"
"Though the game starts off with NPC quest-givers fully voiced, this declines over time to the point that side quests just have some text."
That seems like a pretty cynical design decision to lure players in with a bait and switch."
Oh yeah, I played Age of Conan and it was just like that. Funcom had fully voice acted everything up through like level 20, and several cities with unique architecture; then apparently ran low on cash (enough to finish and launch the game but....) so the rest has little to no voice acting, and loads of "cookie cutter" towns all about (exact same buildings in the same order with the same NPCs, as opposed to at least randomizing the layout a bit even if they're the same buildings.)
"The blowing up graphics cards ended up being due to poor manufacturing I believe though."
Yup 100% certain, running a CPU or GPU 100% should never result in it burning out; it should be adequately cooled... but barring that the thermal throttling should kick in and protect the hardware. However, with modern CPUs and GPUs there's usually several adjustments for some temperature and voltage cutoffs (it'll throttle the CPU or GPU when these are hit). Gaming motherboards and GPUs love to tweak these thresholds up a bit. Do it with some care, and you end up with a CPU or GPU that runs a bit hotter before it starts throttling, it gets better benchmark scores but stays below critical temp. You may argue about reducing chip life but it won't go up in smoke. Don't be careful with these adjustments, and you've disabled the "critical temperature" cutoffs, demand exceeds cooling capacity for too long and the chip goes up in smoke (... or you keep the GPU or CPU itself below critical, but the nearby components get too hot and fail.)