NPC voices / WHY ARE THEY ALL THE SAME???

[BlueCrimpson]

i know this wouldn't be something easy to change but i'm already seriously sick of how every npc sounds the same, i mean come on Bethesda, you're so cheep! why couldn't they at least have a differant actor for each race, that way at least each race sounds different from each other.... or maybe they do, BUT WHO CAN TELL? i swear its the same damn three voices doing a piss pore job of trying to sound different or unique... its really sad and someone needs to make new NPC voices... i realize it would be time consuming going through even half the lines of speech and dubbing new voice but its NEEDED and whoever does it would be worshiped!

[Abramul]

Oblivion - Voices1.bsa is ~ 770 MB

Oblivion - Voices2.bsa is ~ 980 MB

Presumably, one is generic voices, and one is quest/personal stuff. This should give an idea of the magnitude of such a mod.

 

I am of the opinion that moderately-modifiable, dialogue-intensive games should either stick to mostly text-only, or include a powerful speech-synthesis engine supporting AT LEAST accents, emotions, and IPA notation, and possibly allowing for mixing with other (nonlanguage) sounds.

[Sypron]

Plus anyone who makes the mod will end up with a file of equal size (depending on how many of the lines they want to re script). If you can't tell the difference between the races stop listening to heavy metal and get your ears checked out. Each race has a different voice actor for each gender, excluding dumner. 9 different races, 2 genders, 18 voice actors. They're not billionaire's, you try employing that many people for vocals and tell me how your wallet feels.

[Vagrant0]

Actually, they don't have speech seperated by Quest vs. Non-Quest. It's seperated by race and the BSA's pretty much contain as much diversity as allowable for the amount of space the rest of the game takes up. It's not a matter of Bethsoft just having only a few people doing all the voices, they obviously had more (in the case of special NPCs and beggers) they just had to cut out most or narrow it down as much as they could for the files to fit on the disk. The disk size becomes an issue because the game HAD to fit on a single DVD for it to be workable within an Xbox. Having multiple DVDs would also double costs for production (or more depending on how many rejects are produced). So essentially, they just simply HAD to cut out some stuff and make as much of the game generic as possible to avoid that situation.

 

As for any modder picking up the slack... I wouldn't hold my breath. There aren't enough "non-12 year old sounding americans" (not an age thing, anyone who has used Vent or Teamspeak for public games should know what I'm talking about) around with decent recording equipment. Fewer still know how to make the dialogues work, and most don't have the time or server space (since the pack would likely be 500mb - 2gb (nevermind the problems with downloading something that large)) to spend on something like this. Realistically, there are just more useful things those people could be doing with their time that involves new content. Even if someone was dedicated to adding more voices to races, just the screwed up way that everything is linked is enough to kill any attempts early.

[Abramul]

Plus anyone who makes the mod will end up with a file of equal size (depending on how many of the lines they want to re script). If you can't tell the difference between the races stop listening to heavy metal and get your ears checked out. Each race has a different voice actor for each gender, excluding dumner. 9 different races, 2 genders, 18 voice actors. They're not billionaire's, you try employing that many people for vocals and tell me how your wallet feels.

Generic voices for:

Orcs and Nords

Bosmer, Altmer, and Dunmer

Khajiit and Argonians

are identical. Not sure about Imperials/Bretons.

[LoginToDownload]

Female Imperials/Bretons use the same actor. Not males.

[BlueCrimpson]

yeah i didn't figure it would be easy, i guess i'm ranting now but there's thousands of lines of dialog, most of all the NPC's have their own set of speech, its just that the voices tend to wear... a lot. the actors always sound the same, not between each other so much, but on their own, its always the same tone. i agree that a voice engine would be a great solution, i was just wondering if any attempts were being made towards it. i'll live with it.

[Vagrant0]

yeah i didn't figure it would be easy, i guess i'm ranting now but there's thousands of lines of dialog, most of all the NPC's have their own set of speech, its just that the voices tend to wear... a lot. the actors always sound the same, not between each other so much, but on their own, its always the same tone. i agree that a voice engine would be a great solution, i was just wondering if any attempts were being made towards it. i'll live with it.

You want variation in tone for a game? That requires skilled voice actors, something which is very rare in the western world. That also requires having enough of a budget to hire those actors. I'm sure they spent quite a bit just on the few lines Patrick Stewert recorded. Forget about any of the other guys. It's still a hell of alot better than where games were even a few years ago. For the amount of dialogue that was recorded, it's acceptable. If it isn't good enough, you can bet anything community made wouldn't be much better. Or havn't you had the privilage of seeing some fandubs?