Let's examine the voice phenomenon as it pertains to video games. There are likely more examples of bad voice acting and implementation in games than there are good ones, but it's hard to imagine a widespread return to mere text. Voices in video games offer an immediate connection with the personality of the character, even if it's not always the kind of connection the designer might have intended. Let's face it: when you're reading a book, your mind invents its own version of what the characters sound like. You may not actually "hear" a concrete voice, but there is an impression of sorts.

Hearing a character speak for the first time will either jibe immediately with your initial impressions, or completely break your image of what he or she ought to sound like. This rarely results in an outright rejection of the game, but over time hearing the wrong voice adds up to a subtle dissatisfaction that can impact your overall appreciation.

The opposite can also happen: that your dislike of a character's voice -- especially a villain -- will simply result in a greater feeling of antipathy, which can actually help with what the designer wants you to feel. Either way, including voice acting in a game will help with creating some emotional resonance. So it would seem to be a good idea to include as much of it as possible, right? In the cold war of MMO features, this is a tactic that had yet to be tried by a dev studio, and here it is at last.

Things change a bit when discussing MMOs, however. First of all, even when it's just you and the game, there is the back-of-the-mind notion that your quest is not unique to you; it's been created with a horde of players in mind. Second of all, the abundance of quests typically feature a concise summary of the goal of the quest, alongside a much longer detailed analysis, written in the voice of the character who's giving the quest. Frequently, players learn to skip past all the exposition to get to the heart of the matter -- unless they're fans of the lore, in which case they'll read the whole thing. The general consensus seems to be that 1) Players want action, and 2) Text delays action. So in the interest of expediency, the text gets skipped. To look at it another way, the character goes voiceless. And with the loss of voice, so goes the unique personality.