Stop right there, criminal scum.

You've been charged with idiocy and must be put to death.

"standard since the late 1990s"? What drugs are you on?

Games within the last 5 years have not had voiced protagonists and games from 15 years ago have not had voiced protagonists. RPGs, by no means, come with voiced protagonists as standard. The stoic mute is standard. Some Anime-inspired JRPGs are not the standard by which we measure all other games.

Even RPGs reliant on text-based dialogue have mute heroes post 2000.

Standard, my buttocks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_Ex

Some did.

Lands of Lore [1993/95] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHVpa3Onhv0

(...and the other two games in the series that followed it.)

Stonekeep did as well.

well according to steam the amount people that beat the main quest in skyrim is such a low percent (27.9%) making more than one character for most people never happens i suspect .

not saying thats gospel just yeah makeing more than one character is probelly rare in the grand view of BGS titles

Sorry, if I can't have the Native American, Spanish American, Russian American, African American, South East Asian, German American, French American, Italian American. . . male and female voices this game is not living up to it's potential!!!

/sarcasm

whatever if you have scientific data that disproves this then keep laughing.

Yeah, that's not how the burden of proof works.

guys cut out the racist crap ok?

Shesh

http://io9.com/5928125/do-people-of-different-races-have-different-voices

We live in the age of google. You have no excuses.

im not making some supernatural claim undisproveable by science. you can give a refutation of my theory pretty easily if you wanted to.

And they found out that voices of races differ and that the people could in 60% of the cases tell apart white from black.

"So what have we learned? Possibly, if you cloned a number of people, raised them without any exposure to society, and forced air through their vocal tracts, they might produce different overall sounds, depending on race, and purely as a matter of physiology and acoustics. Right now, however, there's no real evidence of a characteristic physiological voice produced by people of different races. What differences there are, physiologically, are more than overwhelmed by age, health, and the deliberate use of the social voice."

Honestly, even with a 60% figure, you have 40% left over. The Fo4 protagonist falls in the 40%.

Additionally, not once were hormones mentioned in the study.

probably because its just one study and they havent focused on hormones at all. also the conclusion of the entire article contradicts many statements made within it such as the research proving that black women have louder voices than white women but then at the end claiming its all based on age and health. what, really?

Tell you what, you go do the research and come back with a better understanding of the subject instead of creating threads like this that have zero basis, and are contradicted by factual experiences by individuals in this thread. You take two kids, any race, put them in a clean, healthy environment, where everyone talks a certain way and only one way, and you're going to have two kids, no matter the race, sounding similar to each other.

they will speak the same language, dialect and accent but will differ in the depth and loudness of voice. i knew a black girl who grew up in my country and she sounded just like any girl but you could still tell she was black. although there were some others that sounded exactly like white females and even those have some kind of "evolutionary ticks" when speaking that tell them apart.

Indeed.

Short of any scientific papers on the matter (which may exist) evidence suggests that 'black voices' sometimes sound deeper is simply down to body size,

hence a large black man and a large white man are indistinguishable other than any social/cultural accent.

As quoted before, this article discusses voice physiology:

http://io9.com/5928125/do-people-of-different-races-have-different-voices

This post is from a professional singer:

http://www.quora.com/Why-does-an-African-American-persons-voice-have-a-different-timbre-from-a-Caucasian-voice

An article by a 'white sounding' black woman

http://www.nerve.com/features/being-black-and-sounding-white-and-why-no-one-speaks-correctly-anyway

Variations in the amount of melanin are not contributing to vocal tone compared to accent and social speech conventions.

So it makes as much sense to say - 'I want a voice actor with a "black voice"'

as it does to say - 'I want a voice actor with a "gay voice"'

In other words it doesn't make sense for sound.

So long as the voice actors are of medium build, their voices are capable of generic speech.

However...

What may be causing the issue is that Brian T Delaney and Courtenay Taylor are known individuals of known race,

and an initial reaction may be 'I want a black actor voicing my black guy'.

Frankly, after a couple of hours running around the wilderness, let alone 100,

I think the voices will fit your character perfectly well.

Have you seen the Fallout 4 video with the minutemen encounter? even before entering the museum walking on the street you hear a guy screaming "hey you grab the laser musket and help us blablabla" you immediately recognize that guy is black without knowing him. atleast i did.

Fun fact: There's more genetic diversity within "races" than between them. So, I'm a man of Italian descent with lots of physical attributes associated with https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/99/MarioSMBW.png, but I can still have more in common genetically with a South African, or a North Korean, or whoever.

If you can identify Preston Garvey, or Katt Williams, Michael Jackson, and Shaquille O'Neal as "black" purely by their voices, that has less to do with the timbre and physiology of their voices and more to do with the similar environments they grew up in. Or their voice actors, in the case of Preston Garvey (or Cyrus the Redguard).

I understand this and it's abundantly clear that you'll have individuals that sound a certain way based on race. A lot of it has to do with social environment. But, you're not making sense when you're telling me that "there's a black girl who sounded like any girl but was still identifiable as black." This just means you knew she was black because you had seen her in person, but if you were to talk this individual over the phone, with no prior knowledge of race, she'd sound like "any other girl."

Yes.

With respect to the protagonist, it was a developer decision to choose voices that were gray so as to not tread on any toes when creating an asian, white, or black character. It's much better for the budget (and with deadlines) to coordinate with two VA's than it is to work with several VA's for several races on the merit of them sounding black, asian, or white.

This amusing short video from Kay & Peele addresses the issue quite well:

Key & Peele - White-Sounding Black Guys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO-EwelnvxU

I think some are confusing social/accent with physiology.

perhaps her voice started sounding black by virtue of her being black... na... i would recognize her as being black over the phone even though she'd speak perfect german.

they do sound white but they are also mixed.

I don't really see how your ethnicity has anything to do with how your voice sounds. I'm from Ireland, a predominately white country, and I have friends who are black and asian, who were born in Ireland, they do not sound "black," or "asian," they sound Irish. You can tell which county they are from by their accent, like two of the guys have thick Cork accents, but you certainly wouldn't be able to say "that guy clearly sounds black."

I had a teacher from South Africa when I was in secondary school, he was white, he didn't sound white, he sounded South African, in college I had a teacher who was french, he was black, he didn't sound "black," he sounded french.

I don't really have an opinion on the voices being used in game, as I have heard maybe twenty lines from them total, so I can't really say if their voice acting is good or not. I can however say that from what I heard and saw, the voices are perfectly fine for playing any race. During the character creation that Todd was showing at E3, the male character was black at one point, and when he talked his voice suited him just fine.

So no, I don't think they should waste resources(that's what it would be, a waste) on adding voices, as what is there is already perfectly fine.

This thread is so racist. xD “Hey, I want my character to sound black!” Well, what does a ‘black voice’ sound like to you? As been demonstrated, race doesn't determine what you'll sound like. It's your environment. If I, a white American guy, grew up in Japan from infancy, I'm probably not going to sound like a typical white American dude. Yes, you'll have people like Garvey who ‘sounds’ like a black guy and IS a black guy, but not every single black guy has THE ‘black guy voice’.