Glad to see some people have a brain still. Dialog recording is a logistics nightmare on top of being just plain hard. You can't just "Read a line", there's so much between writing the dialog, to putting it in the game, that anyone suggesting otherwise needs to have an MRI to check for clots in the brain.

That said, there's also an issue not mentioned a lot when it comes to VO work, and that's direction. An actor or actress can be the most amazingly talented individual on the planet, but if not properly directed to the role's intent, it can ruin a recording as thoroughly as a bad actor.

And this is to say nothing of Dialog assignment.

Everyone seems to be missing the point. Im not suggesting we put them in the roles of Alduin. Would it really had been so hard to use some employees for non essential roles such as guards, bandits, and some merchants. Then it would have freed up the voice actors to do more in depth dialogue. Instead in Skyrim i seem to hear the same voices in each city, town, or random encounter that I have heard a thousand times before. Also to clarify not everyone can act as some of you put it. Well all they had to do was spend a couple days saying who wants there voice in the game of Skyrim. Im sure there are some voice actors working at gamesas, there are to many of them not to be. If they wanted to make Skyrim realistic they could have mixed up the great voice actors with say an employee from gamesas with at least some talent for speaking and bam you have more diversity. alright i hope i cleared up the topic.

you underestimate a lot of things, firstly it is hard to get a good sounding voice recording, this is amplified times a million when you are working with someone who doesn't professionally act, it's really a lot harder than you think (I know because I've tried, with semi-professional actors, and even then they had a very difficult time).

you also seem to be assuming that some-one (other than the guys who's job it is) at bethesda has a vocal talent, I can tell you right now that even someone with the smoothest most orgism inducing voice wouldn't be worth [censored] as a voice actor if they didn't how to act the role, or sound the role, did you ever think that maybe nobody at bethesda sounds like someone that is in-game?

another thing to note, why use employees and not professional voice actors? they aren't short on money and the most expensive part isn't the actors, it's usually all the other costs associated with recording and editing the voice recordings.

Blizzard did a lot of in-house voice acting for their early games and they remain better than much of the newer stuff.

I think Bethseda were mostly limited by disc space. There wasn't enough room to put x2 voice actors in it.

To be honest, I thought some of the Whiterun guard voices were done by employees. "It was fast, faster than anything I've ever seen" from that guard from the west tower...I cringe every time I hear it.

Plus it sounded like part of Hadvar's (sp?) voice in the tutorial was filled in by someone else. The part where you are making your way to the keep and he blurts out "stay close to the wall" just sounds like they grabbed some intern making xerox copies and said, "Here, read this like like you're in a hurry and a dragon is trying to kill you"

Just my opinion.

And sure, more voice actors would be nice, but I'm fine with it as it is. Much better than Oblivion where the voice would change half way thru the dialogue.

Are you contradicting yourself, sir?

Esbern is another example of fine voice acting, ruined by abrupt change of voice at various points.

Well I agree with the voice repetition in non essential NPCs. Altho there′s a huge improvement over previous TES games. Regarding Main Quest and Guild voice acting I think there is a decent number of voice actors and they are pretty decent. The DB, Thieves Guild and Esbern/Paarthurnax/Arngeir voice acting is pretty good IMO but the Companions/College is a bit lackluster.

For someone only doing that the voice acting is fine but since this is TES most players just screw around and spend lots of hours just exploring/doing minor stuff. In that case you will notice the voice acting, there′s a lot of repetition and in some cases it′s just plain bad.
I approve the effort of giving it a "northern" feel but the accent in guards/bandits/etc. is horrible, even if it′s kinda funny at first. Hearing Arnold every 2 secs gets old really fast.

They should′ve got a couple of extra voice actors for those minor roles. One thing that I found odd was in the demo that was shown before the game release at E3 or something, when he reached Riverwood and talked to the blacksmith he had a diferent voice from the actual release, (Same voice as Ralof now I think) and some of the other residents there also had different voices and it was pretty nice IMO...now when you get there everyone has the same Arnold accent and similar voice. I know they probably were placeholders but still they sound better in the demo than on actual release.

Perhaps you are missing the point here: its a videogame,not a movie...and we are talkin' of professionals; probably Bethesda and other studios thinks that its better to have a bunch of them specialized in videogames/movie dubbing do the work than the first dumb-ass with a rasping voice... even for the "general" guards.

If we talk of invest in a better way the budget for the dubbing actors,perhaps abandoning the "fashion" of hiring great actors for the main characters and take more professionals even for the secondary roles..well,this could be a great idea to add more "immersion" and i agree (even if having 20 more voices that says the "arrow in the knee" joke for the 500th time don't change nothing for me sincerely )

But this is a work (dubbing) and require years of study and practice ( other than a "good" voice of course) we are talkin' of people specialized in videogame dubbing,that have a contract,a trade union,taxes to pay and even kids to feed sometimes

In short,you can't hire the first guy that you see in the street to do a professional job in a great entertainment product like this,sorry.

70 voice actors for Skyrim doesn't mean 7 per race. If every race did get 6 voice actors minimum then it would be really awesome, even four is cool. But rest of the cast are only voicing individual characters(with minor overlapping).

In Morrowind, most actors voice 2 races with only one actor voicing 3 races. In Oblivion, that's 3 with one actor(same one) voicing 4 races. Yes: shockingly, Oblivion has less voice actors for different races. Morrowind doesn't assign same actor duo to more than one race but in Oblivion one duo voices 3 races, one duo 2 races, another again 2 races. This is an insane overlapping, that's underestimating players' perceptions.

Funny how Oblivion actually got worse. It is worse plus the burden of full voice acting left uncompensated. Double facepalm worthy.

Skyrim has no overlap(off course except within the same race). But still follows 2 per race formula(Except Nords), male and female. We still can't talk about diversity here.

An improvement over Oblivion but I think full voice acting change is still uncompensated. Morrowind has very limited voiced dialog, one fifth of Skyrim, maybe even less and voice actors are only doubled from Morrowind. So it can be seen as under the Morrowind standards.

Sources:
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Voice_Actors
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Voice_Actors
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Voice_Actors

I think that some of you here are overrating the importance of dubbing in a videogame like this.

However,there is a budget, and someone have the task to choice how and where to invest it; if HE would have chosen 500 professionals actors instead of the great Cristopher Plummer and MAx Von Sidow perhaps instead of this topic now we would have a thread with dozens of complaint about the lack of "great actors" involved in the game

I can't identify the voice used in the first Skyrim trailer for the fus-ro-dah... is it still in the game, and whose voice was it?

Skyrim took over five years to make. That's a lot of effort and a long time for a game to be made on the cheap. Dubbing is very important - you may like the Pokemon-style text dialogue, but it doesn't convey emotion and feeling like voice actors do. And voice acting isn't as easy as picking up a microphone and speaking into it. Trust me, I've tried before - obviously not for something like Skyrim, but I can still acknowledge that it's difficult.

Did I ever say pull some guy off the street and use him??? No I said use what talent bethesda has and add some more voices to the game. (although its a mute point for this game but future games have potential). I just think most people who read are not reading the topic of the post. EMPLOYEES OF BETHESDA not random guys off the street. Im sorry if people don't think it would work, but even if it was just a normal day to day voice it would be better than hearing the same guy spout the same lines in 9 different cities.

Because If I was working on a game and I had some kind of normal voice then, I would want to make it better. Even if I only said 2 lines it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to portray some emotion.

Yep, actually voice acting can be a lot more difficult than screen acting.

Esbern. He sounds a lot different in game than in the trailer.

I've heard from the mouths of actors like Malcolm McDowell who have stated that voicework is far harder than any other type of acting. Stage acting is likely considered easier than voice acting, and that is no where near the classification of being easy. But of course I've heard people say that level design is a very hard aspect of game design to master, yet I don't seem to have too much trouble with that, at least when it comes down to using the CK. I think it really just depends on how good you are in that particular field more than anything. For example, you could probably have a person who is highly talented as a voice actor, but not be very good at normal "physical acting." Also, take a look at a lot of those people who start off being great in one thing, but move on to be terrible in everything else. There's a lot of that in existence.

Oh yes, I'd also like to add that they really can't use just anyone as a voice over, otherwise they might get in big trouble with the acting guilds. You do NOT want to mess with unions, not that I'm saying the existence of unions is a bad thing of course, but they're there for a very good reason.

69 of those are Jason marsden

Jaden, hey! I'm stuck! Can you help? Jaden, see if you can make your way around there. Maybe you can use your lightsaber to cut those trees down and make a bridge.

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Not really. What takes up the large majority of disc space is animations, and because skyrim has no cutscenes, it doesn't have many animations compared to other games. This is why LANoire took three discs yet it was a normal length game, buy Skyrim can handle one, even though there is much more content
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Of the entire topic the only thing i find myself not familiar with is the unions. I hope that future ES games implements more...I really think it would make a difference in gameplay.

I think voice acting just svcks period. Even if you hired 1000 great actors, it wouldn't be enough for it not to seem repetitive. Written text is thew way to go. People are too lazy to read now, though.

As I said earlier, text-based dialogue offers us NO emotion. More than once I've been taken out of context on these forums, simply because you can't put enough emotion into type. Novels can pull this off through details outside of dialogue, but this is not an option for Skyrim or TES as a series. No, text-based dialogue would be a HUGE step backwards.