85 réponses à ce sujet

[Masha Potato]

Fereldan turnip!

[BlenderisedMind]

I hope one day, maybe in Dragon Age 7 or something there will be a merchant with a solid English South African accent. I will go nuts!

[Little Princess Peach]

David Gaider wrote...

Gabey5 wrote...
I think people ae confusing fake accents with heavy or aristorctatic ones, that come across as exagerated.  Having regional accents with less intensity seems like a good move.

Lastly Zevran had a great voice actor. Went well with his character

Yep. I didn't realize until I met Jon Curry that he was a tall, Nordic-looking man-- it was amusing, considering Zevran's appearance. Zevran was one of those situations where we turned down a number of actors with more authentic accents because they didn't have the sound we wanted.

As for the oft-maligned Isolde, her voice had the aristocratic quality we wanted-- not to mention the actress had stage training and could turn in the emotional performance we needed. The scene where she pleads for Connor's life still chokes me up when I hear it.

So, in both these cases, going for authenticity over other considerations wouldn't have given us what we wanted. Though it is a consideration even so, regardless of the fact that authenticity is something many people don't really appreciate like they seem to think they do.

the TEAAAAGAAAN still hurts my ears even to this day....
But for the orliasn (sorry if i spelt it wrong?) will you be looking for french people to do the voice acting or dose it not work that way?

[Red Templar]

Orian Tabris wrote...
Is it just me, or do people actually believe that BioWare would hire actors to do cheap imitation accents?

To be entirely fair, Bioware has done exactly that. The South African accent in the Mass Effect 2 Kasumi DLC was utterly, unequivocally abysmal. Having been performed by a Canadian voice actor.

ME was done by a different Bioware division, but I have no idea how centralized or decentralized the matter of voice acting is for the company.

[BouncyFrag]

Zevran being ridiculously awesome. I couldn't imagine any other voice than this.

[Wulfram]

Just because the actor is from the country in question, doesn't mean their accent isn't fake. See, for example, british actors on american TV.

I think it has more to do with direction. Most DA2 Orlesian accents were ridiculous because, aside from Stroud and Leliana, Orlesians in DA2 were jokes.

[CELL55]

 Maybe we've been conditioned by so many fake accents in other media that some of us are no longer capable of discerning whether an accent is legitimate or not. 

[Morlanwen]

Maybe Louiza Patikas gave the good tone to Isolde, but I had to turn to french version instead of english because of her fake exaggerated accent.
The worst was in DA2 with this guy who was looking for his wife Ninette... Worst fake accent ever.
I can't tell for Merill's or Zevran's, but orlesian accents are awfull.
There must be a way to hire french voice actors .. or at least french-speaking actors right?

[Reznore57]

I don't think the accent is really the problem ,(sometimes it's done on purpose to sound kind of funny) it's more how the actor deliver the line.

I'm french , and truth Isolde never bothered me , never thought her accent was awful (I guess her VA is english ,because i felt like some of her word were said with an accent and not others )
Marjolaine on the other hand was awful , and i think it's the same VA (not sure) but to me it sounded like the VA did it on purpose.

Leliana , I don't like her voice much ,the way she delivered her sentences annoyed me .Like she talks really carefully , really slowly .Almost like she was sometimes looking for word , which doesn't make any sense since she's not talking a foreign language at all.

Zevran , false accent or not , had a really joyful flow in his voice , almost singing .And i liked it.

No problem with Merrill at all , same as Zev , I think the actress did a marvelous job at delivering her lines.

And i love Sebastien just because of his accent and how he talks .His battle cry are hilarious .

[Stiler]

I love french accents and I never understood the people talking about how "fake" Leliana sounded......especially since her voice actress is French natively...

[Mr.House]

Stiler wrote...

I love french accents and I never understood the people talking about how "fake" Leliana sounded......especially since her voice actress is French natively...

And she did ads in french, and sounds awesome when she speaks french.

[Das Tentakel]

Brockololly wrote...

The only voice actor/characters that I kind of cringed when they spoke were Marjolaine and the Orlesian Noble bad guy in Mark of the Assassin. Not necessarily from their accent but maybe more that they ended up as somewhat villainous characters, which combined with the French accent just came across as comical.


That is one thing that bugs me with accents in World War 2 movies for instance when you have Germans speaking english with a german accent but they're supposed to be speaking german. I'm more than ok with just the actual foreign language being spoken with subtitles. Is that a possibility for Dragon Age? Just have Orlesians speak Orlesian, Tevinter speak Tevinter and so forth? Of course you'd have the problem of needing to make a language, unless you just went with French being Orlesian since thats what it seems like already.

Well, in some of the better movies, the Germans simply speak German, and you have English subtitles.
Would be interesting to see how it would work out in a game, with, say, the people in a market speaking French (would be nice if it were in some regional dialect, for instance Norman or Picardian, giving it a less modern French feel), all-Orlesian cutscenes (a la the Loghain cutscenes in DA:O) being subtitled, and a switch to lightly accented English on the Orlesians' part when the PC starts talking to him/her/them.

[Giga Drill BREAKER]

I think when people do accents in games they play them up a bit.

[Mulsanne Blue]

I am a language person. I love accents and I particularly appreciate dialects within accents, which I think people tend to overlook when discussing authenticity. Not everyone that speaks a language will speak it in the same manner.

[Galatean]

Red Templar wrote...

Orian Tabris wrote...
Is it just me, or do people actually believe that BioWare would hire actors to do cheap imitation accents?

To be entirely fair, Bioware has done exactly that. The South African accent in the Mass Effect 2 Kasumi DLC was utterly, unequivocally abysmal. Having been performed by a Canadian voice actor.

I dunno, I found it pretty acceptable, and I'm from South Africa. What exactly about it was abysmal?

[TobiTobsen]

Stiler wrote...

I love french accents and I never understood the people talking about how "fake" Leliana sounded......especially since her voice actress is French natively...

Reality is unrealistic!

[Lilaeth]

I thought Sebastian's accent was bad (the actor's from the same city as me!) until I listened and realised he was using our patented 'speaking to Sassenachs' approach, and then it sounded much better! But yes, a couple of the Orlesian accents have been a bit too 'Allo Allo' for my tastes, and some of the Dalish Irish accents were not convincing. Never mind, they'll always be better than Tom Cruise's attempt!

[Misuyama]

Lilaeth wrote...

I thought Sebastian's accent was bad (the actor's from the same city as me!) until I listened and realised he was using our patented 'speaking to Sassenachs' approach, and then it sounded much better! But yes, a couple of the Orlesian accents have been a bit too 'Allo Allo' for my tastes, and some of the Dalish Irish accents were not convincing. Never mind, they'll always be better than Tom Cruise's attempt!

The dalish have Welsh accents, not Irish.

[Potato Cat]

Misuyama wrote...

Lilaeth wrote...

I thought Sebastian's accent was bad (the actor's from the same city as me!) until I listened and realised he was using our patented 'speaking to Sassenachs' approach, and then it sounded much better! But yes, a couple of the Orlesian accents have been a bit too 'Allo Allo' for my tastes, and some of the Dalish Irish accents were not convincing. Never mind, they'll always be better than Tom Cruise's attempt!

The dalish have Welsh accents, not Irish.

Only Merrill has a Welsh accent. It's to show she is from a different clan originally and that she grew up fairly isolated from the rest of them.

[Wulfram]

Elfman wrote...

Only Merrill has a Welsh accent. It's to show she is from a different clan originally and that she grew up fairly isolated from the rest of them.

I suspect it's more because they really liked Eve Myles but found locating people capable of doing welsh accents more difficult than they originally imagined

[David Gaider]

Wulfram wrote...
I suspect it's more because they really liked Eve Myles but found locating people capable of doing welsh accents more difficult than they originally imagined

No, we knew that getting a lot of Welsh accents would be difficult. Hence the Dalish use both Irish and Welsh accents.

[katling73]

David Gaider wrote...

Wulfram wrote...
I suspect it's more because they really liked Eve Myles but found locating people capable of doing welsh accents more difficult than they originally imagined

No, we knew that getting a lot of Welsh accents would be difficult. Hence the Dalish use both Irish and Welsh accents.

Unfortunately that was quite jarring for someone like me who has an English background because the Irish and Welsh accents are quite different to my ears. I was fine with the Irish accents for the Dalish but when we ran into Merrill, it threw me out of any immersion into the game I'd managed to achieve and I was thinking, "Why is there suddenly a Welsh elf in the middle of all these Irish elves?" It would have been far better to keep them all Irish or all Welsh.

And can I make a plaintive request that if we're going to have more of Orlais and more Orlesians, could you make sure their accents are genuinely French instead of having them sound like a bad imitation of Maurice Chevalier? Some of them were good but far too often I felt like I was in that French Revolution scene from Mel Brooks' History of the World Part 1.

[David Gaider]

katling73 wrote...
Unfortunately that was quite jarring for someone like me who has an English background because the Irish and Welsh accents are quite different to my ears. I was fine with the Irish accents for the Dalish but when we ran into Merrill, it threw me out of any immersion into the game I'd managed to achieve and I was thinking, "Why is there suddenly a Welsh elf in the middle of all these Irish elves?" It would have been far better to keep them all Irish or all Welsh.

And it would have been better if Carver and Bethany had accents from the same part of England as Hawke. Unfortunately, we can't always get what we want.

And can I make a plaintive request that if we're going to have more of Orlais and more Orlesians, could you make sure their accents are genuinely French instead of having them sound like a bad imitation of Maurice Chevalier?

You can request it, sure.

[adorkable-panda]

I freaking adore Eve Myles though D: like for reals, she's so awesome. I think that the accents were performed rather awesomely so, and after seeing a real life pic of Zevran's voice actor, I can hardly believe that he's his voice xD it just shows how talented people can be. I really do hope that we see more variety in accents in DA3 though! I love it so much.

[Red Templar]

Galatean wrote...

Red Templar wrote...

Orian Tabris wrote...
Is it just me, or do people actually believe that BioWare would hire actors to do cheap imitation accents?

To be entirely fair, Bioware has done exactly that. The South African accent in the Mass Effect 2 Kasumi DLC was utterly, unequivocally abysmal. Having been performed by a Canadian voice actor.

I dunno, I found it pretty acceptable, and I'm from South Africa. What exactly about it was abysmal?

It was fake, and obviously so. Which is fair, because the person who delivered it was Canadian.

Having been born and raised in the culture he was trying to emulate, I didn't even realise that was what he was going for until half way through his speech. He manages to get a couple of elements right, enough to mark the attempt, but nowhere in the country would that accent be mistaken for a local speaker. It is a very difficult accent to emulate, and the voice actor sounds, at best, like an English speaking South African trying to mimick an Afrikaans accent. Perhaps after a glass of brandy.

It bothered me additionally because the only reason that that character had to be South African was to perpetuate an American stereotype that white South African men are prone to being amoral mercenaries. Which seems to be the only way we are represented in foreign media. Since there was no actual Afrikaans speaking voice actor on hand to deliver the Afrikaans accent, why make someone else make the attempt when it wasn't at all necessary that the character speak with that accent? I'd have welcome the effort to represent a South African in a beloved franchise, even with a fake accent, if only it hadn't been to exploit a stereotype. This is the DA board, so I won't fixate on that, but it is entirely fair to say that Bioware has used noticeably fake accents entirely unnecessarily. Afrikaaner is certainly more obscure than French, so no surprise that it wasn't more remarked on, but fake is fake.

Also to be fair though, it was really just the one significant lapse of accent quality which I am particularly sensitive to, so I have no larger statement to make about the quality of Bioware's voice-acting in posting here. Normally it is great. Just this thing, it bugged me.

Modifié par Red Templar, 22 septembre 2012 - 12:10 .