u/rusty-key

>Edit: there is some confusion regarding installations and compatibility.
- If you have any other VoiceOver addon (e.g. AI_VoiceOver) installed, it's better to disable it before trying this one.
- You need both: "VoiceOver Redux" (it's an audio-player) and VoiceOver Redux Audio (it's a collection of audios for player to play; you can pick and choose them, or just install all of them)

I really like VoiceOver addon, it makes my playthroughs much more immersive. However, it always bothered me that the one existing English pack is very unnatural-sounding and contains a lot of mistakes (mispronunciations, incorrect voices, weird intonations, etc). After working on ZoneLore addon, I realized that I have everything to fix it.

I just got my rework (VoiceOver Redux) approved on Curse, and it contains a bunch of fixes:

• voices are matched per NPC flavor, instead of just race and gender, so a dwarf warrior and a dwarf official don't sound alike
• object quests are voiced now, using narrator voice
• stage directions (<Advisor Belgrum opens the note.>) are read by narrator;
• proper voicing of sounds (*hic* produces sound of hiccup, not "asterisk-hic-asterisk")
• names and places pronunciations are fixed for the most part and now driven by a pronunciation dictionary;
• performance is more natural-sounding overall.

I repacked the voicelines so they are easier to download: they are now optimized for storage (~1.5Gb → 0.5Gb total) and split by faction/type so you don't have to download everything if you don't want to. You will need a player addon and any combination of soundpacks:

• Alliance-only quests
• Horde-only quests
• Shared quests
• Gossip (completely optional and can be ignored if you always disable gossip voicing)
• All (meta package that contains everything)

I also added a "Report" button to the player. Please use it to send feedback, I will continue improving the lines. You can also provide feedback directly and pre-listen to lines in the explorer that I built: https://voiceover.rusty.one/

Lastly, on translations and TBC: technically ready, my platform supports both. What's missing is budget. It's all paid ElevenLabs credits, and ZoneLore plus this has cost me ~$300 so far. New languages/expansions mean more voices, more testing, and more spending.

If you have your own ElevenLabs API key (or are willing to get one) and want a language/expansion covered, reach out, I'll hand over the pipeline, and we split the work by area. Otherwise, there's buymeacoffee, donations with a comment help me decide what gets voiced next (I am open to suggestions for better crowdsourcing implementations).

As promised in the previous thread, I pushed a big update to the addon:

• Fully updated text. More on that later, but I removed tons of post-vanilla lore, "gaminess", quest outcomes, etc.
• No more cloned voice. The new one is probably not as good, but I tried to find one that is close in spirit (narrative style, epic, raspy)
• Fixed pronunciation for over 150+ names of NPCs and locations.
• Significantly reduced size of audio packs. Almost halved, thanks to removing incorrectly parsed zones and better encoding.

Main addon: https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/zonelore
Audio pack 128kbps (CBR, ~450MB): https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/zoneloreaudio
Audio pack 64kbps (VBR mono, ~225MB): https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/zoneloreaudio64

Thanks to everyone who submitted reports. It helped me improve the "post-vanilla lore detector" a lot and, hopefully, lore is now more era-accurate.

However, there are still 800+ subzones, and I couldn't possibly review them all, so I relied on a combination of a script and AI to help me detect lore problems and fixed just those that were marked. If you notice any problems, please continue sending me feedback on https://lore.rusty.one/. Things to look out for:

• Post-vanilla lore. Wiki is written from the viewpoint of 2026 player, and some lore sections, especially summaries, contain unmarked post-vanilla lore. Cataclysm is the main offender here, as it forces summaries to be rewritten in past tense or mention some things that happened later.
• Gaminess. Wiki mentions a lot of fourth-wall-breaking information, explaining some game mechanics or systems. This is easier to spot, but some could still slip through.
• Vanilla quest outcomes stated as lore. This one is tricky, as it technically is vanilla lore, but from the viewpoint of the player doesn't make sense as events didn't happen yet. I tried to rephrase the ones that I found as unresolved conflicts/problems, hopefully it's good enough.
• Retcons. This is a big one, and I am honestly not sure how to deal with it. Retcons come from multiple sources (later expansions, books, comics, etc). I decided to let some in (e.g., worgen curse framing and Ariden's Dark Riders backstory), but refuted the blatant ones that don't fit well (like Legion or Shadowlands retcons). However, I am open to suggestions, I'd be happy to find a more solid rule for what's allowed and what's not.
• Mistakes in wiki (like mentioning Hall of Justice in Darnassus). Well, this one I'll have to just deal with one by one, but, hopefully it's rare.

(All of this makes me kinda want to have a lore-focused vanilla wiki... But let's focus)

If you are interested in writing and want to help with the project, let me know. I just added "editor" role to https://lore.rusty.one/, so now it's a simple collab tool. Otherwise, please complain about wrong lore or bad audio/pronunciation, it helps a lot!

If you want to support the project with a coin, you can now do it here: https://buymeacoffee.com/rustykey. Everything will go to voice generation, which is expensive, or towards supporting a voice actor.

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!