Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - Enhanced Edition Voice Acting

Love this game but why oh why change the original voice actors?
In Cyseal for instance, the voice acting was Brilliant before... Stand out characters like Bibious (sounded like Jack Sparrow!) Esmerelda, Septimus, the excellent bloke at the bar (the "Please do keep shouting in my ear" one when Madora ordered a drink), Madora herself, The Duke! The cheese vendor! Thelyron... Victoria in the library...
All these voices were perfect, really funny and absolutely excellent in the original version and added character! I remember thinking that it was brilliant, and some of the best voice acting I had heard! Now, Im loving the game, but seriously, the original voices were much Much better than these ones! Surely its not just me?
The above characters all sound worse now. Every time I hear them speak I actually feel dissapointed and miss the original voices, because now they just sound bland, like theyre just reading from a script. Theyre just not fun anymore, and they mostly sound bored!
Everything else is great, but changing these voice actors in my opinion, was a mistake.

I agree! The old voices were perfect and fitted much better in the more humorous setting of the game.

I'd agree that the new voice acting is a mixed bag. Some of it is positively awesome and engaging (and stop me skipping on when I've finished reading the text), others are missing the spark they had before (Madora annoys me now, likewise the Rogue voice I chose for Roderick)

Both are good, I'm going with we were used to the others. But I think they did that because the narrative has changed, if not every single line/encounter, at least one and at that point for professionalism that means they all have to be changed to be even. #Hunch

I justed talked to a rat in the tutorial dungeon and its voice was soooooo cute! Made me want to hug it and play with it.

. . .

Also, I'm looking forward to hearing how the cats sound downtown.

Cat's sounds absolutely awesome. I can imagine cat's would speak so in real life. If they could speak.

I'm quite torn: the new voice acting is good, but I loved the character of some of the previous voice acting, such as the now infamous cheese seller: the new guy just doesn't have the same irritating adenoidal voice that worked so well!

I think some of the new voice work is unquestionably better, but that doesn't mean I don't miss what we had before. It's like all my friends suddenly talking with different voices.

It may be that in some cases the original voice actors weren't available to add the extra dialogue where needed, so they had to be replaced outright. Not sure if that was the case for Ishmashell, the original wistful voice was much better in my opinion. The voice options for the PC duo seem far too strident compared to the laid back sound of the originals (at least in the initial walk up the beach it felt that way), sadly it's not just the American accents for the PC duo that I find revolting, the others are just as bad to my ear. And when I start looting, grabbing several items in quick succession, I would like to punch Jahan in the throat *edit* just read about Zandalor's trunks, will have to remove them.

Same here.

When I heard the :
"She bit me in the face" in Cyseal, i was like nooooo, where is my favorite voice in the game?

I don't have a problem with them changing the actors, I have a problem with the quality of the voice acting. Some of it is so bad I'd rather some characters had no voice at all, or just the old ones.

I've been mostly okay with the new voice acting so far, it's gained a bit in some places and lost something in others, but having arrived in Sacred Stone... ugh. Horrible. The old voice acting of the nattering Immaculates was really good, and the new voice acting... is not. At all. And it seems that the characters in the store are missing a load of lines completely.

The joys of "Full VO" in effect people.

It was a bad idea from the start

Chances are they changed the old voice actors - since they couldn't get them again to redo their lines.
After all a lot of the dialog has changed also.

Also would not be surprised if the newer actors worked for a bit less. Since the quality seems a bit poorer over all.

To me, the majority of the voice acting is superb. It's better than 90 % of the games I've played and that's quite a lot.

Sure, there are some voice acting that I dislike, but that doesn't make it bad. It's just not my cup of tea.

Also you'll have to admit that most of the dislikes about the voice acting is because we played the original, loved it to bits and remember fondly all the sentences that, for example, the cheese vendor said. But, people who didn't play the game earlier, will like most of the voice acting in enhanced edition. That's quite normal and it happens in many situations.

I'd rather have great voice acting in every part of the game, rather than just a few pieces of it scattered around the game. So good job on the voices, I'm loving it!

Mixed feelings: Some are so over the top, it annoys me, but for some of them it's quite awesome. And then there are voices like Braccus Rex (who could have been a bit more over the top) and King Boreas, who I love to listen.

Well ... at least we have now Fantasy-Cowboy-Madora. I love it. Could we please have a whole nation of fantasy themed - texans, with the quests and all that? Maybe in another Spin-Off like "Stampede at Gondor" or "The Gods forgive, Madora not". "A handful of Star Stones" could also be fun .

One thing that's a bit odd is that, unless my ears are deceiving me, some of the original voices are still there but in different roles. For example, Alix Wilton Regan (the English-accented Inquisitor from DA:I) does the game's narration now, e.g. the voice who reads out stuff like inscriptions on gravestones, but I could swear she was one of the options for the PC voices in the original D:OS. Then again, I haven't fired it up to check and my memory isn't the most reliable...

Isn't she also one of the main-NPC's? I thought so and it would be explaining, why she is now telling the events of the story and not the male narrator of the maingame.

Yes, she is voice acting for Weaver of Time, Icara, Ruby, Iron Maiden, Legionnaire that BearDaughter!!! bite and a few more, they've gone too far in using her.



I don't think she was in original version but I could be wrong.

I've played a couple hours with voice acting and a couple hours without. I'm enjoying the game much more with voice-acting off. I had the same experience when I disabled voice-overs in Pillars of Eternity.

I understand perfectly well that full voice-overs were necessary for mass appeal on the PS4/Xbone, and it was certainly a good idea to have that done for the Enhanced Edition. I'm not sure this game would be taken as seriously by console critics as it has been had Larian not added comprehensive voice-acting. That said, I think the issue that Swen has referred to before--that is, the fine line between what is humorous and what is absurd--is made that much more problematic to deal with when everything is voice-acted.

In my theater of the mind I provide the voices. With one fewer variable (speech), my imagine is freer and I'm able to interpret the script in a way that makes the most sense to me. With voice enabled, I'm strictly an observer relying on a disparate cast of strangers' interpretation of the their little section of a very large script, which is often hit or miss (and unfortunately, I'm able to judge this right away because I've read the text long before the voice-over has ended). This isn't a 90 minute animated film where every phoneme is tightly directed, nor is there a similar budget, so I don't hold this short-coming against Larian. I don't envy the people responsible for directing the voice talent as this must have been a daunting undertaking.

The voice-overs are by no means poor. Most are in fact quite good, but with the tone being set solely by text (along with visual queues to a smaller extent), I'm having a significantly more cohesive experience and the world is so much more real to me.