Bethesda has been holding back most of the details about The Elder Scrolls 6 ever since it was announced at E3 back in 2018. Despite Skyrim approaching its 10-year anniversary this November, fans are no closer to knowing the next game’s setting, story, or what key design changes may be coming to the next chapter in Bethesda’s flagship fantasy franchise.
Despite Skyrim’s success, there are undoubtedly many ways that The Elder Scrolls 6 could take the series’ formula to new heights, especially with multiple console generations having passed by in the decade since Skyrim’s release. There’s one trend with the games’ voice acting that has been increasingly established across the last two Elder Scrolls games, and which Bethesda needs to take to the next level in The Elder Scrolls 6 to make Tamriel more immersive than ever.
Full voice acting is a relatively recent addition to The Elder Scrolls. Most of Morrowind’s dialogue wasn’t voice acted, with The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion being the first game in the series to have almost every line voiced. This transition wasn’t without its issues.
Oblivion’s voice actors were given their lines in alphabetical order rather than by scene or character, giving them almost no chance to change up their performances for different characters. Because of this, not only are Oblivion’s voiced lines often delivered with a famously detached and frequently meme’d cadence, but lots of NPCs have identical voices.
For example, many of Oblivion‘s male guards, Redguard, Orcs, and Nords spoke with the same default deep voice. This led to a lot of generalization when portraying the many races of Tamriel. There’s no differentiation between Elven accents, for example, and those races which do have consistently applied accents like the Khajiit and the Argonians share voice actors.
Though Oblivion was a messy first foray into a fully-voiced Elder Scrolls game, Skyrim would improve on some of its key elements. Regional accents went a long way to diversifying the people of Tamriel as they appeared in Skyrim. The Dunmer were given faux-Cockney accents that helped distinguish the race, their history, and their societal position relative to the Received Pronunciation of the High Elves. Nords, at last, got accents based on real-life Northern European countries, including Scandinavian accents, Germanic accents, Irish accents, and even a Scottish accent for the Thieves Guild’s Brynjolf.
The distinction between the Khajiit and Argonian voices was also made more clear, with the Argonians losing the slight accent they had in Oblivion, instead talking with raspier American accents with a pronounced hiss. Much like Skyrim’s winding roads and steep mountains, the diversity of accents found in the game helped sustain the illusion that the relatively small map was in fact the size of a country, and contained people from all across a continent-spanning empire.
There were, however, missed opportunities with Skyrim‘s voice acting. For a start, there’s a clear distinction in Skyrim between the game’s “accented” voices and the generic British and American voices used for the other characters, which are applied with far less consistency. While accents like the new Dunmer and Altmer voices are generally kept within their race, other voices are used across many characters regardless of race.
There are no specific accents for the Bretons, the Redguard, or the Wood Elves in Skyrim either. Despite this, the Bretons and Redguard in particular have clear real-life cultural counterparts. Bretons are based largely on French culture, while the Redguard are a mix of Middle Eastern and African influences. In both cases, these races could make use of specific regional accents in The Elder Scrolls 6 to make Tamriel feel more diverse and therefore larger than it’s able to be rendered in-game.
Though there’s no single clear real-life cultural influence that provides a clear accent for the Wood Elves of Valenwood, they could fill a gap in the Elven accents established so far. Since Skyrim, the Dunmer have been given gruffer voices inspired by working-class urban English accents. The Altmer have been given increasingly haughty upper-class English accents in contrast. As just one example, the Wood Elves could have accents inspired by rural British accents from Welsh to the West Country, if Bethesda wants to diversify the Elves’ accents while keeping them from the same general area of the world.
While some accent choices are more obvious than others, ultimately the specific accents Bethesda chooses isn’t the most important thing. What’s most important is that by defining clear regional accents for the different races across Tamriel and sticking to them in-game with a few voice actors per gender and race, the world of The Elder Scrolls has the opportunity to feel more consistent and immersive. Brynjolf’s Scottish accent, for example, might make more sense and give some insight into his origins if all the Nords in Cyrodill’s northern County, Bruma, had been given Scottish accents as well.
Bethesda itself has demonstrated how effectively accents can be used for world-building and storytelling. At the start of Skyrim, the Nord accents of Ralof and Hadvar are used to distinguish them from Imperial leaders like General Tullius and the Captain who orders the player’s execution. The accents in Skyrim’s intro help the player understand which characters are Skyrim natives and which are Imperial administrators from abroad.
Skyrim’s intro shows the storytelling capacities of Tamriel’s accents when used effectively and consistently. A sole exception being the lines spoken by the auspiciously American-accented Nord child in Helgen, who is replied to by his Scandinavian-sounding father. Even breaking the rules can have storytelling uses, however. The American-accented Lokir, a Nord, has a voice which distinguishes himself from the Stormcloaks and makes him sound more like an Imperial, the very distinction the character himself attempts to make before fleeing and being taken down by Imperial archers.
After the intro, however, the accent rules of Skyrim’s world become far less consistently applied. The voice acting in The Elder Scrolls 6 should be organized to give the different races of Tamriel a few different voices per gender, and to give each race a specific and consistently applied accent or group of accents from a region of the world. This would even help overcome a common criticism of the series since Oblivion – the frequent repetition of voice actors.
With the same number of voice actors but more consistent accents, this criticism could be more easily handwaved – the characters who sound the same do so because they have similar accents. This is already shown to work with Skyrim’s Argonians and Khajiit, who despite having fewer voice actors don’t seem as repetitive as Skyrim’s default human and Elf voices because their accents are more consistently applied.
The Elder Scrolls 6 is in development.
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