Skyrim: Revoiced Is a Major Free Overhaul That Transforms the Game

This upcoming revamp of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim might just be one of the most immersive changes to the game I’ve ever seen, and its existence is ever so slightly making Bethesda look terrible at their jobs.

If you’ve played an Elder Scrolls game before, you have likely run into the same voice actor voicing close to fifty of the game’s characters.

Supposedly, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has somewhere around 5,000 NPCs in the game, but there are roughly only 70 unique voice actors who lend their talents to the game. Admittedly, the majority of those 5,000 NPCs aren’t unique (as a lot of them are going to be guards, for instance), but supposedly around 1,000 of them are.

The funny thing is, it’s sort of become a bit of a staple of Bethesda’s games. They have a pool of very recognisable actors they like to use over and over again, and said pool doesn’t seem to be particularly large… but weirdly, I kind of like it.

Image of an orc and a somewhat bigger orc from the Steam store page for Skyrim, Bethesda

However, it’s understandable if you don’t. Personally, I do think it breaks the immersion of the game, because the world ends up feeling a lot less real once you bump into several NPCs in a row who are all voiced by the same fella.

If that's something that bothers you, then you may want to keep an eye on an upcoming mod titled Skyrim: Revoiced, which, according to the modder behind the project, is set to drop very, very soon.

As detailed in an article by TheGamer’s Rhiannon Bevan, spdude, the original creator of Skyrim: Revoiced, has already managed to alter 50 unique NPCs in the game– and they’ve used real voice actors to pull all of this off.

This is in contrast to spdude’s last mod that attempted to do something similar, titled Skyrim Vocal Diversity, which used AI to generate new voices for dozens of NPCs (something that, understandably, a lot of the community wasn’t on board with).

No exact word on the release date yet, but spdude seems pretty certain that it’s not too far off. Plus, they plan to continue working on it after its release, so it sounds like one to keep an eye on down the line.

I can only hope that Bethesda has widened its voice acting pool for the release of The Elder Scrolls VI to save spdude some extra work in the future.