Well Bretons are supposed to sound English, despite being pretty much pan-Western European culturally. The thing that I found the most strange was that most Dunmer I've encountered sound Cockney and that's just not something you expect from Elves.

Yeah. One guy send me to another and they both have the same voice. Kinda immersion breaker. What I don't understand is how come one actor can't use different voices, accent etc. Or why didn't they use effects like pitch altering.
Still, it's not as terribad as Oblivion was, and the unique voices are fine.

There is nostalgia yes, but you can't deny Morrowind had more content. Also Skyrim copies a lot from prev games like guilds, spells, monsters, the usual world saver hero BS, so no wonder it's not as exciting as it was for the first time.

I believe that this same idea led to Two Worlds' classic voice acting. :laugh:

Some posts were deleted.
Calling someone's opinion lousy is flaming. Two people bickering in a thread is derailing. Knock it off - Eficus and Halthor, if you wish to continue your scintillating back and forth, take it to PMs, okay?


I am mostly okay with the VA this time out, definitely some attempts to broaden it a bit, but the Ahh-nold accent does make me giggle, especially on the "lost your sweet rrrrroll" line.



Perchance it did. Mayhap.

Hi there.

I know we all live on this big anonymous blob called the internet, so you don't know me and vice-versa. But I want to tell you a little bit about myself.

I act for a living. I'm fortunate to currently be able to count myself in the small percentage of actors who actually get to say that. Part of how I support myself is through voice acting. There is a reason I get paid for my work: because I'm good at it.

I know that when you listen to voices in a game like this, you think, "I could totally do better than that." I'm going to let you in on an industry secret: no, you couldn't. Nor could the vast majority of fans of the game, because the vast majority of fans wouldn't know what to do if they were put in front of a microphone. This is far from an elitist statement. You may as well have said, "Let's replace the professional orchestra with fans who play instruments for fun." It's just as ignorant and just as insulting as your insinuation that there's no need to hire professional actors for a project of this magnitude.

Now, to the OP: the voice work in this game is pretty stellar across the board. Are you going to hear the same voices over and over again? Of course. Until a company gets an unlimited budget and a writing staff with an inexhaustible fountain of one-liners, that's going to always happen with open-world games like this. The only way around it is to get rid of the voiceovers, but I think that most people prefer getting to hear the lines to reading a paragraph of text.

morrowind's dialogue was text based and much of it was repetitive/pointless. recording isn't the only issue here, it's probably hard to write unique dialogue for hundreds of npcs and not make it sound like filler.

and i disagree about the voice acting. it is largely the same quality as oblivion's, ie. little improved. it sounds like 2 guys do every nord male's voice, one doing a bad arnie impression. children have different accents to the advlts, which doesn't make sense. and the silent protagonist is still jarring IMO

The same two guys do every guard's voice. If you're hearing the same two guys for every Nord, you aren't talking to enough Nords. There are (I believe this is right) 3 different voice actors per gender, per race. I think some of the actors with wider ranges may have covered multiple races, but you will not hear the same person trying to do two different voices for the same race.

And I can agree with the criticism that they should have given more variety to the guards, since they're the most common NPC voice. But that's definitely not on the actors. Also, you need to be specific about where you're criticizing the choices the developers made for voices and where you're criticizing the acting. The voice actors don't choose to give children different accents than advlts, etc.

argonians dont sound like khajitts nords damn sure dont sound like orcs the elves sound different from each other sept mabye the female dunmer altmer i still cant tell the difference from bretons and imperials save for face paint i love this forum becuase hey humanitys diverce and i agree with some of the voice acting dissapointments considering so much was focused on it love belethor and farkas but not that much for my part in this im an argonian first so for me the voice acting = smart i still feel pleased when i hear modesi say landstrider dammit why cant he be married :brokencomputer:

Molag Bal's quest in Skyrim would be nowhere near as good if it wasn't for the voice acting.

I much prefer voice acting, but I will say Bethesda really dropped the ball with Skyrim and Oblivion.

Skyrim had 70 voice actors, but most weren't that good -- Farkas and Farengar sound like they're reading instead of acting, while "Arnie" sounds out of place and Jim Cummings sounds so fake it hurts (even though I'm not particularly a fan of his, I know he can do better), and they're used for a good number of NPCs. They weren't well utilized, either. Most voices can be shuffled around onto other races and not sound too out of place, and I don't even think the voices were properly split among the Imperial, Nord, and Breton characters (I swear you could hear the same voice on an Imperial as on some Nords, and certain Bretons could sound like some Nords). Some voices were good, but even among those that were, most lacked anything special.

Oblivion's voice actors were much better (I mean, you could actually tell when they were supposed to be angry, scared, or sad), but they fell flat because multiple races shared the same voices, which stripped them of their racial characteristics. A lot of Oblivion's voice actors were in Redguard and Morrowind, but the voice work in those two games had more character it, which helped make them interesting (Khajiit actually sounded like sly cats, Orcs sounded like dumb brutes, Argonians sounded like predatory lizards, Wood Elves sounded lovably annoying, etc).

The number of voice actors you have doesn't matter as much as what you can do with the ones you do have. They could've done a lot with Wes Johnson, Jeff Baker, and Jonathan Bryce alone, but they instead dropped everyone ,good or bad, from the previous games except Wes Johnson, Craig Sechler, and Lynda Carter, and relegated them to bit-parts. Skyrim had a lot of okayish voice actors with a couple good ones, and Oblivion had a handful of very good ones, but in both cases they were utilized poorly.

@ OP - The fully voiced dialogue is an old debate and one of my major issues with the series' direction. The console 'tards win though. It's here to stay and it'll now be 20 years before a TES game recieves the kind of dialogue content that it deserves, if ever.

I do like Morrowinds dialog. I could care less about voice acting. It is unfortunate the direction TES is heading in aiming for that wider audience who attention span is low. You would see people posting threads with the topic title "TLDR" or "I don't get it". No one reads anymore in the new generation. There lazy, and it is the lazyness of technology.

I think the voice acting in Skyrim is very nice, I just miss the Dialog options. They are too short, and vague. Oblivion had much more options. Also when you walked into a shop in Oblivion you were recognized by the NPC with a "How is my favorite customer" or something along those lines. Now it is just the same repeated line over and over every time you walk in that door. Even Morrowind had NPC that would say something in recognition you were in the store. Skyrim is very much repetitive compared to others in the past.

My opinion.

Don't use the map or the compass. Then you have what most real life explorers had. Arovald Big Face told you to go to the smuggler's den and find the axe made of human hair, take a few weeks finding it lol.

But seriously, the journal could be a little more explanatory in some of the quests. I turned off the compass but still use the map.

I don't see why they don't just create a hybrid system, anything you want to go in depth on they have as text, anything superficial like they do now, is voiced. Easy.

That's the way it should be. Unfortunately, many people think that such a system would be an instant immersion breaker. The fact that the unspoken dialogue is content that they wouldn't access anyway is apparently lost on them.

Everyone talking, but you don't wanna listen because they've got nothing to say. That's the catch-22 of fully voiced dialogue in TES. I'll take a Morrowind style system (with a shed load more content and non-generic at that) any day.

i wouldt mind having the text dialouge as an option other than shouting its not like my charachter talks anyway sides too many npcs spend too much time talking when they should spend time chopping wood :intergalactic:

Everything being voiced pretty much breaks an RPG, but it's evidently what the, uh... consumers expect, so I doubt we can ever go back. It's only a mercy that the player character remains voiceless in a big 2011 RPG.

In fairness, some of Skyrim's voice acting is good, and some is wonderful. But master vampires with Texas drawls, loud-mouthed Californian(?) children in little Nordic villages, and awful, awful cockney (Aussie?) Dunmer constantly remind me that I'm really ready for that Creation Kit release, please, Bethesda.

Yeah , i have to agree. I think a combination of both would be best, have the same amount of quests with scripted dialogue, ad then a LOT of extra quests with written dialogue... you can do so much more with written dialogue

i dont understand why they couldnt get the voice actors to atleast put ona different voice to atleast try and make them sound different,

i would never play this game if it had no voice acting but they could atleast change up the voices a bit.

the variety in voices is better than oblivion but not by much..

The "it's 2011" argument would be valid for an action-adventure game with little content. For a massive rpg (the likes of which TES *should* be), fully voiced only leads to critically inadequate dialogue content. Please understand also that a) nobody is asking for voices to be dropped altogether, and B) the reduction of dialogue content from Morrowind to Oblivion *is* a step back.

It's just not working anymore these days.
Hell, even games like Zelda gets some negativity because they don't use voice acting these days.

An emotive subject to be sure. A few things really leap out at me here.

1. They keep re-using the same voice actors between games. Which really ruins immersion: 'oh its that guy again'.
2. They keep re-using terrible voice actors between games. I won't be specific but we all know who they are.
3. They have a massive development budget, but they can't/won't invest a few hundred k in top quality voice content from established professionals with track records in the field? Of which there are many.
4. The 'lets do silly accents' thing in Skyrim is bizarro. Why on Earth not just use actual Scandinavian voice actors? You could have flown your sound team out to Stockholm or even Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, Kiev etc and got amazing authentic voice acting for a few extra bucks on air fair and hotels.
5. I'm not just being harsh here but the sound editing and direction, not just the acting, is poor. I could do a better job of managing a consistent output from the actors and I could edit the end product better than whoever you are paying now. For less money. So why can't you find someone better than me to do the job?

I really wonder why, but it all seems to come down to their rushed release date.

I BLAME THE CONSOLES!! :brokencomputer: lol

You, along with most of the rest of the fully voiced crew, misunderstand.

EVERYBODY recognises Morrowind's generic dialogue as a major flaw. NOBODY wants it back.

If people have stars in their eyes for Morrowind, it's because it's the last title before things took a turn for the worst. They have stars in their eyes for Morrowind's potential.