Northwold wrote: »

Yeah I've talked about it before. Most of the time it's OK in the sense that a lot of games are much worse (although the wood elves are often very offputting and there seem to be at least one, maybe several, regular actors who are Australian but regularly get asked to pull off accents that are quite difficult and they simply cannot do, so you get Devon via Brisbane).

But the Scottish accents in the Reach were a whole new level of atrocious and I had to turn the sound off. They were plain excruciating and made me wonder if no one in the voice directing / casting process actually knew what Scottish accents sound like. It didn't help that there was at least one actual Scot in there, just to remind you what it's supposed to sound like (which is not Toronto via St Petersburg via Kilkenny).

The ones that bother me most, though, are roles where the actor sounds like they plain do not care and are reading the script for the first time. I don't think this is the actor's fault, necessarily, rather a failing of giving them context or suitable direction. But the most egregious example I found was the Anchorite in Deadlands. I just could not carry on and doubt I will ever complete the zone.

100% agree. Okay so they do know it's wrong but roll with it anyway! Like I said it doesn't make sense!

I love the voice acting and think it adds a lot to the game, and certainly to my immersion. Every single NPC is voiced when you hail them, even those that you're just passing by with no quests to give you, and every line of speech is voiced rather than just an opening phrase as in some games. That's quite an achievement in a game of this size.

Do some voices grate personally? Yes, some are irritating, and in any game there's always the odd one that grates for me as a UK player because it's Americanised - such as using the word "gotten" instead of "got", for example - but I'm sure that works the other way round too.

Also, minotowers. There are so many minotowers. Save me from the minotowers adventurer. How will I survive the minotowers.

Dear god.

The occasional mispronunciation is OK. The occasional garbled read because the dialogue hasn't been written in a way that can be spoken. But when it's central to the quest and immediately makes a supposedly educated character sound illiterate...

It doesn't bother me, it amuses me. Some of it is hilarious. Especially the voice actor who must obviously know she isn't saying, "Stupid cart!" in that particular accent.

I also admire the professionalism of voice actors who can knowingly mispronounce words like "ignominy" so badly yet still remain in character.

HiveMind3006 wrote: »

I haven't spent much time in the Reach. I am currently 'mopping up' missed quests and other bits n bobs I've missed throughout the zones so I shall definitely make that my next port of call. Thoughts shall be shared.

Just talk to Billy Boyd a lot whenever it gets too much. Of course, I could be being unkind and a whole meta plot about a Russian-Irish spy ring infiltrating Markarth may be forthcoming...

The reuse of voice actors can be a problem.

e.g. Black Drake Villa's final boss Pyroturge Encratis is also a trash mob in The Cauldron.

Youyouz06 wrote: »

I say it's time to bring in ze french accent.

'It cud be veri intéressant, n'est-ce pas?'

(PS: I am a Francophone and Francophile)

I'm picturing the continental breakfast furnishings pack now. Only 4,000 crowns, limited time only.

SkaraMinoc wrote: »

The reuse of voice actors can be a problem.

e.g. Black Drake Villa's final boss Pyroturge Encratis is also a trash mob in The Cauldron.

I may be wrong, but I believe they are hiring a voice-acting studio, that of course has a number of hired or closely kept voice actors, which is why almost all of Tamriel sounds so... similar.

Why did they even give bosmer that fake cockney accent in the first place. If we finally get some more bosmer content I hope they will tone that down substantially.

Or Paulytnz, what about that hippy Bosner in the PD Blackwood- eeesh more cringe!! Think they were attempting to copy something but it's so bad nobody knows what! Just a theory.
Iiii dooonnnt haaaave aaaa prrooooobleeeem wiiiith theeee Argooooooniiiaaaans thooouugh!

Apparently this stuff only bothers British/European players.

As an American, I couldn't care less, and it is what it is. I honestly don't even notice it, nor do I pay much attention to it.

It makes me sad to agree, because I love so much about the acting in the game. Most of it is superb.

But the accents make my ears bleed.I can't believe there aren't hundreds of excellent, reasonably priced VA actors from the countries who's accents they're trying to emulate. I don't want to talk about specific moments, but it honestly spoils some of the story for me because it's so distractingly terrible at times. I've frequently wanted to write about it on the forum but as I say, I feel bad about criticising the usually fantastic VA.

But I really hope they sort it out for future chapters.

DP99 wrote: »

Apparently this stuff only bothers British/European players.

As an American, I couldn't care less, and it is what it is. I honestly don't even notice it, nor do I pay much attention to it.

I think it bothers us because we live with it every day. We know exactly what it needs to sound like and how far off it is when it's wrong. These aren't made up accents, but real ones that exist in the real world.

So there's stuff you can overlook, like the stresses being wrong when said in an English accent (REEsearch should be reSEARCH), adjectives where Brits would use adverbs, etc. But the actual tones, the sound of the language being spoken as a sort of horror show caricature of what it's meant to be, is very hard to shrug off because it pulls you out of the story into "I am listening to actors in a studio trying to do an accent and doing a terrible job".

It's like the minotower thing: it goes from "I'm watching a slightly lost character" immediately to "I'm listening to an actress who doesn't know how to pronounce a word in her script and probably doesn't know what it means, either".

In the same way, I'd guess, in the US if someone played a southerner with a Philadelphia accent it would be ear [violation].

But Markarth was something else. Literally the worst Scottish accents I have ever heard. And you can't even put it down to a Tamriel accent because the different actors do it different ways, so unlike the Khajiit it's not a consistent accent, and some of them are literally changing their accent within the same sentence so they pronounce *the same word* differently at different times(!).

The voice work gets a lot better the newer the content gets. Some of the worst dialogue I've heard are in the base game zones.

Drdeath20 wrote: »

I just never imagined people actually getting immersed in dialogue and storylines that is rated E for everyone.

Huh? So if is isn't full of profanity or adult content it isn't worth listening to? Forgive me if I pick you up wrong. I enjoy the story. It's nice to have the VA's. I played LotRO for years and that was all just text, but I read it. I like to know what I am doing and not feel so much like I'm just farming XP.
The majority of the voice acting is good, some of it is a little flat but when accents are just downright cringe it bugs me.
Some of the storylines are guff too, still listen to them.
Like folks have said they have the coinage and means to do it correctly so why not?
I understand North American's not noticing and it not being a big deal but when you notice something you can't un-notice it.