The missing Dialogue, especially voiced lines, but also text-only RP, has been happening to me since Legion. This is not just Shadowlands and BfA. This has been happening for THREE Expansions now, and its only getting worse and happening more often as more and more of the game is voice acted or has a text RP scene play out.
I’ve been having the vanishing Dialogue (especially voice acted lines, but text vanishes too) bug since Legion on my account. It’s not just one character, but its more obvious on characters I play more.
This needs to be addressed, especially if Blizzard wants to actually provide decent storytelling in game. And many times the quest dialogue is used to explain the steps in a quest, and when that bugs it makes completing the quest difficult and confusing for players.
Most players assume a long period of silent npcs means they’re done, so they run off without staying for the story, whether they mean to skip it or not. A lot of players are probably not reporting this issue because they don’t even realize they’re missing entire chunks of the story RP. Because when it doesn’t trigger, it’s just a long few minutes of silence and nothing happening.
I’ve submitted many tickets and bug reports, and it’s never been properly addressed. I usually get canned responses from Support, or they blame it on addons or say just turn in the quests and move on. I’ve tried everything on the standard list of ways to ‘fix’ issues. Reset the quest/RP, removed all addons, re-created cache, even re-installed the game. Nothing works to fix it.
Resetting the quest has very rarely caused some of the dialogue to re-appear, but I’ve spent hours resetting a quest to try to get all the dialogue to trigger and still had missing parts. This is not fun or good gameplay for the time wasted trying to enjoy the game. I’ve often had to go to Youtube just to see the entire quest dialogue, and sometimes I’ve seen it bug out on the Youtube videos, or the video ends before the RP plays because the player didn’t realize the RP even existed because it was missing for them too!
This bug is most obvious in voice-acted dialogue when there are long extended periods of silence as the NPC moves around as if they are talking, but say nothing. But I’ve seen it happen with text-only dialogue too during BfA. In Legion, even the popup talking head toast windows failed to trigger along with the voice acted lines.
The most memorable instances off the top of my head happened during major storylines:
- Legion Hunter Class Hall mount scenario. Odyn failing to talk during the Hunt, and his popup talking head window failing to trigger.
- BfA Horde questline in Ashenvale Zoram’Gar outpost during War of Thorns.
Sylvanas and Nathanos text RP lines failed.
- Shadowlands Nightfae covenant questline to change/join covenant. The Boon of Shapes quest. Moonberry’s entire speech is missing while my character kneels.
- Shadowlands Zereth Mortis. Taelia and Bolvar’s ‘stay a while and listen’ voiced RP is mostly missing.
- Shadowlands Zereth Mortis, Help from Beyond quest. Droman Aliothe’s entire voiced dialogue is missing. She stares at me for a while in silence, then turns and runs off without saying a thing.
With more and more lines in game being voice acted, and with Blizzard focusing more on telling story through these RP dialogues inside the game, this needs to be fixed. This bug has existed since at least Legion without being addressed. It causes story beats to be missed, and results in a confusing story that doesn’t make sense to the players, who are missing chunks of the story but don’t even realize its missing.
Please fix this Blizzard. It’s only getting worse as you add more RP story dialogue to the game.
