I've seen quite a few threads where people complain that everyone has a British accent but, for me, I just love it. There's something about the different British accents that lend themselves so well to the fantasy setting. (And I just love the way they sound) And the voice acting is *phenomenal*. I haven't encountered a line with poor delivery yet.

It would be nice to see some more variety but I hope the voices stay dominantly British. I thought the Dragon Age games struck a good balance--most characters had British accents with a few others thrown in and dwarves had American accents.

I have to agree, it's a nice change, to me.

I thought a few of them seemed to be New Zealand.

Astarion's accent is Transatlantic....which is a manufactured American accent mostly associated with old money types.

Is it really? I actually had no idea--it sounded English to me. You learn something new everyday! Nevertheless, I like it.

Yeah, when it was manufactured they wanted an accent that vaguely sounded European. It is a deliberately designed prestige accent.

That's incredibly silly but also very fascinating. I recognize the accent now that you've pointed it out (Winchester in M*A*S*H speaks with it) but I never would have guessed that it was an intentionally manufactured accent to denote wealth. But this is the kind of accent variety (in games) that keeps things interesting. I'm hoping we get some more accents from around Europe. Welsh, Scottish, French, and German, in particular.

You'll also here it in the Malkavian mansion in Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, whenever you play the tapes left by the the owner of that place.

It really isn't. It is hyperbolic RP (Received Pronunciation); the vowel quality is way off in order to be Transatlantic. Listen to an actual Transatlantic accent; it only sounds vaguely similar. Obvious instances would be the way god(s) is pronounced; in transatlantic it would still be /gɑːdz/ but in Asteron's case it is obviously NOT that; he very clearly says /ɡɒdz/. There are plenty of other examples. Most versions of Transatlantic are also lightly rhotic whereas Astarion's is not at all. He CLEARLY has a British accent, a hyperbolic one, but a British one nonetheless.

Astarion sounds just mostly "posh" and theatrical to me.

As for accents. I don't mind them speaking with British Accents, but I'd prefer if they stuck to variants of English. I never liked the "put on" accents of "German Accent" and "French Accent". If they want that, at least get someone from those countries to act the part, and not "make it up", at least then it sounds more believable.

Mostly it sounds to me they use European actors, being an European company and all.

Seems to me it's mostly Americans who find it "off putting"? I guess to them it's something exotic, where as us Europeans are more used to British accents?

I think it comes down to a mistaken belief in there being a "standard English" that has no accent; for Americans, it's an American newsreader accent and they don't seem to understand it simply sounds like a generic American accent to everyone else, not an English one.

Obviously it's not only Americans who do this. As a Geordie who spent some time living in Hertfordshire I never heard the end of how outrageous it was that I had an indecipherable provincial accent compared to their no-accent-at-all. It was quite amusing listening to them having the same argument with Cockneys who also used the same argument, with everyone being largely incomprehensible to each other.

It's slightly tiring seeing all British accents described as "posh" and "snobby" though: I mean considering my PC is a rough-as-a-badger's-arse Cockney who I'm sure is about to yell "gercha!" at someone.

Fantasy races having British accents has been a staple for years(trope?). Americans get to do cowboy accents lol.

Could be. I'm American but my husband and I mostly watch British and Korean shows with the occasional German or Italian show thrown in. We don't care for most American TV.

Also, yes, good point. 100% I welcome all accents but from actors who can speak in them natively.

I agree, I like how it is. And there's a lot of variety to it.

I think most Americans have trouble discerning the different regional accents of Britain. By default, to the American ear, English accents sound posh or, depending on the person's inclinations, snobbish. I can definitely see how this could become obnoxious. Personally, I love all British accents and, yeah, when compared to American accents, they do sound higher class--even when they're not. Look at how often Micheal Caine get's cast in posh roles in American movies. His cockney may be tempered but it's still there. Perhaps it's cultural conditioning?

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.




D: Cowboy accents.

As someone who wrote the first thread about the massive over-abundance of British accents in the game, I can categorically say that is *NOT TRUE*.

I *do not* have a problem with there being characters with British accents in the game.

I *DO* have a problem with seemingly *EVERY* character in the game having a British accent. Why, on all of Faerun, would a goblin grunt pronounce words with the same tones and phrases as someone from a completely different plane of existence (Githyanki)??

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.

Irenicus (British) - https://youtu.be/RRSMCuJISdw?list=PLzw_r3FRBpcMejn_maOZjBKo51RkDue_3&t=530

Golem (flat mechanical) - https://youtu.be/RRSMCuJISdw?list=PLzw_r3FRBpcMejn_maOZjBKo51RkDue_3&t=563

Imoen (mid-western/California American) - https://youtu.be/RRSMCuJISdw?list=PLzw_r3FRBpcMejn_maOZjBKo51RkDue_3&t=599

Jaheira (Eastern European/Arabian mix) - https://youtu.be/RRSMCuJISdw?list=PLzw_r3FRBpcMejn_maOZjBKo51RkDue_3&t=807

Minsc (Russian) - https://youtu.be/RRSMCuJISdw?list=PLzw_r3FRBpcMejn_maOZjBKo51RkDue_3&t=981

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.

Your viewpoint is valid but this is just personal preference. There are no set rules for accents in a fantasy setting. This is far from the only fictional world to have aliens that speak in the same/similar accents to the main character. I'm enjoying the abundance of British accents immensely. But I'm sure they'll introduce more as the game goes on since we don't even have all of the main cast introduced.

Yes, we do have rules for accents in *THIS* fantasy setting. We literally have the voice acting for Baldur's Gate 1 & 2. You know, those games this one is supposed to be a sequel to?

How stupid do you think LotR would be if every single character in it has the same accent? I don't care whether that accent is British, Russian, French, Chinese, Indian, whatever. The fact that a random goblin guard sounds the same as a being from another plane of existence is stupid, period. This game has incredible visual diversity, absolutely top marks to their art department on that one. But as soon as they open their mouth and the goblin, Githyanki, Tiefling, Ogres, machine constructs, and undead lord all sound like they grew up on the same block together, immersion is lost.

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.

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.


I would add the example of Dame Maggie Smith, whose natural accent is not terribly posh but generally seems to be picked to play 'posh' women.


If those goblins are posh, I hate to think what the social position of the rest of us is.

Just to make it absolutely clear, Astaron's accent IS British and not Transatlantic whatsoever.

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.


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).


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".


Yeah. The goblins sound more like the Kray Twins' henchmen. Definitely not posh.


He could almost be voiced by Leslie Phillips.

Sorry, I didn't catch that. Your Newcasunderland accent is far too strong. Tynesiders and Wearsiders are always trying to pretend that they have distinct groups, but we in the civilised south know better.


Oh PLEASE badger the BG3 team to have Astarion say 'Ding dong' at some point during the next Act.
(Anyone not getting the reference will find that Googling 'Ding dong' and Leslie Phillips will remove any confusion).

No rules? Correct. But even a basic level of realism dictates that characters from other planes of existence have a different accent. I mean, in real life accents vary wildly over short geographical distances. It really does break the game for me personally, making it very difficult to get into the story and try to think of this as a real place with real people. It's just, 'Yeah, this is a game with a made up story.' That's fine for a Mortal Kombat story mode, but for BG I expect more.

But no matter what, the accents given to these different people will be arbitrary. Look at Mass Effect--You have humans that speak in different accents and then the aliens have some arbitrary accent assigned to them. Turians speak with American accents. The Quarians speak with several different accents. I think the Krogans also sounded American, if I recall. But they were all alien--shouldn't logic dictate that they speak with accents completely unknown to us? But that's hard to pull off and more likely to come across as silly so they're given different earth accents. One could argue that if they're using a universal translator or something then they should all speak with the same accent as the listener for clarity's sake. (Which also begs the question, depending on the setting, if you want to look at things realistically, why are they speaking the same language at all?)


Realism can only be applied to fantasy arbitrarily because it is *fantasy*. Ergo, execution comes down to personal preference. I like the the British accents and find a lot of variety present in them. You don't. Both perspectives are fine.

The universal translator of Faerun is called the "Common" language. No real reasoning why everyone speaks it, they just do.

So, accepting that departure from 'realism' is fine, because it's baked into the world and it's consistently always been that way. It's one of the care rules of world building.

*However*, while everyone might speak the same language for the sake of simplicity, Larian has decided that they all must speak with the same accent as well.


For me, this isn't even an argument of accuracy or realism. The audible fidelity of the game would be drastically improved by greater diversity and variation in accents. Characters like Minsc are infamous now in part because of the fantastic voice accenting and unique use of an accent (Russian). The fact that you can't close your eyes and recognize various NPCs with perhaps 2-3 exceptions is telling.

Use British accents. Use different dialects within the British accent to make unique characters. But come on. Literally look at what I posted. In 5 minutes BG 2 demonstrated more accents than BG 3 has in its entire EA. There is no excuse for that.

Not forgetting Anderson and his periodic "I was born in London", stated in a broad American accent. I've seen this explained away in that the accent was "lost" (his? All of them?) by the time of ME but no explanation for why a different accent was gained...

I mostly didn't pay too much attention and just expected that, it being an American game, most characters would sound American. As someone described it a while back, "the future is full of Americans and the past is full of Britons".