Well, you had the human inhabitants who were portrayed as being distinct from those in other Imperial provinces, but they were never named 'Imperials' until Redguard. The population has always been there, and distinguished from the Nords, Redguard and Bretos (Individuals like Uriel and Tharn were never portrayed by Provincial racial identities) but they were never made a distinct Race until Redguard and Morrowind.

Jagar Tharn was an ambiguously mixed race elf who claimed to be from Valenwood. Uriel VII's own race wasn't stated explicitly, but The Fall of the Usurper suggests that his dynasty was predominantly Breton, then Nordic.

Jagar Tharn an elf?? Uuuuhh.....

'"I just don't trust that mongrel elf. Part http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Bosmer, part http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Dunmer and part only the gods know what. All the worst qualities of all his combined races. No one knows much about him. Claims he was born in http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Valenwood, of a wood elf mother."..."Human blood seems to be the one missing component in Tharn's ancestry."' - The Real Barenziah Part IX

It does sound like the developers at ESO had other ideas though.

no to a fully voiced pc. the second a silent protagonist get a voice it tends to go downhill. just trust us on a few decades of video game's history here. most of the time the silent protagonist gets a voice or extended dialog it kills a franchise. tes is one of those games that does hindge on the character being whatever. limiting that would take a good hit to its lifeblood that makes it what it is.

id sooner have bethesda go to ye old days of roleplaying where ya got one spell it was magic missle it did one point of damage and if ya missed then tough coockies you screwed, then have a fully voiced pc in TES.

Since inevitably no voice actor will be able to satisfy the voice I imagine my character to speak, coupled with less diversity and deviation from the tried and true path of "Be whoever, play however", I'll say NO to a voiced protagonist.

When I look back at voices in Morrowind, I'm reminded that I quit playing a Bosmer and later a Breton character almost entirely due to the horrendously stupid noises they made when getting hit. It couldn't have been MY character as I envisioned them making those sounds, yet it was too frequent to ignore. Eventually, I increasingly found it difficult to stay connected to the characters, and ultimately gave up on them because of it.

I also recall how difficult it was resigning myself to the voices of a couple of female D&D characters in another game, where none of the voices even remotely suited their personalities.

In my opinion, this is a BAD idea.

I'm reminded of my time in Neverwinter Nights. During character creation, you could "choose the voice personality" from those offered. Some were quite good, others got me smiling (the southern preacher, anyone?). But they did not voice the whole game. All we got were combat comments and a little line here or there, not relating to dialogue.

[EDIT]

My personal favorite was the combat line, "Stand still so I can HIT you!"

The thing with voiced dialogue is that the actor has to be fairly "generic" in their script reading. If not, you go from "angry retort" to "nicity-nice-nice" in one line.

Personally, I'd rather read words and "imagine" the voice on the screen. After all, I hear voices in my head all the time

I would too. But I'm afraid imagination is a thing of the past. In my opinion, too many players these days do not want to use their imaginations.

Bad! You know full well that imagination is outlawed these days.

I'd go even further than just make options topical, with a menu for tone, like we had in Daggerfall. Scripted Player dialogue, even text, always grates on me. I like hearing NPC's talk, but hearing the PC spout words that are not mine is about as unimmersive as things get for me...

Wasteland 2 has decent topics, particular near the end game when confronting Mathias. You could actually get into a entire debate with the bugger until he got frustrated with you. The thing with topics alone is that you (like in Morrowind) don't have the option for ''responses,'' which I think more often then not is its core failing. Wasteland 2 assunages that by displaying a example piece of dialogue when choosing a topic, giving you a sense of what's actually being conveyed, which is very nice.

For what its worth, Fallout does have some golden lines. I kinda like to see them just for the sake of itself.

i thought that law was imaginary

It's just the idea of the voiced protagonist in Fallout 4 combined with the fact that BGS seems to struggle a bit at times with handling ten playable races for TES. There's also the fact that at certain times Todd Howard suggested the idea that they're going the route of voiced protagonists for all their future games, while at other times he suggests the idea that the decision to have a voiced protagonist was unique to Fallout, likely to address issues Fallout fans had with bad storytelling in FO3.

There's a good chance that TES VI will still have the ten playable races for reason of being a key part of what makes TES unique and popular, but we should probably be careful not to take that aspect of the franchise for granted either.

That's kind of what I mean, though. Yes, there's a valid concern that TES VI could have a voiced protagonist, but where does the fear of cutting playable races come from? The leap that 'voiced protagonist' implies 'cut playable races' is what I'm looking at. Were people afraid of races being cut when Oblivion added voiced NPCs? Where does it seem BGS struggles a bit with ten playable races?

Yea, I experienced that in SWTOR. I'd click on a response and the PC would say something kind of close, but not quite what I clicked on, in a way that I did not like

I think Mass Effect was the worst for it, especially in the third game... You'd pick something that seemed like the pleasant, diplomatic option (which was especially obvious considering the blatant Paragon and Renegade tags on everything) and what Shepherd would say was something snide and often threatening.

I'm playing SWTOR right now, as a matter of fact. This can drive me crazy at times. I really hate having to second-guess the developers. Everything I do comes to a grinding halt while I sit there and try to guess what a paraphrased dialogue option probably means. When I guess wrong I feel like Bioware has pulled a practical joke on me.

I haven't played much of Mass Effect, but at least in that game you could reload if the dialogue turned out to be completely different that what you thought it would be. In SWTOR you're just stuck with it forever.

I would not want the PC to be voiced, no. I very much enjoy the silent protagonist. Actually its one of the reasons Skyrim bugs me: sometimes it has responses in dialogue that are really lmited, leaving out choices your character could've reasonably had, that were contrived to move the story on. "Whats the part you're not telling me?" Yeah I didn't care for that.

So anything that further goes to restricting potential responses is a negative for me. a very hard one to overcome, as you can see.

Shepard is about as interesting to talk to as a wooden post, so that problem is kinda mitigated. He's just so dry and bland that you don't really have to worry about choosing anything beyond Renegade or Paragon options.

Voiced NPCs were already there since Morrowind. The cutting of the races comes from the fact that, this is what happend to Dragon age II. Origin had multiple races, Dragon Age II had only one race and voice. There is some sense in those fears, it is easier to simply take away diffrent races and only bother to record two voices (female and male), then to record multiple voices for multiple races. Or they could also go with one voice for all races, but then you run in to the problem of Brutish Orc, Argonian, Snotty Altmer, Khajiit, and Imperial all speaking in the same voice, which is argubly the worst thing that could happen.

No voiced protagonists and I hope that god awful dialogue wheel we saw in Fallout 4 doesn't enter TES. Just look at the fallout 4 forums and see the massive amounts of people talking against it, I bet reviewers and LPers all around will criticize it because it's a bad design choice.

According to Howard, it was something they "wanted to try out and see what happens" on day one of development for Fallout 4. As I said before though, I'm less against the idea of the PC having a voice, and more what it sacrifices you have to make to accommodate it. Interestingly enough, he also said that they wanted to make it so that it doesn't "hold you back from all of the different options you would want in a dialogue system."

So at the very least, they know exactly what it is they're doing. I may not agree, but at least they're sorta talking about it.

I absolutely do not want a voiced protagonist(s) in TES! I say keep our player character silent except for the battle grunts. I'd much rather see the money spent on more variety of npc voices.

edit:

And I do not like the dialogue wheel conversations. Let Bioware keep them. In my opinion they ruined Dragon Age 2 by going this route. I refused to buy it. (I played the demo enough to know that it wasn't for me.) I only played some of Mass Effect and didn't care for the voiced main character or the wheel conversations.

I've been looking forward to a new Fallout and I cannot begin to tell you how disappointed I am about the voice protagonist decision. It's too late for FO4, but I surely hope they don't do this to The Elder Scrolls series.

I've come to terms with it for Fallout 4, but I highly doubt it Bethesda would record thousands of lines for all ten tes races each with their own unique voices. So I vote 'Silent.'

I didn't like how in Skyrim all ten races used the same voice for shouts.