Obsidian Entertainment’s upcoming first-person RPG Avowed is one of the most hotly anticipated titles for the Xbox Series X. The visuals in the teaser trailer quickly drew attention for their similarities to the Elder Scrolls series, and after Bethesda’s recent disappointments, many fans are hoping the new game could be Obsidian's answer to Skyrim.
One frequent criticism of Skyrim is the limited number of voice actors in the game, which causes a lot of overlap and repetition which some players find immersion-breaking. However, Avowed should not remedy this by trying to making every voice in their game unique. In fact, Skyrim’s voice actor problem, if handled correctly, could be turned into one of Avowed’s biggest strengths.
The Downside of Vocal Variety
Skyrim, like Oblivion before it, has a relatively limited amount of voice actors for how many NPCs are in the game. Many of the lines were categorized by tone and personality, but as a result players who put more and more hours into Skyrim generally begin to see more and more repetition, which can make the game less immersive the more they play.
However, there is one huge advantage to having such a limited number of voice actors and having recorded the lines primarily by personality type rather than by character for the vast majority of Skyrim’s NPCs. The limited number of voice actors in Skyrim gave the modding community huge flexibility when it came to expanding the amount of lines available in the game, not only for the NPCs, but for the players themselves.
For example, the voice used for Sven in Riverwood is also used for many of the male bards across Skyrim as well as other characters in the world. Individuals like Sven also have lines which are specific to their characters and the quests the Dragonborn can activate speaking to them which are not available to other NPCs with the same voice.
However, by mixing and mashing these audio files, the Skyrim modding community has been able to massively expand the number of things the player character can ask NPCs and the responses they are able to give. A unique line about disliking elves that was originally just meant for Sven’s disdain for his rival Faendal can be repurposed for a character with the same voice living in Windhelm, for example, and the line takes on an entirely new and immersive context due to the marginalized Dark Elf population in that city.
The time played between repeated lines makes line repetition no less noticeable than the reused voice actors to begin with. Some mods have also been able to add a huge amount of additional NPCs into the game that completely fit in simply by recycling lines that the same voice actor recorded across multiple characters, and remixing them to give the new Skyrim NPCs their own unique personalities.
Giving Avowed a Voice
Avowed should have a relatively limited number of voice actors in order to make the game more accessible to the modding community. However, there is one big issue with Skyrim’s voice acting that does need to be avoided. The real issue with Skyrim’s voice acting is not the lack of variety, but the lack of consistency.
There are characters in Skyrim who grew up in the same village and even the same family and yet some of them sound Scandinavian while others sound American. The lack of variety in the voices among the Khajiit and the Argonians is far less noticeable than the lack of consistency among the Nord characters’ accents, for example, because the Khajiit and Argonian voices are more consistent and can be hand-waved as their accents. If only the Imperials spoke with a few different American accents while the Nords spoke with a few Scandinavian ones, the repetition would be less immersion breaking despite having the same number of voice actors.
Avowed needs to have a limited amount of voice actors in order to encourage the modding community, but also needs to make sure that the voices are used consistently among the various races of Avowed. This will make the game accessible to modders while avoiding the immersion-breaking accent inconsistency of Skyrim. If Obsidian does this correctly, Avowed might just be able to achieve the same longevity as Skyrim and step out from under its sizable shadow.
Avowed is in development for PC and Xbox Series X.