If Skyrim's voice actors are so "Diverse" and "varied", why do I hear 30 nords that sound like Popeye Vogelsang?

The voices do seem to be pretty repetitive, I mean there are only like two voices for the entire Khajiit species.

There are more voice actors but it certainly wasn't enough.

Even twice the amount wouldn't have been enough in my opinion.

I'm just glad they added alot more, it's alot better then oblivion! Would it be cool if everyone had a unique voice actor/actress? Yes but there are good reasons why they didn't

They hired 90 voice actors, for 120 characters. The repetition is probably just the fact that you notice similar voices more often than you notice the diversity.

Back in the op oblivion days there were only 12. Be thankful and stop complaining.

/boggle

I swear that's the number they have now.

I think a lot of those voice actors do voices for bandits and such. Hence you rarely hear them in regular conversation.

Cutting aside the "Special guest" voice actors who voice important characters (Ulfric, Tullius, etc.), you really don't have that many for the generic population. And many of the voices don't even fit the races. (Avrusa Sarethi, for instance.)

This

This guy knows!

You know, "be grateful and stop complaining" is not the best possible response to comments about products that people are paying for. :$ There's room for recognition of improvement, but that doesn't negate the fact that I hear Alvor everywhere I go, and he has severe Dissociative Identity Disorder.

I wonder if there's any correlation between more voice actors and shorter, less interesting quests?

While it is slightly better then Oblivion, and i mean slightly, it still isnt enough... Maybe instead of hiring famous people, they should have hired proper voice actors who can do more then 1 voice......

Thats because they are the voice of Popeye Vogelsang.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Voice_Actors

Maybe instead of hiring famous actors to only do 1 voice that you barely hear through the game, they should have invested more of the money into voice actors that can do multiple different voices, and well.

I became a big fan of Popeye V in Skyrim; he's got a great voice and it fit perfectly. I became a big fan of Jason Marsden in Fallout New Vegas and was happy that he's in Skyrim too. His voice is very different in both roles. I'm good with the voice acting. Another favorite is Christopher Plummer as Arngeir. It's just a great character and he sounds so natural. I'm also a big fan of the best actors playing the main parts...people with a long career of acting and who know what they're doing. They know how to make you feel what they're saying.

Thank you, smart-alic. That's why I said that.

They didn't need to invest money to do that, the majority of their cast could of handeled that, the issue is the script writers and designers. They write "male nord 1" and do a whole bunch of different dialogue all attached to that one voice type. So the actors won't be reading each character one at a time, they are basically reading random lines from multiple characters, thus they have to do the same voice for each line. It lets the designers use multiple lines over and over again for different characters.

The reason the designers do this, is because they are in part lazy (more work, and more coin needed for actors) and in another part probably trying to conserve file size (especially for consoles).

You can really see how bad it is if you go to Windhelm for the first time, and meet the two identically voiced Nords harassing a Dunmer woman.

Hiring famous actors with no range of voices is indeed a ridiculous waste of money. If they just want to fix easy issues they shouldn't have had multiple voice actors record identical lines. The dialogue is repetitive enough without the different voices saying exactly the same things when they bump into you.

Definitely hear Boon in there. Must have got bored waiting around in Novac.

I'll never join the Stormcloacks simply because i can't stand the accents for nordic guards.

Well maybe they shouldn't even try anymore and do no voices at all, imagination is better

(the sad thing is people are going to take this seriously and say THIS!!!1)

Poor management.

Basically....
Take New Vegas for example. Unique, important NPCs got unique, often higher quality voice actors to voice them, whereas nameless, anonymous NPCs got normal voice actors that would repeat.

Skyrim thought that was a pretty good formula, so Skyrim took it too.
The problem? Unique and important NPCs in New Vegas often offer 20-40 minutes of conversation material (in one sitting), unique and important NPCs in Skyrim only offer 2-5 minutes of conversation material. Molag Bal for example has a unique voice actor, but you're really only going to hear him for his brief quest, then you never hear him again. Even NPCs you can repeatedly visit like Ulfric and Delphine don't have a whole lot to say; not much more than Farkas or J'Zargo.

The formula simply doesn't work for Skyrim, but they failed to realize that. So while there ARE unique voice actors, their appearances are VERY brief.

That is so dumb, why on earth do they have one actor playing 62 different Nord males, and then another guy who is only playing 1 (Torsten Cruel-Sea doesn't even have very many lines). The least they could have done was split the lines between the different actors. As it stands right now, the repetition of the same voice on different characters is almost as unbearable as Oblivion, and sometimes even worse, as some of the VA in Skyrim can't seem to deliver their lines properly.

*cough* Farengar *Cough*