Longtime fans of Bethesda’s work will know that the developer has a strange weak spot when it comes to Irish accents.Fallout 3had Colin Moriarty, a shady tavern owner whose accent was about as cartoonishly Irish as you could possibly get.Fallout 4had Cait, a rough and rowdy cage fighter whose accent was extremely controversial at the time, with some going so far as to say that it completely ruined her character.
For some reason, Bethesda keeps insisting that at least one character in each of its titles has to have a dodgy Irish accent, so you probably won’t be surprised to hear thatStarfieldhas yet another Irish character that is being raked over the coals by fans. This time its Charlie Flynn, a stressed out medic who you’re able to find in Cydonia City’s Reliant Medical office.
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Some of Flynn’s dialogue was shared by IGN editor Wesley Yin-Poole on Twitter earlier today, but you’d be forgiven for not realizing it was supposed to be an Irish accent to begin with. It’s all over the place at the start, with little bits of American coming through on certain words, until the voice actor in question pulls out an extremely confident “EEJIT” as some kind of smoking gun. It’s definitely not what you’d expect from a title as massive as Starfield, and it’s getting a good ol' roasting online as a result.
Many are questioning why Bethesda doesn’t just hire an Irish voice actor if it wants to keep putting Irish characters in its games, while others are calling the accent “borderline insulting” and “hilariously bad”. You also have a few people jokingly defending the accent by saying it’s just hundreds of years of accent shifts or that this is actually a new accent called “Space Irish”.
To be fair to the voice actor getting roasted, those that play unessential characters like Charlie Flynn in Bethesda games are usually made to voice a handful of characters rather than just one, and it’s likely an Irish accent just wasn’t in this particular actor’s repertoire. It also appears to be a Bethesda problem specifically at this point, as it has a bizarrely consistent history of getting non-Irish actors to voice Irish characters. It’s still a bad performance though, and one that they won’t want to be reminded of any time soon.
In other Starfield news, players have recently started encounteringa pretty nasty bug that is stopping them from shooting their weapons. This is actually a bug that was prevalent in Fallout 4 and wasn’t fixed, despite the game being 8 years old at this point. Unfortunately, it seems to have made the jump to Starfield now too, but here’s hoping that Bethesda actually does something about it this time.
