Voices: “Have we met before...?”
One of the truly impressive things about Oblivion is the huge number of NPC's, who, rather than just standing around in one particular location all day, or doing nothing but minding a shop, actually go places and do things according to routines that sometimes change depending of the day of the week. Not only that, but you can interact with pretty much all of them, by engaging them in conversation (or by attacking or pickpocketing them or even drinking their blood, if you're a vampire). Moreover, unlike a lot of RPG's, more-or-less every single NPC that you can engage in conversation (you can't speak to hostile NPC's like Bandits and Marauders) usually has several lines of spoken dialogue they can give in response to topics you raise with them. This is pretty impressive. In a lot of RPG's, an NPC's responses may be limited to written dialogue, or you may not be able to engage them in conversation per se, rather they simply give a single spoken line response if you try to activate them, so it's quite impressive that almost every NPC in Oblivion can actually converse with the player... after a fashion. Of course, while this is very impressive, it's not without its problems. For instance, there are a lot of lines of stock dialogue, which you'll find repeated ad nauseum as you speak to more and more characters about generic conversation topics. But this isn't terribly objectionable, since many characters do, in fact, have unique lines of dialogue, despite having no relation whatsoever, at any time, to any particular quest, and these can often be quite amusing. No, the real problem with almost every character having spoken dialogue in Oblivion is the painfully narrow range of voices used for regular NPC's throughout the game.
As I've already mentioned, there are ten playable races in Oblivion; there are four races of Men, three races of Elves, as well as Orcs, Khajiits, and Argonians, and exactly eleven different voices you will hear from NPC's throughout most of the game. With the exception of the three characters played by major celebrities (Patrick Stewart, Sean Bean, and Terrance Stamp), more-or-less every NPC of a given race and gender will have exactly the same voice. And most of the races don't even have voices unique to themselves; only Redguards do, whereas all three races of Elves sound the same as each other, Orcs and Nords sound the same, as do Khajiits and Argonians, and while Imperial and Breton males have a unique voice, Imperial and Breton women sound the same. For the most part, the only exceptions to this are the occasional important NPC, like, for instance, Lucien Lachance, who, despite being an Imperial male with the exact same voice actor as every other Imperial male, actually has a reasonably unique voice. In the game's only expansion pack, The Shivering Isles, there are a few NPC's with somewhat more unique voices (indeed, Lord Sheogorath's chamberlain, Haskill has his own unique voice actor), but it would have been nice if the same bit of extra effort had gone into the main game too.
One of the truly jarring examples of this re-use of voices in Oblivion involves the characters Jauffre and Vicente Valtieri. These two characters could not be more different. Jauffre is the Grandmaster of the Blades, an ancient order sworn to protect the Emperor and uphold peace and justice in Tamriel; he is wise, kind, and friendly and, assuming you follow the main quest, will guide the player character's efforts to save Tamriel from invasion by the evil Daedric Prince of Destruction, Mehrunes Dagon. Vicente Valtieri, on the other hand, is a vampire and a member of the shadowy assassins guild known as the Dark Brotherhood, who delight in murdering people for the sake of their “Dread Father”, Sithis (and for considerable profit too). And yet, both Jauffre and Valtieri sound exactly the same, simply because they're both Bretons. Of course, I don't expect there to be no two characters that sound alike in a videogame as big as Oblivion, but it would have been really nice if just a little bit of extra effort had gone into the voice work to give a bit more uniqueness than there actually is. Would that really have been so difficult for there to be quest-related characters with unique lines of dialogue?
While I'm on the subject of voice acting in Oblivion, while it's not terrible, it can be a little mediocre sometimes. The way some lines are delivered seems to suggest to me that the voice actors hadn't always been properly briefed on what kind of emotion they were supposed to be putting into their lines (this can be especially true of the voice actor who provided the female Elf voice, I find), whereas some of the voice acting is generally pretty good (the male Elf springs to mind), and some of it is hilariously over-the-top (the Imperial male... and the Elf male sometimes). And, of course, the work done by Patrick Stewart, who plays Emperor Uriel Septim VII, Sean Bean, who plays the Emperor's illegitimate son, Martin, and Terrance Stamp, who plays one of the main quest's principle antagonists, Mankar Camoran, is very good, but it can be weird to hear such unique voices in a game where so many characters sound identical to each other.
No comments:
Post a Comment