Don't get me wrong, I love this game, but, why, Bethesda, would you hire, for example, Farengar's voice actor.

"OH-YES-I-COULD-USE-SOMEONE-TO-FETCH-SOMETHING-FOR-ME"

That line makes him sound more like a simulated voice program (ie Microsoft Sam) then a live human being putting life into his role. I think in all of the game, the only good voice actors were:

Whiterun Jarl
General Tullius
Ulfric

And that's all I can think of. I need to ask; why do you hire such inexperienced/bad voice actors?

/rant

If you've got the APTitUDE YoU should join the mage's COLLege in WINterHOLD

At least they didn't rehire Sunny Smiles....OMG, I wanted to eat a bullet!

Yeah, Farengar was not one of the better ones. They're not all terrible, though.

I'm not bothered by it. I've met people irl that have worse.

Never did play what I assume to be Fallout?

Is she as bad a Farengar?

That would be FONV and by far the worst in all of gamesas or Obsidian. Followed closely by Three Dog. Well TD was just the most annoying in all of the lot.

EDIT : She sounded like a 6yr old reading a bedtime story.

I don' blame the voice actors, all they are doing is voicing the lines they are given. Bethesda are the ones that are writning it all, and it's a bit subpar at that. You can have the best voice actors in the world, but if you've got crappy writing, the acting can't make up for that.

Voice acting is fine. There have been far worse in the history of gaming

None of the voice actors even come close to Terence Stamp.

While I do agree with you about the quality of the lines. Or lack of quality, i should say. I see it as the opposite. If the actor is bad then all is lost. A good actor can still pass some very believable lines despite the actual verbiage. But a bad actor is just...Sunny Smiles.

I won't argue about Sunny Smiles, that was a bit painful to listen to.

"Get on over to that campfire now...Give it a try." *pulls back hammer and places barrel in mouth*
She got that job on the casting couch. After my second char, the tutorial was muted.

As far as Farengar, he reminds me of a pizza delivery guy, for some reason. It's like landed the part from being one of the dev's cousin or something. I can't place that accent but he sounds like a he is in his second year of speech therapy.

The weird part is how they don't use the voice actors to their full potential - Take Steven Russell, the guy who voices Mercer Frey, Belethor, many Dark Elves and some others. In all of Skyrim he only uses one voice (one similar but not quite the same as Garrett from Thief, in which he voiced at least a quarter of the cast). He also voiced Harold in Fallout 3 and if you know of his other works many other characters - yet his other voices never appear.

Why not put their voice actors' talents to full use? Russell could have given at least 3 different voices for NPCs to share and this would have cost Bethesda far less than hiring 2 new voice actors. If each of their 70ish actors all did 3 or 4 voices then the variety would have increased massively. And they would be able to use the worse sounding voice actors less.

Admittedly material in some cases could also be better.

EDIT: Actually Russell does voice Clavicus and Barbas, but this is still way less voices than he is capable of and he could have done some extra ones for other NPCs rather than create a million Garrett clones.

On the one hand I was pleased that Bethesda hired a greater number of actors for Skyrim than they did for Oblivion. On the other hand I felt, overall, that the quality of acting was a little worse. It's as though they had the same budget for voice acting in both games and were forced to hire cheaper actors for Skyrim in order to hire more of them.

To be honest I think Farengar is the only bad voice in the game.

And people blamed the celebrity voice actors for Oblivion's problems (Well, there are a couple in here, depending on how much of a celebrity you consider Max von Sydow to be). I thought Sean Bean in particular was pretty good... then again, Sean Bean could read the tax code in a monotone and I'd be enthralled, so that's not a very good objective measurment. And, of course, there's Wes Johnson clearly having fun with his job.

To be fair, though, Skyrim's voice acting has its decent moments; unfortunately, like all the voiced Elder Scrolls games it suffers from repetition over and over so much you want to shove an arrow in your knee ear to make it stop. I'm just disappointed that the voice actress for the female Dunmer (Linda Kenyon) apparently didn't return, though the new one is at least fairly close.

Arngir wasn't well voiced? Esbern?

Sunny smiles, doc Mitchell, for some reason most of good springs voice acting was just bad..as for Farengar he is very awkward soinding

Sunny smiles, doc Mitchell, for some reason most of good springs voice acting was just bad..as for Farengar he is very awkward sounding....sorry about the double post..I'm on my phone

IT SEEMS THIS DAMnablE CONFFFFFFFFFFFLICT HAS clAIMED EVERYONES PAssIONS OF LATE

He's also Barbas which is an entirely different voice. I'd say they used his range quite a bit. Still can't get over the fact that he's Mister Gutsy man.

Another one I get a kick out of is Galmar playing Septimus and also the Nord hero Felldir. Good range there, as well.

I don't know what everyone's problem is with Farengar. He's supposed to be a nerdy guy and sort of wrapped up in his own world. Sounds fine to me. *shrug*

How could I forget them. Yes, Iiked them.

And now that someone mentioned it, I did like Mercer Frey and Belethor.

It's the way he says his lines, like he's just reading them and putting random emphasis on things without actually trying to act. Like he's bored almost. Also, to me, he sounds as if he's trying to fake an accent by speaking through his nose.