How to change to Japanese, Korean or Chinese voice actors.

[Cestarian]

I found a way to alter the in-game NPC voice language to Japanese, Chinese or Korean through a known mod, but what I also did myself was improve the batch script used to circumvent the file verification process of the ncsoft launcher with a much safer solution. (Ironically, the original batch script didn't even need to be a batch script, a modified shortcut path would have sufficed)

Here is the original thread for this voice mod where another player has extracted the voice-related files for the three different language (KOR, JPN, CHN)  versions in such a way that they can be overridden to replace any other language in any of the game's versions. I am sincerely hoping that this solution will only be a temporary measure until NCWest gives us access to the asian language packs without the need to do anything by hand except ticking an option. But until then, some of us just can't live with the english voices.

If you go with Japanese voices, You will want Shear's fix for extra voices and fixed textures. This adds for example character creation voices in Japanese.

 

You will notice that the Japanese voiced game (and probably Korean and Chinese voiced as well) will have significantly more things voiced (side quests, minor characters, loads of stuff not voiced in English), and also often longer dialogues than the English version. The animations and lip synch are also updated to match the different voices and dialogues.

Please know beforehand that the english subtitles will not always be consistent with other language's dialogue, sometimes, but not always (this applies to names as well).

Here is the official approach to apply these kinds of modifications with an override folder:
 

1. Download the voice pack of your choice.
2. Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSOFT\BnS\contents\Local\NCWEST\ENGLISH\CookedPC (Your game's install directory).
3.  Within this directory, create a folder named 'mod'.
4. Extract the voice pack files into the mod folder.
5. Launch the game with the official launcher.
6. Hold enter for ~15 seconds to skip the ambiguous package name (conflicting file) warning messages (there are roughly 350 of them, give or take; same as the amount of files in your mod folder).
7. Enjoy!

Here are the two other methods requiring batch files, just in case the above method doesn't work for some, or at some point gets disabled, or if you just really hate file conflict warning messages. These are provided as step by step guides. (First one uses junction links, second one moves files back and forth)

 

Update: April 7th 2016, After patch 2.0 the old batch files are broken because launching the game directly (not through the launcher) is no longer possible through the method used. To remedy this, I have created an alternative method and updated the below accordingly. If you already have things set up with one of the below methods and want to update to the new method, refer to this post.

 

1. Don't read beyond this point unless the aforementioned method did not work for you (or you want an alternative approach with fewer error messages but more work)
2. Download the desired voice pack
3. Navigate to the path where the current voice pack is located (normally C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSOFT\BnS\contents\Local\NCWEST\ENGLISH\CookedPC\)
4. Backup every file in there (<-Vital step, do not skip it) into C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSOFT\BnS\contents\Local\NCWEST\TEMP\  (This folder does not exist, create it) and also into C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSOFT\BnS\contents\Local\NCWEST\JAPANESE (You also need to create this folder)
5. Next, extract the downloaded voice pack into "C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSOFT\BnS\contents\Local\NCWEST\JAPANESE\" overriding any files that are there before (This folder must not be empty, the english voice files must be in this folder before you extract your desired language's voice files in there, this is because this folder also contains other vital files like UI files, I am assuming you use english ui normally, if you want a japanese interface, download the japanese version of the game and copy this entire folder from that version over instea, you won't be needing mod files if that's how far you're going to take it anyways.)
6. Prepare the batch files below as I describe. From now on you will have to launch the game with these files.
7. Run Launch_BNS.bat and press play to run it through the file verification and update process
8. As soon as the launcher is finished (at which point the window will shrink and gameguard will launch) quickly press Voices.bat to swap out the English voices and Japanese ones before the game is run (before the Blade & Soul logo pops up on your screen).
9. All done! Verify the voices by going to the character selection screen and testing speech settings (Only works if you have the extra voices; otherwise these are still english)

 

Then download these two batch files:

Launch: http://pastebin.com/6tied3jZ

Mod: http://pastebin.com/4K6zx8e5

(There is a download link on that site, just above the window displaying the script)

 

 (Original batch, does not work: this batch file )

Old Batch (Ignore if you are on new batch files):

Quote

If you downloaded the game and installed it at the default path (program files (x86) on C:\ drive), play on the european servers, and you have followed all the above steps, the batch may work for you right off the bat (no pun intended!). If you did install the game to it's default location but run on the NA servers, you need to edit the last line of the bat where it says "-region:1" to "-region:0".

 

If you didn't install your game to the default directory of " C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSOFT\BnS\"  you will need to carefully edit in both batch files all instances of "C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSoft" with the correct path (like "E:\Games\NCSOFT\BnS\" if that's where you installed the game) this applies to all cases except the middle start command that starts the ncsoft launcher for patching, that one is probably installed at "C:\Program Files (x86)\NCWest" no matter where the game files themselves are located, but make sure to double check these things.

Once all the paths in the batch file are correct and your game is setup as it should be if you followed the above steps, you can safely execute the Launch_BNS.bat batch file now. What happens when you do is that if the CookedPC folder exists, it is removed, and in it's place a junction link (fancy type of shortcut) to the TEMP directory is created (where all the original english language files are contained)

 

Old Batch (Ignore if you are on new batch files):

Quote

 

At this point the ncsoft launcher will start, and now with all the original english voices linked into place, the file verification will not detect any problems. Meanwhile the original command line window that is created when the batch is run tells you to "press any key to continue", DO NOT continue until you have done the following

 

1. Log in to the ncsoft client
2. Update the game (if there are any updates, if not, you've got nothing to do here)
3. Exit the launcher

 

After you have done that, you can go back to the command line window and press any key.

 

 

At this point the ncsoft launcher will start, and now with all the original english voices linked into place, the file verification will not detect any problems. You need to press play to be doubly sure all file verification is over and then as soon as all that is indeed over (you will get a gameguard dialogue) you need to run the Voices.bat batch file, this will swiftly replace the junction link to "Temp" with a junction link to "Japanese" which essentially in one instant replaces your english language files with the ones you downloaded, and after this point the game will launch normally and you are done. (Note: I have not tested this but you may run into problems if you are late to run the voices.bat file; e.g. if you do it after gameguard finishes loading, this is because the game itself while launching (that time when it displays a logo in the middle of your screen) it runs through all the files and loads them up before launching, if you haven't run the batch before then I wouldn't be surprised if you may run into problems, so be quick about it)

If you were too late to run the voices.bat file, then no sweat, nothing bad will happen and you can just start over, the only way to screw things up is if you run voices.bat before the launcher file verifications are all finished which will make it detect your japanese voice files and replace them with English ones. If this happens then no harm, you just have to start at the beginning and set up your japanese files like at the start again.

Alternative Method: Moving Files (Instead of junction links)

 

In case the junction links method stops working, alter the above steps with the below, and change to the below batch file.

 

1. Move the modified files to C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSOFT\BnS\contents\Local\NCWEST\JAPANESE
2. Move the original files to C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSOFT\BnS\contents\Local\NCWEST\TEMP
3. Make sure "C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSOFT\BnS\contents\Local\NCWEST\ENGLISH\CookedPC" is empty (contains no files but still exists)

 

And use these batch files (editing it as I described above)

http://pastebin.com/y3WAmmKY

http://pastebin.com/ZQVHJbJ1

 

(Old batch: this batch file)

 

What happens with this method is that all the modified language files (which should be in "C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSOFT\BnS\contents\Local\NCWEST\ENGLISH\CookedPC\") will be transferred to the JAPANESE folder we created earlier ("C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSOFT\BnS\contents\Local\NCWEST\JAPANESE"), and all the original english files are going to be transferred back to their original directory ("C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSOFT\BnS\contents\Local\NCWEST\ENGLISH\CookedPC\").

Then it's pretty much exactly the same as before, except after you run Voices.bat the files will be moved back so that the English voice files will be moved back to the TEMP folder, and the JAPANESE folder voice files will move to CookedPC instead before the game is launched (as opposed to creating a junction link like in the other method). This process is effectively moving back and forth about 4GB of files every launch (however since all the files are on the same drive, this takes only a second)

I hope this was of help to someone, please post in the thread if you have any problems :)

[Senzura]

I was actually hoping we could change the voices to Japanese (mostly due to me watching the anime) but I have to agree the voice acting is terrible actually even some of the npc texts are awful but I skip through that mostly. I don't understand many of the changes to be honest like is "yes man" supposed to be the pleasure gang? like did that really need a name change and seriously ? "yes man" no one could have picked something that didn't sound completely stupid.

 

Give us the option of choosing the voice overs from the launcher please~ It could be somewhat like the censoring on other servers where you just change it from the launcher and have a small patch >: I cant stand the terrible english voice actors.

[Cestarian]

Yes Man... It's probably a reference to this, pretty out of place (good movie anyhow). There is translation and then there is localization, this would be localization, where they not only directly translate but also edit names and dialogues of say Asian games or movies, to change gags and easter eggs to match what people know in western media.

For example, there might be a comedy show in korea or japan called "pleasure gang" so they localize it to a western comedy movie called "yes man". (Just as a n example, I don't really know if there is such a thing in korea or japan, but it seems to me like the english dub and translation are based more on the japanese dub than the original korean version for whatever reason) I detest localization of content (games or otherwise) because you can't replace an X with a Y to begin with unless you're super lucky. I'd rather the gags, jokes and easter eggs pass me by or make no sense than be silly, out of place and not funny anymore even if you "get it", like that yes man example you gave.

But sadly dumbing down stuff is the norm in most industries, not much can be done about the localization problem, but the voice acting can definitely be fixed, I don't care if the subtitles don't match what people are saying, I can just pick a language I don't understand (or pick a language that I do) and either rely on the subtitles for story context entirely, or disregard them entirely.

Translators have always been a problem, for a more serious example, they mess up the meaning of historic and religious texts all the damn time (not that I don't understand, it's hard to translate, I know, I've done it, but at least I did it well).

Anyhow, maybe if not asian, can I at least for now turn it to french? they have some decent voice actors in France, I know there's a french version! (Not a good substitute for Asian voice actors, considering it's a kung fu centered game with Asian looking characters... But waaay better than those mediocre english voice actors!)

[Cestarian]

Come on, nothing?  How hard would it be to add an option into the launcher to select voice languages? It wouldn't make the game take up any more space or anything, it can just default to the language of the client that was downloaded but be selectable from there, while at it, subtitle/menu language selection would also be nice.

Edit: Wait there ALREADY IS such an option, I can select french and german to install alongside with english (can't uninstall english though, flaw...) now why on earth can I not also select Korean, Japanese and Chinese (and other, if there are any) voices? This baffles me. The game is playable in french, but... I want korean or japanese voices.

[Cestarian]

Argh crap, I changed to french but I couldn't set it to french voices and english interface, only both french or both english, but even if that were possible, there are no french voices in the french version :'( Maybe I'll jsut mute the voices...

[Houlon]

You can change to KR, JP, CN just download the voice packs and run the game via a .bat file and not the launcher as it will repair the files and overwrite them back to English.

[Changels]

There's a mod you can get to do it. Literally just google "Blade and Soul Voice Mod". You can choose whether you want the JP voices or the KR voices.

[Cestarian]

Yeah I will do that then, but that's such a roundabout way, it shouldn't be necessary to go that far to change the voices.. One of these days, that voice pack mod will be outdated, what then?

[Kensho1996]

just a word of note DO you guys know what voice acting costs?

 

I can agree that some of the voice acting (in fact most of it) seems out of place

 

BUT to redo it would force them to reedit it and would cost hundreds of thousands potentially and THEN that assumes it game be hotfixed into place..

 

The other side is that we could also end up with a REALLY bad sounding/badly dubbed game that is reminiscent or those BAD 70s chopsocky movies 

 

I would have gone a completely different route with this game for the voice acting (and IF the write ups were right I would have left the storyline options in place so you can choose immoral/or moral options since as it is the game is very linear and will be repeated with every character which IS a BAD idea I think)

[ZackGTie]

Thank you guys im totally trying the voice packs! i do miss to hear NPC's saying like things or making any short of...noises!

[Cestarian]

47 minutes ago, Kensho1996 said:

just a word of note DO you guys know what voice acting costs?

 

I can agree that some of the voice acting (in fact most of it) seems out of place

 

BUT to redo it would force them to reedit it and would cost hundreds of thousands potentially and THEN that assumes it game be hotfixed into place..

 

The other side is that we could also end up with a REALLY bad sounding/badly dubbed game that is reminiscent or those BAD 70s chopsocky movies 

 

I would have gone a completely different route with this game for the voice acting (and IF the write ups were right I would have left the storyline options in place so you can choose immoral/or moral options since as it is the game is very linear and will be repeated with every character which IS a BAD idea I think)

Uhm.. what are you babbling about, Japanese voices have already been done, so have korean, and chinese. (Apparently french and german voice acting wasn't completed for NPCs, just cutscenes and the like, or that's the impression I'm getting). People commonly state that the japanese dub is the best voice acting done for the game (unsurprising since voice acting is a huge industry there moreso than anywhere else on the planet), while korean voices are the original and chinese have also been done (and make the most sense contextually sicne it's a chinese mythology based game despite being made in korea!)

Speaking of which, I found the voice pack, but where's the batch file? Is there a batch for updating the game?

[Kensho1996]

2 minutes ago, Cestarian said:

Uhm.. what are you babbling about, Japanese voices have already been done, so have korean, and chinese. (Apparently french and german voice acting wasn't completed for NPCs, just cutscenes and the like, or that's the impression I'm getting). People commonly state that the japanese dub is the best voice acting done for the game (unsurprising since voice acting is a huge industry there moreso than anywhere else on the planet), while korean voices are the original and chinese have also been done (and make the most sense contextually sicne it's a chinese mythology based game despite being made in korea!)

Speaking of which, I found the voice pack, but where's the batch file? Is there a batch for updating the game?

accusing people of "babbling" is kind of insulting ..

 

goodbye

[xArinx]

3 minutes ago, Kensho1996 said:

accusing people of "babbling" is kind of insulting ..

 

goodbye

 

But you did babble nonsense though. You talked how expensive VA is, when the data is all there. You can simply drag and drop mods now if you want, free for us. Sure it will take some time to properly implement for the devs, but nowhere expensive.

[Cestarian]

He did, but please let's stay on topic. (And he wasn't wrong that VA is expensive, although it was quite off topic. I have a vague idea of how expensive even, I just didn't care to mention it, if he wants to be petty, let him be petty)

How do I "drag and drop" mods without them being "fixed" by the file verification process everytime I launch the game? Is there a specific override directory?

As for how much time and effort it would take for devs to implement this. 1 hour maximum for 1 dev, 2 hour maximum for 1 dev if he also adds (back in) the missing feature to select interface and voice languages separately (and this is assuming they work reaaaally slow). This was never the problem, and due to popular demand they would do it right now if it was up to them. But the decision lies with the higher ups of all the publishers, and there can be legal implications (for example, it is common for japanese voice acting to be licensed in such a way that it is not legal to release it in any other country, this is a very common reason for japanese games translated to english and sold on the western market do not ship with a japanese voice option. Some of them do (soul calibur 4, my love!) but very often they don't, and very often that is the main reason, this is just one of many possibilities. If it's not something like this, then the reason is that the higher ups don't want to have paid for english voice acting without good reason when everyone just uses another language for the voices to begin with, and they're being petty about it because they spent money on it, probably not realizing that the game would grow faster in popularity if they weren't being petty, that is just another possibility though.)

[Bonrdaddy]

No this America we speak American here.

[Keawen]

On the launcher you can change to german and french also if u dislike English voice.Click setting at top.

[Enhance]

I still stand by my suggestion to give the guy who voiced "Enemy raaaaid!" a medal.

[Zarozian]

All the enemies sound like frickin Raiden....

 

Korean voices pls. ;<

[Cestarian]

51 minutes ago, Keawen said:

On the launcher you can change to german and french also if u dislike English voice.Click setting at top.

I tried this with french voices (if you'd read a bit up higher you'd see what happened) there were no NPC voices in the french version (it was also a couple hundred megabytes, english version is 1.7gbs, japanese version is 2.4+ gigabytes)

 

Anyhow, I managed to find a safe way to throw in the japanese voices without running the risk of breaking your game by not updating it like we're supposed to with the launcher. I was pointed towards this batch file to launch the game but I was not satisfied with it since it didn't account for the possibility of the game becoming outdated. I don't like that, nor do I like having to update the game and then again patch the japanese voices in every single time I want to run the game. So I modified it to do things properly, I'll post what I came up with in the OP in a minute.

[Saima]

The guy who did the voice for item storage in dungeon lobby should be shoot. It's ESPECIALLY annoying since i have to use it every time i do a dungeon. The whole VA in this game sounds like it was done by a bunch of middle school drama club students.    

[MadBlue]

2 hours ago, Cestarian said:

Yeah I will do that then, but that's such a roundabout way, it shouldn't be necessary to go that far to change the voices.. One of these days, that voice pack mod will be outdated, what then?

 

It's a roundabout way because the NA/EU voice and text options are for version of the game localized for NA/EU, they're not just translations of Korean. If they were to offer official Korean language support for the NA/EU version,  they would have to change a lot of the Korean text and voice-overs in order for it to match up with the NA/EU release. For example, all the dialogue from the quest chain "The Scholarly Path" is completely different in Korean, because they changed the questgiver's motives for the NA/EU release, so all of that would have to be changed to match what the dialogue is in English/French/German.

[Cestarian]

No it's a bit more simple than that. They can simply add a warning, e.g. "Warning: The English subtitles were created for the English voices, subtitles and voice may be inconsistent."

They don't have to go all the way, at least not right off the bat.

[Cestarian]

Allright guys, I added my method of modifying the game to use japanese voices, can also be used for korean and chinese. All I did was create that batch file. Everything else was made by NCSoft (In Korea, Japan, China and North America (I think NCWest is in north america)) so credit to the original authors, don't forget it.

If anyone dislikes the obscene use of moving files around to get this to work, you can modify the batch yourself to set the original files in the described TEMP dir, and the modified files in the JAPANESE dir, deleting the original CookedPC dir, then instead of moving the files you can create junction links ("MKLINK /J "path" "path"" is the command to do so) and then replace just these junction links instead of moving the files around.

Moving the files around should in theory have a little effect on your hard drive's lifetime, I don't know about SSDs but probably the same (they have limited reads and writes, not limited file movements). But if you give me a good enough reason, I might create such a batch myself.

[Reine77]

Awesome, definitely will be using this mod. Thanks for posting it Cestarian

[PrinceMarcus]

On 1/24/2016 at 2:51 AM, Cestarian said:

How to change to Asian voice actors... followed by a lot of stuff...  

 

 

why bother? just hit the SKIP/ESC button and listen to some asian girl saying kebab in the most sexiest way you can ever possibly imagine of. =P