voice actor repetition!

MrDenimChicken

Okay so I just played for about 30 minutes, and I had 3 quest givers with the same dude voice, and 2 with the same chick voice, and many of the NPC's around those quest givers had the same freakin voice as the NPC giving the quest! seriously? at least spread the voice actors out a little bit.

I'm about to just put the dialogue volume to zero and just start reading quests, because this is getting ridiculous and very anti-immersive. I can only take hearing Jowan's *** voice from dragon age origins so much.

Dayel

LOL, I find voices and sound distracting so I work with subtitles only. It is much more peaceful that way.

phaneub17_ESO

Back in my day, games only had text...

mikeymike2785b14_ESO

Press 1 really fast and often with the occasional 2, and when u need quest guidance, look at ur quest log!

Vr 12 in no time!

Phantax

The lack of voice acting variation is... well... 'cheap' !
You'd think they would have at least hired another dozen or so actors to do the voices. How many out of work or young actors would have jumped at the chance to do something more a massive game like ESO. More-so they would have probably done it for next to no pay, just to get something like this on their CVs
(Hell, I'd have done some voice overs for them for free, if it meant adding some diversity to the game)

VampiricOmen

MrDenimChicken wrote: »

I can only take hearing Jowan's *** voice from dragon age origins so much.

No wonder a few of the voices sounded so familiar. I think the VA for Fenris in DA2 is in the game as well.

Most of the voice acting I've encountered sounds great, but it is a bit repetitive with different named NPCs having the same voices.

Sakiri

VampiricOmen wrote: »

MrDenimChicken wrote: »

I can only take hearing Jowan's *** voice from dragon age origins so much.

No wonder a few of the voices sounded so familiar. I think the VA for Fenris in DA2 is in the game as well.

Most of the voice acting I've encountered sounds great, but it is a bit repetitive with different named NPCs having the same voices.

Jowans my favorite one.

They got Minsc/lorewalker cho.

Gah his name escapes me(I need sleep).

Go for the eyes, Boo!

kkravaritieb17_ESO

Well they have more serious matters to attend to and money to spend on improving the game rather than voice acting.

AngryNord

Ever played Oblivion? EVERYONE of the same race, had the same voice. ALL elves had the same voice. Argonians and Khajiit had the same voice...

SaibotLiu

Yeah this is a pretty standard ES thing, if you played the last two it shouldnt come as a shock.

Voice acting is pretty hard, and expensive. Im pretty sure if they went with cheap voice actors someone would whine about that too.

AngryNord

At least in Skyrim, voices weren't bound to race in the same way as Oblivion, you could have a variety of voices between races... And there seemed to be more unique voice actors for the important characters.

Evergnar

I can live with somewhat repetitive voice acting but the whiny tone everyone has drives my crazy.

MrDenimChicken

I just finished playing Dark souls 2, and MY GOD the voice acting in that game takes a huge dump on the voice acting in this game.

and I never found the voice repetition in Skyrim to be nearly as anti-immersive as in this game. It might be because in this game you are doing way more quests and you are forced to do quick quests constantly, whereas in Skyrim the quests took much longer to complete.

cigarsmoker

Voice actors cost money.
You either hire a few really good ones and get emotional and well spoken dialogue, or you hire as many bums as you can and get crap that kills your game faster than hearing the same group of actors doing different voices for the game.

MrDenimChicken

I would much rather hear a cheap voice actor that is a little less "talented" than hear the same "emotional, well spoken" voice from 4 different NPC's in a span of 15 minutes. Especially when some of these voices are so recognizable.

I mean hell, some of these voices are as recognizable as roseanne's

Ghanima_Atreides

What cigarsmoker said.

ESO hired a bunch of well-known actors to voice the most important NPCs in the game (John Cleese, Bill Nighy, Kate Beckinsale, Alfred Molina, Malcom McDowell to name a few) which no doubt took a big chunk out of their budget; actors like that don't come cheap. Also, the game is BIG, with hundreds of NPCs. Voice repetitiveness is inevitable, though it's still not as bad as it was in Oblivion where there was a single voice actor per race/gender.

At least there is voice acting, and most of it quite decent. As someone who likes to listen to dialogue, I appreciate that.

Lodestar

phaneub17_ESO wrote: »

Back in my day, games only had text...

Text? Luxury! We dreamed of having text. We had to make do with mime, body language, from stick figures drawn in monochrome. And it never did us any harm.

Katarina

The only voice that I actually found repetitive was Shalidor's, who seems to be the voice of every other male Nord

kevlarto_ESO

I enjoy the voice acting, I hear the same voice acter a lot and don't really care, I care more about what he/she is tellling me for the story, in fact there are clues to encounters, and even tips on how to fight certain bosses given in the vo's and if your playing solo some of these things make a big difference, I have been playing mmo's since the late 90's, I am sick of reading text for my personal tatse and enjoy being part of a story with voice that invloves me , I click on every npc I get an interact on and have heard some great stories, and long winded npc's that did not even have a quest. Same thing I did in the single player Elder Scrolls games. But this is just my personal playstyle for me..:)

SFBryan18

I think the voice actors did a good job. It's funny how the Arch-Mage has the male Nord voice from Skyrim. It's hard for me to take him seriously because of it.

AlexDougherty

phaneub17_ESO wrote: »

Back in my day, games only had text...

Oh god, those text only adventures from the eighties, where there was no graphics, and you had to type "Look North" or the like to even get a description of what was there.

Tandor

Lodestar wrote: »

phaneub17_ESO wrote: »

Back in my day, games only had text...

Text? Luxury! We dreamed of having text. We had to make do with mime, body language, from stick figures drawn in monochrome. And it never did us any harm.

I used to play games with the monitor off, that way you really learn to rely on your imagination!

Lodestar

AlexDougherty wrote: »

phaneub17_ESO wrote: »

Back in my day, games only had text...

Oh god, those text only adventures from the eighties, where there was no graphics, and you had to type "Look North" or the like to even get a description of what was there.

Course we had it hard. All we had was a blank sheet of paper and you had to guess what was going on and what to do about it. Hard times they were, but we were happier back then.

Phantax

Lodestar wrote: »

AlexDougherty wrote: »

phaneub17_ESO wrote: »

Back in my day, games only had text...

Oh god, those text only adventures from the eighties, where there was no graphics, and you had to type "Look North" or the like to even get a description of what was there.

Course we had it hard. All we had was a blank sheet of paper and you had to guess what was going on and what to do about it. Hard times they were, but we were happier back then.

Certainly never heard us QQ'ing about class balance...lol

mndfreeze

I think they did a bang up job with the voice acting on TESO, especially for the size and breadth of the game. When you have thousands of npc's there is going to be a LOT of bleed over on the voice acting. Also I think they do use some tricks where they take the same actor but audio tweek his voice with pitch and tone changes and stuff to sort of give it a different sound to it, but its still the same person. But even with all that you will def see a lot of repetition, there is just way to many npc's to have unique people for even 10% of them.

Older TES games as others have said were far far worse. Skyrim even only had a handful of voice actors for the entire thing and it most def felt repetitive. I'm happy they chose to have voice actors since a ton of mmo's will just completely cut them out of the picture for npcs or make only the super important main quest npcs talk, and all the rest are just text boxes. I hate text boxes now a days. They make me want to skim and not pay atention and just click to get my short form direction to the goal. I dont remember any story from WoW for example, because no one read or cared about reading the quest giver stories. You knew it would be kill X or collect Y and sometimes involved the other faction.

FlatLine84

Out of all the things to complain about you choose voice acting lmao..... Calm down cupcake, I'll bring you a Pepsi with an umbrella straw so relax, would you also like to wear a nice warm pretty princess blanket? No problem I'll take care of you

nerevarine1138

Lodestar wrote: »

AlexDougherty wrote: »

phaneub17_ESO wrote: »

Back in my day, games only had text...

Oh god, those text only adventures from the eighties, where there was no graphics, and you had to type "Look North" or the like to even get a description of what was there.

Course we had it hard. All we had was a blank sheet of paper and you had to guess what was going on and what to do about it. Hard times they were, but we were happier back then.

A blank sheet of paper? We used to dream of having a blank sheet of paper. In my day, our dad would give us a pickaxe and have us go play down in the mines. That was our Minecraft. And when we got home, he'd kill us and dance about on our graves.

But you tell kids today about that, and they don't believe you.

theyancey

I am certain that one or two of the NPCs is voiced by the same actor that does the Templar companion in D3. It was sort of comforting to fined him here, LOL.

AngryWolf

I can always spot that gal from Star Trek. It's okay..I like her. I'm just glad they fixed the tree voice.

twev

kkravaritieb17_ESO wrote: »

Well they have more serious matters to attend to and money to spend on improving the game rather than voice acting.

And this last patch proved how well they're doing that, too.....

AlexDougherty

nerevarine1138 wrote: »

Lodestar wrote: »

AlexDougherty wrote: »

phaneub17_ESO wrote: »

Back in my day, games only had text...

Oh god, those text only adventures from the eighties, where there was no graphics, and you had to type "Look North" or the like to even get a description of what was there.

Course we had it hard. All we had was a blank sheet of paper and you had to guess what was going on and what to do about it. Hard times they were, but we were happier back then.

A blank sheet of paper? We used to dream of having a blank sheet of paper. In my day, our dad would give us a pickaxe and have us go play down in the mines. That was our Minecraft. And when we got home, he'd kill us and dance about on our graves.

But you tell kids today about that, and they don't believe you.

You had it lucky, you had pickaxes.

We used to dream of pickaxes, not that we ever saw any, we used to get up at three o'clock in the morning, go down t'mine, and chew the rock out with our teeth. We'd do a fifty hour day, and get to bed at two in the morning. Where we'ld say a forty five minute prayer, and still have to be up for three, to go down the blasted mine.


The use of voice actors to do both significant and minor roles is pretty standard in the industry. Both MMOs and single player games have been doing for a couple of decades, when they introduced voice acting into games.