it would help the game immersion to hear my own voice. Maybe is it to save space on the disks?

No, it's because there would be people who hate the voices, and they could only have a select amount of voice options.

Because there are 10 playable races of both genders. Cost and disc space requirements would be insane.

Too much memory, would destroy the series if implemented and Skyrim is a 1st person narrative type RPG. Voice over would work in a 3rd person narrative type RPG like Witcher or Mass Effect but not in the elder scrolls.

Not possible. The goal of Skyrim is to create your own character and see the world through him. Voice is one of those stuff that clearly defines a character, and it greatly limits your imagination

He/she does speak...when you shout

Having one or two generic sentences read aloud to you in ridiculous accents would be fairly, ah, zany.
The cost of the VA would be massive.

Yeah, and i seem to remember people complaining about even that before release.

Yea like the way I hate the voice of ever child actor in the game. Somehow I got past that. I never really understood the whole voiceless character bit though. Certain games do it I guess so the player can hear their own voice in the dialogue choices. That's my feeling as to why they do it this way. Well either that or it just saves them a lot of money having to hire voice actors for all that extra dialogue in all the different dialects.

Other games have player character voices and nobody gets upset about it or complains about the actor's voice. I'm sure someone is never happy with the actor chosen for a character but there's certainly no uproar about it on any forum I've ever visited where the main character had a voice.

This.

Plus people are roleplaying and want to imagine either their own voice or a voice that fits their character.

The PC is already defined for you to a greater degree in those types of games, imposing more limits on character creation. Todd Howard keeps saying TES is about being whoever you want to be, and such design decisions counter that vision.

No, it wouldn't.

I hate voice acting with a burning passion. VA means fewer dialogue options, less control over my character, limited role-playing, unwanted features imposed on me. VA means more money spent on something I don't want, means less money and time spent on creating actual content.

VA is acceptable only if I'm playing an already established character - e.g. The Witcher. In TES I want complete freedom, therefore no voice acting.

I would prefer to have a voice for any race and gender, but I would happily accept 2 voices only (one for male and one for female characters, to save costs and disk space) rather then having a character without voice... but apparently it's only me

Because players have imagination.

I've complained a lot about voiced characters.

For some reason, I can not stand to hear maleShepard's voice. It isn't exactly the voice actor; I like other characters he's done. But for whatever reason Shepard irritates me to the point of never playing a maleShepard. I started ME and picked the default maleShep. Poor guy never made it off the Normandy. His voice bothered me that much. And I've run through ME/ME2 multiple times; of over a dozen Shepards, not a single one is maleShep because of the voice. If femShep wasn't Jen Hale, I wouldn't have bothered with the games at all. [And yes, I watched youtube to check the voices before I considered getting the game.]

When DA2 was announced and they finally revealed the voice actors it sealed the decision I'd made to not get the game. I was already heavily leaning towards not getting it due to other factors, but the voices finished the deal for me. MaleHawk opened his mouth and all I heard was the wedding crashing rapist Vaughn from DA:O, FemHawke wasn't that great to me either. Even though the game is now like $4.99 I still haven't bothered with it.

You might have missed it, but there was a lot of uproar over Meers and Hale being Shepard. Both sides had their own viewpoints, and calm discussion wasn't really happening.

When I create a character, I get to create the voice as well. Hearing a voice that doesn't fit the character I created does more to ruin a game than just about anything else.

The voiced protagonist in DA2 was just about the only decision I agreed with in that *ahem* game, but it fits with the extreme railroaded and constrictive narrative.

It wouldn't blend at all with Skyrim.

Meh. We'd probably get stuck with the guy who does the voice of Mercer Frey and about 20 other male characters in the game. That dude must have worked for cheap because they used him a lot. It probably had to do with his complete lack of versatility.

Also, the limited sounds my female orc character makes are gruesome as is. When taking an arrow she sounds like a tranny getting kicked in the nards. To be saddled with having to hear that voice speak actual lines would make the character unplayable.

Unless there was some easy to way seamlessly incorporate about 20 voice choices each for female and male characters, it should be left as is.

Disc space was not an issue. The DVD is only half full as it is!

Wouldn't it be annoying if you selected somehting like "Let's go over here" and then you heard a voice saying "hey, let's go over here." Wouldn't taht get really redundent over a while, because it would be the same dialoug twice. MAss effect convo wheel and heavy rain were the only two systems to get this right.

Though I understand the reasons behind not voicing all the player characters dialogue, some more utterances would be nice in open gameplay. We already get the breathings, the ouches and the cries of effort when doing a power attack. Then there's the whole shout repetoire - so there is a bit of noise coming out of the player character.

Just a line here and there would make the character a bit more lifelike. "Take that you brute!" It works well in GTA IV - when you run someone over, "I hope you have health insurance!" Niko would say.

They were going to include player character voices, but Gilbert Godfrey wouldn't take the job and being the perfectionists they are the devs decided it would be better to have no voice at all then to have to settle for someone else.

Dear god no, I dont want this turning into Dragon Age 2

Leave voices to Bioware.

Listen to the male voice acting for Shep in Mass Effect 2-3. It's absolutely atrocious and annoying.

Dragon Age 2 also has insultingly bad "Hawke" voice acting. Also, the main character MUST BE NAMED HAWKE!!! ROFL do you really want that amount of cheesy BS in Skyrim?

I think people would view that in the same way as kill cams.

I know the feeling. I could barely stand the sounds a Breton makes when being hit in Morrowind. It was something so trivial, and not even heard very often, but it just made me cringe.

The PC in Knights of the Old Republic. I always wondered why he never said anything, except things like cycling through character selection, or when you pick locks. I never put two and two together with the "force visions." But then when I got to the revelation. I was like "so thats why neither of them speak." But the voice in general was just dull.

Aerie in Baldur's Gate 2? One of the worst VA jobs I've ever heard. Granted I havent owned a ton of games over the years. But she was just unbelievably annoying and whiny. A lot of people agreed with me on this one, and didnt like her for the choice of narrator of Icewind Dale 2. Now the narrator of IWD? Nice job. And great twist at the end. I still cant stand Kath Soucie, and she seems to have a very limited range. The BG and IWD series in general, the majority of the dialouge was text based, except with characters who had larger rolls. If you talk to a townsperson or a traveler, they might say their first line, but the rest of it was all text that you would have to read. But Sarevok or Irenicus? All spoken. And Kevin Michael Richardson and David Warner both did amazing jobs. Some of the best voice acting I've ever heard.

As to the PC in BG, and the parties in IWD. There was a limited selection of voices for your characters. IWD had more choices, since you create all the party members. It even had a few class specific voices, like thief sets having lines about using stealth, or mages talking about fire and lightning. But again, the number of lines was somewhat limited. Character selection and action confirmation, combat taunts, badly injured, and so on. Conversations with townspeople didnt even have the first line spoken. Interactions between party members had the first line from each character spoken, but the rest was text.