Starfield players are criticizing the game’s questionable Irish accents.
A clip from Bethesda’s sci-fi RPG went viral on Twitter last night showing an NPC supposedly speaking with an Irish accent and it’s being ridiculed. When the character starts speaking, it’s clear that the voice actor is putting on a soft impression of what they think an Irish accent is supposed to sound like (via GamesRadar).
But the more they talk, the more the attempt morphs into a collection of other accents, causing a lot of confusion as to why Bethesda didn’t simply hire an actual Irish voice actor for the role.
One user pointed out that the NPC’s voice slowly switches from the Irish attempt to British, to American, to more British. It’s a bit dodgy and you don’t even have to listen hard to notice the different accents changing throughout her speech. You can check it out below in the tweet.
The Irish accents in Starfield are… yeah. I’m crying lol pic.twitter.com/upaDDEpxuYSeptember 11, 2023
It seems it’s not just this one character with a bad Irish accent either. In a separate tweet, a different user said that they’d heard it across multiple other characters in the game.
“Playing Starfield and my only big complaint is they’ve doubled down on that one woman in Fallout 4 with a *horrific* fake Irish accent by having *multiple* characters have horrific fake Irish accents!” they said.
Some other comments about the game’s use of Irish accents have made it over the game’s subreddit, with one Irish player saying, “The voice acting in this game is fantastic. Except for the unbelievably bad ‘Irish’ accent on Osian Salvato in the Clinic. What gives?
“As an Irish gamer maybe I’m just more sensitive to it, but I will never understand the need for American voice actors, or actors in general, to ‘do an Irish accent’, when they have clearly never heard one in their lives.”
Elsewhere, in rather unrelated Starfield news, one player has brought attention to the fact that the game doesn’t render the sun if you have a Radeon AMD graphics card.
Despite its faults, Starfield might be one of the best RPGs of the year, but if you’re looking for something different to play, check out our top picks for the best Xbox Series X games.
