Meh, I'd rather wait until people use voice emulation to make your character have your voice. Your character having a set voice works in Bioware RPGs when the person your playing is a set person, but otherwise meh. Of course that's my opinion.

That would probably be the game that kills any interest in new ES games for me. Voiced pc character isn't progress. My character shouldn't have to sound like someone else imagined. If I can't stand a voice actor, and there is no other choice, I just don't bother with the game. For example; I can't stand Mark Meer's maleShepard. It isn't the actor, since I do like other characters he's done, its his Shepard. While I have a few dozen Shepards, not one that I finished the games with is a maleShep. He never made it off the Normandy to Eden Prime. If I couldn't stand Jen Hale's femShep, I would have passed on the game completely. The change from mute to voiced characters destroyed a lot of the interest I had in DA2 [the rest of the (alleged) improvements destroyed the rest. I haven't bought the game and don't really intend to].

Not exactly my main priority for Skyrim

It's funny, because although I'm the one that suggested having a fully voiced character in Skyrim and still prefer it that way, I felt the same way about the male Shepard. I've been playing a female Shepard through the Mass Effect games. I could stand him though, but I liked the female voice better, so....

Gods, how I hate it when people invoke the 'this is RPG' line. When I play the real tabletop roleplaying games, with dice, storyteller and a pile of sourcebooks, then it's all about imagination. I draw my characters' portraits, I make up their voices and write pages of backstory and personality that actually have an effect on the world. In cRPGs like the TES series, you don't have this essential feature of an intelligent being overseeing the world and plot at all times. Sure, you can imagine things, but they mean absolutely nothing in a computer game restricted by however much the developers have manged to implement. Your character is limited by the technical and fabular restrictions of the game - which in TES is: nameless, backgroundless, personality-less voiceless and often even genderless.

Of course, computer 'roleplaying' is never going to be like its pen-and-paper inspiration in terms of freedom, possibilities and complexity, so it has to find other ways of making itself remotely as enjoyabloe.

Your character doesn't have a backstory, because that would require either restricting you to one or a few predetermined backgrounds (which many people may not be happy with) or an infinity of them (like in tabletop storytelling), so the easiest way out of this problem is leaving the whole thing up to the player's invention and interpretation; it makes the character slightly disassociated from the gameworld (their background won't reflect on it as it would on a pen-and-paper game), but at least allows the game to be finished faster than the centuries it would need otherwise.
Likewise with personality and gender, although here skillfully applied limitation to a few general archetypes could probably be forgiven - almost all of it is dialogue stuff anyway, so not nearly as effort-demanding as a complex backstory. It's much more possible for the character's behaviour to have effect on the world, and it has been done already (Bioware's games are not yet perfect in this regard, but going in the right direction). Removing the player character's unisixness is even easier, though so many games unfortunately don't bother with it.
With voice, it's pretty much the same as with personality. You already get to customise your character's appearance (their 'portrait'), so why not voice them and customise their speech in a similar fashion? And before you start whining about how much work it would take, how many things would have to be recorded and so on, allow me to assure you that it has been done already - a few years ago in a game called The Sims 3, where you had a choice of three voice bases for either gender (for advlt sims, at least) and a slider allowing you to adjust the pitch however you liked, resulting in a sufficient number of combinations to satisfy even someone of my finickyness. And pitch-control is hardly the summit of technological advancement - just as well there could be various special filtres, echos, volumes and other such, all dynamically applied and requiring nothing but a recorded voice base for either gender.

Of course, by this point the discussion has no significance for Skyrim, since implementing something like a fully-voiced PC would have to have been planned and worked on from the very beginning. Still, it's worth noting that voice customisation is not nearly as impossible as way too many people seem to think.

In 15 years when voice modulation is more advanced, enough where you no longer need voice actors, then yes. Til then, no. we're close though, I can change my voice to sound like Skeletor with a couple of sound clips right now.

THIS ^

Even in 15 years when voice modulation will advance I won't have it. Hearing your chars voice departs you from the world itself. You may feel attached to your character, but you won't feel that YOU ARE the character. And that's where Beth is heading. You should feel like you're existing in a realm, not seeing through someone else's eyes.

Well I heard somewhere that Skyrim will have more voice actors than Fallout 3, which had 36, so I'm assuming they will hire about 45. If we take away the four or five that will inevitably be big names that only do one character each, that leaves us with around 40 others. Split that evenly between both genders for every one of the 10 races and we get atleast two voices for all of them. If we're allowed the choice between those two possible voices, I have no problem with that. It wouldn't hurt anything but asking for the option to pick one out of, say, five would mean Bethesda would have to employ a lot more people. Too much effort, time, and money to be spent on something as simple as that. You only hear it when you're performing Dragon Shouts anyway.

Edit: If our characters have completely unique voices, all my logic reasoning above could be wrong.

What about furthering you away from actually feeling the world? I remember hearing somewhere Beth explained this is mainly why they aren't doing it.

Hearing your character's Dragon Shouts is already confirmed. People that don't want to listen to their character speak in dragon tongue will just have to svck it up. I really don't see how it's any more game breaking than listening to those grunts they made in Oblivion. That's not what this thread is about anyway.

No xD you got me all wrong.

I mean, actually speaking? Dragon-shouts are different, I'd accept that. Because let's face it, would be weird NOT hearing them. But talking to people, having whole conversations with them and answering them not in text line choices makes you believe that you are in fact not your character. Things that you have to hear like grunting when hurt and dragon-shouting that's fine, but taking that further away is just playing some other dude rather than playing myself, not for a role-playing purpose, but for the feeling of getting svcked into the game.

Oh, well yes, I think most people would agree with you there. My post was really pertaining to the OP who seemed like he was asking if we will have a choice in voices when it comes to grunts/Dragon Shouts. I didn't get the chance to read the conversation everyone was having above.

I'm afraid it's either fully-voiced PC furthering you from the game or unvoiced PC furthered from the gameworld. Again a matter of individual preference with neither option entirely flawless, though personally I'd rather play a fully (Gothic, The Witcher) or partially (Dragon Age, Spellforce) predefined character with a voice and a place in the world, than an http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AFGNCAAP disassociated from it.

Seriously? you do realize we are still associating with NPCs, right? We had dialogue texts, and if we get to customize our character to see our eyes fit, then we shouldn't have a predetermined voice. The character is us, that comes hand to hand with the freedom of choice ES is presenting us. It's not only hard doing for technical reasons (developers point of view), it also defines you rather than you define yourself. That is why we don't hear ourselves in other ES games. As long as it's an open world with almost endless freedom and endless options from the smallest things to the larger ones, they tell us only one thing: You are who you want to be. And with voiced PC it's simply impossible.

except in the grove of reflection. My doppelganger shouted something or other about Julianos if I recall.
Any way would just get annoying, games like the Bioware stuff have fully voiced player characters because it's possible with their fairly linear narratives, TES is open world so any player voice would most likely be the usual random spouting. Would anyone want to hear "that's looking much better" every time you repaired your sword, or "In the name of Sithis" for the fiftieth time as you kill yet another random bandit. No thanks.

Huh... You know, after Oblibian, I'd be careful with implying the existence of any semblance of non-linearity in TES.

That's not what I meant. The disassociation here is mainly aesthetic - around you, a semi-living world, people conversing, conveying emotions, actually sounding like people... and there's you, a mime, the only person in the entire game communicating purely via telepathy, whose voice you will never get to hear, in comparison making you the conversationally dullest character in the setting. Essentially, the character just doesn't feel like a part of their own world, stands out in an immensely 'meh' way.

In RPGs I have seen it hurt more games than help.

Personal opinion; hearing my character speak in a voice that I had no control over doesn't feel like a part of my own world. I read/voice the dialogue, so my pc isn't "mute". I can "hear" my character, the npcs can hear my character. I have no issues with imagining that. Other people's mileage may vary. If you are heading in the ME/ME2 and (divines forbid) DA2 direction, you have little to no control over "you". From what I noticed and what others have posted, DA2 offers even less control, since you choose a "tone" and have no idea what your character will say.

True, but frankly, I don't mind. In DA2, the dialogue options do give you a general idea of what the character is going to say (a snarky character can turn 'No' into a half-minute rant, but it still basically boils down to 'No', except much more awesomely), and the rest is determined by their personality, which you establish and change by choosing appropriate tones in dialogues, which is the most awesome dialogue system I've ever seen (okay, so I only finished the game with a 'sarcastic'/'charming' personality and only recently made a less funny 'diplomatic' character with occasionally 'aggressive' tendencies, but still I'm impressed).

Yes, you do lose a lot of control over the exact lines of your character (although you still have dialogue choices, from refusal or questioning to asking for money, though depending on character's knowledge and personality, some may be unavailable), but in exchange you get a character with a consistent personality, which you get to pick and then even gradually change. I believe it's an excellent compromise (or shall I say middleground?) between a character whose personality and speech you can fully control and randomly change from dialogue to dialogue, and one with an entirely pre-written, consistent personality (which in DA2 sticks even when you do not have dialogue options to choose from - in this regard, exploration comments win: "Where are we going? How should I know? Do I look like the leader of this merry band of misfits?", "It looks like they took him to some bolt hole on the Wounded Coast. I wonder if that's near the Injured Cliffs? The Limping Hills? Massive-Head-Trauma Bay? No? Just me? Forget I said anything." <3).

You have to actually play it to see and appreciate it (or not), but it's a really interesting approach, from my point of view at least. For now, only three personality types are available in DA2 (diplomatic, snarky, aggressive), but I hope Bioware decides to stick to the course and expand the idea.

I wouldn't mind, but I'd prefer more options for what to say (even if they are short). I remember in Oblivion most of what you said sounded purely mercenary and money focused. I think there should be a few more options for those that want the immersion to show their character is interested in something beyond that.
Anyhow. Answers are fairly short, so I don't see why not, if they kept character commentary brief but with plenty of options.

My thoughts placed, elsewhere I wonder. :disco: