninja was talking about.

Well, you could upvote the issue on the tracker. I opened it a second time, over a year ago:
https://dgcissuetracker.com/browse/EQII-1007

That fan site is not associated with DGC. It's worse than useless because it gives people hope that something entered there might be taken for action.

I did a bug report over the official Daybreak Customer Support. The GM that handled the problem confirmed the bug and explicitely told me also to use this site!
Direct quote from her mail:

"We'll send in a bug report but I strongly advise that you also submit a bug report (see below) and post on the tracker so it can be looked into and fixed.
[...]
If you have encountered a bug, please utilize the /bug command as well as the community issue tracker website (https://dgcissuetracker.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=11501) . Posting on the tracker is an important step since it's transparent to everyone, along with UP voting any issues that you've experienced."

So, Customer support says we should use this site.

I hate to drive any clicks to that site and encourage the monetization of this scam, but look at the last time an issue on the site was resolved. How many were resolved this year? Zero. How many were resolved last year? Looks like three and they were low level issues. So tell me again about the importance of that website.

I will look into why it is acting differently on EU versus US. Its the same data so there must be some sort of exception made that told it to switch to the original language it used and if that is not there any longer its possible that it just doesn't play anything at all instead of reverting back to the English version.

I assure you we don't consider EU a lesser server.

Thanks Gninja for looking into this. I added Repro steps to the JIRA bug and upvoted it. It seems to me that when u switch US to EU it does not include the voice over audio files. However when you switch from EU to US you see a bunch of voice over files being installed in the file list.

Thank you Gninja, that would be really awsome. And yes, those files get deleted when you switch versions. (I tried copying them manually after switching wich, quite of course, didnt work ^^).

Thank you for the statemant as well. Its kind of you.

Hello Gninja,

we collected some data on this very old error. Maybe this helps:

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...n-censorship-geoblocking.585984/#post-6515355

I have seen this issue the EU server started this after the FR and DE servers were merged into them.

I have all the files that get removed copied into a folder and copy them back in after the launcher deletes the voice overs. If needed I could make a full list of the files for you.

The way I worked around the issue was to change to EU first... then after it updates change to US and have the "Everquest II\Paks" folder open in explorer. As they are repopulated they should populate at the bottom cause you have the folder open. The "Everquest II\music\combat" folder is combat voiceovers and it is the whole folder.