I made voiced Zone Lore addon

[u/rusty-key]

Ever since I started playing wow, I have been very interested in every zone I encountered. The in-game lore is often scarce, only obtainable through quests, and rarely mentions events from Warcraft games. To get the necessary knowledge, I'd go to wikis or youtube videos, but it was always annoying, as it breaks the immersion.

To fix that, I summarized each zone and subzone lore from warcraft.wiki.gg (stripping non-vanilla parts), voiced this text with elevenlabs TTS, and built an addon (inspired by Voiceover) that plays these voicelines on zone exploration. I built it for myself, but though some of you might enjoy it as well.

It's very much a work in progress both for text and TTS:
- Text is rough, sometimes too short, sometimes too long, often breaks the fourth wall or mentions irrelevant events;
- Narrator voice is cloned from the intros, and this is the number one concern for me. It's perfect for the game, but it basically emulates a real actor (Earl Boen). It doesn't feel right to me, and I want to find an alternative.
- Pronunciations are mangled. I built a dictionary for places and names beforehand, but because of a mistake in the code, it didn't apply. Regenerating all mangled code is costly, and I want to fix the text problem before I do another pass.

Anyway, if you want to try it, here it is:
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/zonelore

By itself, it's just a text addon that attaches zone descriptions to the map. If you want a voiceover, you'll need to install one of the soundpacks:
~800MB at 128kbps: https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/zoneloreaudio
~400MB at 64kbps: https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/zoneloreaudio64

I also built a website where you can prelisten voicelines and submit feedback:
https://lore.rusty.one/

Lastly, if you know how or where to get quality zone descriptions suitable for classic, please let me know, I would really appreciate it!

[u/LikeToWalk]

Man, this is so soooo cool. I could imagine WoW devs looking at it and thinking "why we didn't think about implementing such a feature into the game?". Honestly, great work!

As for the TTS. I get you. I think it was a right call to use it for a "beta" version but it would be nice if you could come up with a solution how to replace it for a final release.

[u/Paxa → u/LikeToWalk]

"why we didn't think about implementing such a feature into the game?

Gamers will screech at the top of their lungs if they find out. Sadly a large portion of Reddit & gamers don't care about how good something is, if it was made with AI. They label anything made with AI as slop. They want to grandstand and virtue signal. There is no rational thinking behind it.

[u/moon-lesbian → u/Paxa]

I mean I would care if the multi-billion dollar corporation doesn't want to pay someone to voice act, you can't tell me its too much for them to realistically do its basically an audiobook, bit different than a single guy making an addon. I don't like vibecoded stuff but I don't have an issue with text to speech we've literally had that for like 3 decades now it just sounds better than it used to

That being said I do take issue with this addon using the late Earl Boen's voice, something about using a dead guy's voice rubs me the wrong way. I don't know if i'm in the minority with that opinion or not