There is no excuse for this. At all. Watch the video below, I've included links at the relevant time stamps. For those that don't recognize it (as I suspect many will not) this is literally the first few minutes of gameplay of Baldur's Gate 2. Within the first few minutes we get *five* different and distinct accents, which is pretty much more than exists in the entirety of BG 3 EA.
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About 5 minutes worth of gameplay. Already more audible diversity than all of BG 3. There is no excuse for BG 3, made 20 years later and with access to phenomenally greater resources, to have the same voices for characters from entirely different backgrounds, races, and planes of existence. Heck the voice actor for Astarion (Neil Newbon) did a Russian accent for a recent Resident Evil game, so it clearly isn't a technically issue. This is a design issue.
I suppose "it depends". It's easy for me to say that the accents in the game all sound very different: a Scouser and Cockney sound as different to me as a Scouser and an American, but I am aware that I'm kinda doing the same thing because even as a non-American (well, an eighth, but that doesn't count as I've never lived there and genetics don't know accents!) I can tell there's a difference between e.g. Texas, West Coast, East Coast and The Bit In The Middle; I can tell there's differences even amongst NYC accents. But to some degree it's a matter of perspective.
My opinion is that there are risks with trying too hard to make accents sound different. Sometimes it works, and Dragon Age mostly did I think (although ISTR they came in for some criticism for the French accent sounding fake: not the one by the Englishwoman doing Cassandra but Leliana, voiced by the actually French Corinne Kempa. And I think Larian got bitten slightly by the American-ish accented Mazola or Midori or whatever she was called in DOS. I suppose there are degrees of (un)subtlety.
You are obviously a person of good tastes and breeding. Naive, perhaps, but of of good taste. Some British accents sound harsh and/or odd even to other native British people. They conjure up certain stereotypes; 'Brummies' (from Birmingham and the wider Black Country) are seen as slow, friendly and slightly thick, 'Geordies' and 'Mackems' (North-East, Newcastle and Sunderland) are drunken party-animals, West-Country (Wiltshire and the South-West) are slow, backward yokels who get drunk on cider and chew straw. I speak as one whose accent is generally fairly RP, but reverts to West Country when I have a drink or two.
Oh, look, don't group us in with the Mackems: Geordies are often considered to have friendly-sounding accents whereas Mackems are total hooligans. They also sound completely different, hence the Newcastle supporters at the local (un)friendlies yelling "whose keys are these?" at the Sunderland types ("whose", "keys" and "these" all rhyme in Sunderland land).
RP (received pronunciation), by the way, is the classic old black-and-white BBC newsreader English accent, and is often regarded as being 'posh' even though it is really not. It is, rather a deliberate non-accented way of speech.
It's been replaced by Estuary now. While the old RP might've sounded a bit stuffy it's at the point where I wouldn't be surprised if the typical BBC newsreader finished every sentence with "innit".
I find it funny how often I've seen the goblins described as having "posh" accents. Yeah, they sound British, but they sound like gritty thugs. lol I think it gives them a lot of character.
If those goblins are posh, I hate to think what the social position of the rest of us is.
Yeah. The goblins sound more like the Kray Twins' henchmen. Definitely not posh.
Just to make it absolutely clear, Astaron's accent IS British and not Transatlantic whatsoever.
He could almost be voiced by Leslie Phillips.
