Hmm.... How about something remotely like a believable character? XD

I'm glad they've expanded their voice acting, but they should still carry on down that road. Voice actor credits as long as a Rockstar game would be nice.

Are you familiar with the concept of trying to have one's cake and eat it too? If they had to pay that many VAs, they'd have money for practically nothing else.

And it's really easy to say "I want her to sound believable!", but not so easy in practice. It would have been really easy for her to just come across as wooden and boring, and then people would have complained that they wished she had sounded more sinister and interesting.

You're overestimating the issue, I named a studio that does it, that still manages to focus on other areas and still produces top-notch games. TES is an AAA franchise, and hiring a full crew of voice actors without hurting development isn't beyond them. They had money to spend on Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean even in Oblivion.


With ears and taste it really isn't that hard. Why would it be for a trained voice actor and a skilled producer? To be perfectly honest, I think the point here is they wanted to stick to a cliche. Some people like them, and not all cliches are inherently bad. I disagree in this case, but that's just an opinion.

Yes, but look how the other voices suffered. They had four fairly big names in Oblivion (Terrence Stamp and Lynda Carter being the others), but then had only like ten or so other actors. I think they did fine in Skyrim, considering they still had some rather famous people like Max von Sydow and Vladimir Kulich. Not quite Steward or Bean level, but they had six "names" this time and more additional VA (no Michael Mack Redguard, though, sadly). Sure, not all of the voices are the greatest, but it seems like they've at least been trying to improve their voices.

Morrowind didn't really need a huge cast since it was mostly text-based conversations. It seems to me like they tried having the same small cast with Oblivion, but since they didn't have the text dialogues, it drew more attention to the small voice cast. I think they realized that and tried to step it up a bit with Skyrim. Most of the generic NPCs still only have a handful of actors, but it's getting better. I don't know much about Bethesda's development process or their other games, so I could be wrong, but it seems like they're more or less just starting dealing with VAs whereas Rockstar has had more "practice" with it.

But that's just me...what do I know?

Yeah, I'm not trying to berate the games in this area, it's just the response to my post demanded an argumentative response in return. I'm just stating that I hope that they continue to expand in the area, and that to do so isn't some 'have your cake and eat it' scenario, but an actual possibility.

she sounds like a creepy assassin because... She is a creepy assassin...

Oh, Jack254...

I would claim no 'unawareness' of modern games of earlier works. I think that for whatever reason, LOTR seemed to be a tipping point, that got people into the genre at a much higher rate than at any time previous. Obviously people read works that came before or those works never would have survived. But it seems to me there was a large uptick in interest with the LOTR books almost an order of magnitude difference within the next generation. This is my *perception*, it may be faulty, but I think during my formative years, I saw it most often cited as a reason, or a backdrop, (many hadn't even read it!), or as something that got them into the genre.

I know there were lots of other stories before LOTR, but LOTR created an entire world that didn't seem to strongly derive from any single work before it. As opposed, for example to the Gor series which a derivative flavor for much of the first part of the series like a cross between Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars and Tarzan series...

But everyone has their unique point of view based on where and when they grew up (if they have ). If you look at the Japanese, they mine world mythologies for for source material for modern manga/anime stories... stretching them every which way... (along with unique story lines, as well)...

Certainly, you'd have to admit that at least in the -- maybe 70's/80's, many were gaming to derivatives of LOTR. Later, they went on to delve into other works for more material as interest grew for more content... LOTR (which I didn't read until a few years ago, BTW -- was much too dry / detailed/ cerebral for me as a teen-20something), stimulated intellectuals in a way previous pulp sci-fi had not...

In any event, I certainly don't think being similar to LOTR is a bad thing (IF it is even true, which I am not granting... just the idea that something deriving from LOTR might be a 'bad' thing, I found rather unbelievable)...

By mentioning the SS you just contradicted yourself. Nazi Germany was also a high society. The Nazi, like the Thalmor, believed themselves morally superior to other "races". Both are loved by their people, and considered saviors. However, they are also both guilty of persecutions and unspeakable atrocities.


I can't say whether or not Shigeru Miyamoto was inspired by Tolkien, but there's nothing in The Legend of Zelda that looks like it might have been influenced by Tolkien, not even Link's elven appearance. That's the one series, I think, that had a bigger impact on video games than Dungeons & Dragons.

Why not just do something like Allo Allo and have everyone speak english but in diferent accents.