I also wouldn't really call Skyrim's voice acting top notch....

Best gaming story I played in the last 5 years.

For the amount of text it's not that bad, I never got torn out of the experience by it. Heavy Rain had worse voice acting and that game was basically a movie with quick time events.

Xbox. And I bought it late deliberately so that I could wait for all of the patches... didn't help.


Well, some of it is really good. Then some of it is really bad (like that Mjoll chick). Overall, I think it's pretty good. But you can only do so much in an open world game. Scripted linear games don't have an excuse for sometimes good/sometimes bad voice acting. I think Skyrim does a better overall job than the likes of Deus Ex: Human Revolution (one of the games that doesn't have an excuse).

Some of the random dialogue for people can be a tad annoying, but a big part of that is simply lack of variety. Hearing ANYTHING five zillion times will get annoying. Yes, I know you don't claim, to be the best blacksmith in Whiterun, I know that you're SWWWWOOOOORN to carry my burdens, and I know that you call these things "treasures", but I got it the first thousand times, thanks.

But I don't know how much they can fix that. Vendors could have like five different greetings or something, but given how much time people spend with their companions, you're gonna get a lot of repetitions from them regardless. Even if Lydia had twenty different responses to "I need to swap some stuff with you" or whatever, even twenty responses will end up getting repeated enough to be annoying over the course of a game.

Some of it's awesome. Esbern, and so forth. Even the random people are pretty decent. The worst voice acting in Skyrim is better than the best in Oblivion, honestly, even though they got three decent voice actors for major parts in Oblivion. Still, they largely had terrible scripts, and even a good actor will struggle with a terrible script.

My only regret was that I was too young to fully enjoy Morrowind and never completed the main quest (well I did do Bloodmoon). I'm almost twenty now, but when I got Morrowind I'd say I was thirteen or fourteen, because that was around the same time Fable was out.

I genuinely do love Skyrim compared with Oblivion which I hated but the main gripe I have with both Oblivion and Skyrim is that neither of them feel as vast or intricate as Morrowind did. When I played Morrowind I never did the same thing twice because the whole game was so immense and everywhere had so much variety.

I just want that feeling back.

For some reason I can never take complainers with a yesterday join date seriously.I cant help but suspect that they are forum plants stirring up dissent.Im probably just paranoid.

I very strongly disagree. You really think Irileth and Farengar are better than Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean? I cringe whenever I have to go to Dragonsreach

Given the scale of these games, this might well be due to fast-traveling. Try not using fast travel, and use a mod to disable it if you aren't able to resist temptation. I've never had much desire to completely forgo fast travel, but walking from one city to another does help reinforce the sense of scale and distance.

No, I wouldn't call them young and dumb. I'd tell them to wait for the dlc expantions to be done with Skyrim. NV wouldn't be the same game without the dlcs. While it does make the communities of the Wasteland feel like real things with proper reactions to your actions, much more than Skyrim does, the towns just feel empty to me when you stop in for a visit. Especially Vegas, save for the first time you enter the strip.

In the end, all I'm trying to say is sometimes nostalgia runs a little thick here. Doesn't mean people can't take the goggles off and make a logical arguement. Doesn't mean I'm not talking out of my backside either. But I do think that the direction of TES is fine for what it is. Sure, I'd love to see the story improve. Hell, if they could come with a solid reason to explore EVERY dungion they create I'd probably drop dead then and there. But these games in the end are huge, and we are getting 200+ hours of single player content. Some will like the content, other's will prefure what came before. There will be no changing that.

And when the next TES comes out, we'll all be here again with the same worries and gripes. If that's a bad thing or not, well, isn't for me to say, cept all we can do is keep nagging on Beth to try and do better than what they're kicking out.

I made a topic about this a couple days ago...
Not gonna repeat myself, but basically the jist of it was....I think anyone who regularly works with languages or has a lot of multi-cultural friends who speak a foreign language primarily...we simply will NOT be able to take Skyrim's voice acting seriously AT ALL.
Why? Because Skyrim manages to break the most basic of language "rules." For example you either say "Poe-tay-toe" or "Poe-tat-oh;" you don't randomly switch between the two. People all have their own idiom and they stick to it.
The citizens of Skyrim lack an idiom in that one second they say "kom-raids" and the next they say "kom-rads." It comes off as completely comical, like a bunch of ignorant voice actors trying too hard to sound "foreign-y" when they themselves lack much experience with foreign cultures or languages.

Hey there, every game where you get introduced into the story by Cpt. Piccard has good voice acting.

I speak four languages and I never got the impression that Skyrim's VAs are immersion-breaking. The one guy that sounds a little bit like the Terminator is funny, but it didn't bother me really.

No, Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean are great in themselves, but the end result of their voice acting in Oblivion was terrible and flat. They were phoning it in, no question. I don't blame them, I blame the terrible scripts they were given.

I'm talking about the end result in these games' voice acting. Oblivion had a few great actors, but Skyrim's "celebrity" voice actors do a better job, because they're given a better script. The run-of-the-mill voice acting is, of course, incomparably better in Skyrim. Oblivion's no-name voice actors give me the impression that all of them were either (1) complete non-actors doing the voice acting as a favor to somebody at Bethesda, or (2) amateurs who do local theater on weekends, and think that hamming up their lines sounds good. Skyrim's non-name voice actors are far more believable than Oblivion's, and they get a better end result from their top-shelf voice actors.

Umm... look, I love Sean Bean. I'm a big fan of his. I loved him in everything he's done, obscure and mainstream: from "The Field" to "Patriot Games" to "Fellowship of the Ring". However, I was *extremely* disappointed in his job as Martin Septim. He put on the skaky "I'm a scared little wuss" voice too much and it got annoying for me. Patrick Stewart was awesome.

I don't have a problem with the voice acting other than the usually complaints that a few of the actors were forced to voice too many of the NPC's.

Well, granted. They might have done better with more actors speaking fewer parts apiece. I think they did it this way because the actors probably get paid by the day, not by the line. Might as well give them enough lines to fill up an eight-hour day of recording.

I'll only say that I agree with the OP.

And yet you preach this while responding to posts explaining WHY Skyrim falls short that provide FACTS and logical statements, and your response is "that's just nostalgia talking?"

If you want logical arguments, provide them.
The fact is that both Morrowind's and New Vegas' main storylines feel better written because they encompass more literary tools. Foreshadowing is a big one, which Skyrim completely lacks. Pacing is another, where New Vegas and Morrowind ease you into the plot, Skyrim says "get this stone, k thanks OH MY GOD UR JESUS" or "can you pick up those research notes for me? Thanks. Oh and btw grats: you're archmage." Skyrim's Thieves' Guild also isn't a plot, but rather one giant plot hole. Hell, Skyrim's Thieves' Guild deserves a Nobel Prize for managing to be the first story that actually has more plot holes than plot...it'd be impressive if it weren't so embarrassing.

Voice acting feels awkward (at least to some, probably to those with experience with languages) for the reason I mentioned above.

Game mechanics are weak. None of it feels tweaked or beta tested, but rather they just picked numbers that sounded good (start with 100 of each stat, increase by 20%). Light armor and Heavy armor are functionally the same 95% of the time, as are one-handed (without shield perks) and two-handed.


I could go on. None of this is nostalgia, it's basic compare and contrast.

Plus MW had pretty much only text dialog and I wouldn't say it suffered from it. Voice acting isn't the important part in a game, and nothing they should spend most of their budget on.

Skyrim needs a hardcoe mode like New Vegas.

I have to say, I pretty much agree with you.

We will never go back to text based dialogue but if they did, I wouldn't miss the voice acting so much, just because text dialogue allowed them to add depth and more background to the stories, but whatever, I've let that go.

At the risk of going off topic and enjoying a convo about languages and cultures, which?

Next time you play Skyrim, listen to a certain character and how they pronounce words. There's a lack of consistency in the pronounciation of words. English is fairly inconsistent with letter pronounciations, yes, but in my experience, english is more of a minority in that sense (latin languages, russian languages and germanic languages (save english obviously) have reliable rules and patterns to pronouncing words), and Skyrim takes it a step further. Even english has dialects where certain cultures tend to say words a certain way, but Skyrim will see this awkward, inconsistent pronounciation of sounds and letters. With people randomly pronouncing W's differently or forming their sentences with a different structure (like the guys in Sovngarde, but some characters not in Sovngarde occassionally form sentences like them; not super often, but it's there).

I like Skyrim, but I do want attributes back, ALOT more skill options(make axes, blades, and blunt weapons separate again please, and please bring back unarmored). More consequences, less two-dimensional quests, WAY more spells(bring back levitation please).

I like the perk system, but I would like to see it more fleshed out, with more options.

It would be cool if they went back to text for conversations. No one would be able to complain about voice acting, plus the money used to hire the actors good go into making the gameplay better.

But that will never happen.

^This, It's all about INSTANT awesomeness nowdays.

And yes, if the nord's are supposed to have an english accent like northern Europe, then it's not very good. I hate how general tullius pronounces "throne" in the beginning of the game (I have heard it a few times).