It's been a long (almost) five years since Oblivion. To fill my thirst for another Elder Scrolls game I've played a lot of other rpgs. One of my favorite void fillers has been the Mass Effect series. Those of you who've played it, which I'm sure is most of you, know that Commander Shepherd is fully voiced. That got me thinking, would a fully voiced main character be a welcome edition to the Elder Scrolls series or not? Personally, I'm a fan of the strong, silent route Bethesda has taken in their past games. So I don't really want to see a fully voiced main character. On the other hand, I don't think I would hate it if it was implemented... What do you guys think?

for me, only if i could pick a voice from a list or modify a voice. Otherwise chances are id have to listen to a voice i didnt like throughout the whole game and that would ruin alot for me.. but small grunts and stuff like that (as in oblivion) is ok

edit: so that makes it a bit hard for me to vote in your poll

However you look at it Commander Shepard is never really your own character.
In TES however you are in total control of who your character is.
I like imagining how my character sounds, so I don't want voice acting.

It would be neat, but I wouldn't trade the freedom and variety in character creation for a voiced Pc, and I don't see how they could do it any other way.

Unless the voice sounds like he is permeantly drunk then no thank you.

Having a long list of voice actors to chose from would be cool. But that's not very feasible. Nothing wrong with using the imagination.

I want to imagine my character's voice. Seeing as I play almost solely with female Wood Elves, who have the most annoying voices in the game, I'd rather not hear them talk. I'd rather imagine my character has a pretty voice, and not this horrible squeaky screeching Wood Elves seem to have.

I'm 100% for "silent" character.

I don't want a pre-written character. I want the character to be whatever I'm projecting into the game.

The truth of the matter is if BGS were to fully voice the main character, then we the player would feel less-connected to the character and he/she would already have a developed personality. While Mass Effect is a great series (I have played every BioWare game since KotOR), it's really more of watching a movie more so than actually building a character. Shepherd was great before you play as him/her and that merely continues in the story. In TES I want to start out as a lowly prisoner and work my way to becoming a true hero (the great tradition of TES). I do not want my character's personality to be predetermined (wouldn't be likely with all the species anyways) and I want to shape how he becomes by my own personal choice. Now I wouldn't mind a more choice-driven experience for quests and such like Mass Effect (maybe some sort of moral system). But I don't want the main character to be fully voiced.

Sometimes I prefer speaking my character's lines anyway. Plus, adding voices for the PC would limit disc space even more.
Unless Carmack helped them develop major-audio technology, I'd say it's unlikely. :tongue:

I think the poll results say enough

How could people role play with a character if it talked. The way TES games already are work fine for me.

Your character isn't silent, it's just that they don't give your guy a voice. There are numerous problems with giving your character a voice: You can't be just male or female, but from numerous races. You also can alter your age too. This leaves you with two options: don't voice your character or give your character the stock race voices --- no voice would be infinitely better than your character sounding like the stock races.

It worked with Mass Effect and The Witcher because you were playing as an established character. I don't see how it could work in a game where you can create your own character, especially with so many races to choose from.

I'd prefer they focus on giving more dialogue options for a silent PC.

Having a fully voiced main character is incredibly distracting when you're trying to RP, at least for me. I much prefer the silent protagonist so I can imagine what they sound like.

Silent, I like to shape the voice of my character in my mind.
And thats 20 new dialogue sequences that need to be recorded, even as a stock race. Thats alot of voice acting.

I like my character silent...lets me decide what they sound like, not some developer/designer.

So far it's completely unanimous. It's not only a matter of tradition-it's also just based on the fact that there are so many ways you can customize your character that they'd have to record like 26 or so different voice-overs, it's not like Mass Effect where you're either a human male or a human female (although I commend Bioware for investing so much in their lead voice actors, who need to be flexible enough to play both as a stoic hero with strict values or as a total a-hole who likes to punch out journalists). I think the silent protagonist aspect also obviously makes it easier for the player to feel like they're inhabiting their character and it adds to the sense of immersion. I really don't think a player voice-over could possibly ever work in an Elder Scrolls game no matter how much time they tried to invest in it.

SILENT definataly..

otherwise you'll be stuck with a douchbag like ezio from AC2 for 1000 hours

On a Khajiit character.

or the PC from two worlds who felt the need to comment on the rain whenever it was raining!

I

Keep the character silent.

Oh geese yeah. Keep the character silent its MY character not some premade one im playing!! >,< This would break immersion SOOO much i'd be pretty upset.

I'd be more than a little dismayed if Bethesda went with a voiced protagonist, to the point of losing all interest in playing. Luckily, that seems extremely unlikely - if not because of the developer's "play who you want, how you want" style in previous games, then for purely technical/financial reasons; it only seems feasible in games with fixed-race player characters. I hope my confidence in that isn't misplaced!

I could go either way, but as long NPCs talk then I'm fine