Hello!

This game is notorious for its god awful voice acting. Patrick Stewart is really good but the others not so much. When I found out that Lynda Carter did the voice overs for the female orcs, I was actually surprised. She's a veteran actress, and I think her lines should've been better.

Do you think she didn't care because it was a video game? Maybe she was out of her element? I remember listening to an interview with Jennifer Hale - regarding her role in Mass Effect. She said when she did the voice acting, she was alone in a room, and that she would've been more effective if she was working off other actor's lines.

Thanks for replying.

That's probably one reason... having to record the lines out of context and without other character's lines to work off (let's not forget that most NPC lines are reactions to things the player says, which are not voiced at all) makes it probably difficult, especially if the voice actor is not familiar with the franchise, genre or possibly video games in general, and maybe doesn't even understand what he or she is saying.

But really, if you thought Oblivion's ENGLISH voice acting was bad, you should hear the German version. ;) But the translation was completely messed up, anyway, including all written text (like item names which had to be abbreviated because the translation turned out to be too long for the inventory menu to display - only that fans managed to fix this with mods, so why couldn't the people who translated it do it?). Anyway, I've stopped playing the German version after one hour and never played any Elder Scrolls or Bethesda games in German again since then. So yeah, in comparison, the voice acting in the English version is really not that bad. ;)

If bad acting is that pervasive, it's probably the director. A good director can even get inexperienced actors to sound decent. I've seen plenty of cartoons voiced by experienced, well-regarded actors that sucked at voice acting. It's the director's job to fix that problem. The director should know, and relay to the actor, the context, and should hear when the actor is "doing it wrong" and correct it. In summary: if an actor is good, it's probably the actor, and if everyone else is bad, it's probably the director (or the use of cheap non-actors/newbies, as some games tend to do). I really doubt that FemShep could've been any more awesome. People who concentrate on voice acting just don't seem to have that much of a problem getting it right.

You might be on something with the directing. I remember reading an interview with Craig Sechler (who voices half the elves in Oblivion). Apparently, he didn't realize he as voicing the entire race until he was halfway through recording his lines (apparently the director gave him all his lines as one character).

Both Sechler and Carter are definitely better in Skyrim (possibly due to having a better director).