The voiced narrator is really distracting.

[Morrydwen]

Too slow. She's also very dramatic but has no character and that's a pretty uncomfortable combination. Someone earlier linked IWD2 intro: 

 

 

Listen to that by comparison. That is a young female narrator and it sounds amazing. She makes you want to hear what she has to say. People think that narrators need to be generic and featureless but that is completely incorrect. They need to be consistent, yes, and with a broadly appealing manner but if you don't care about the person telling the story you don't care about the story they have to tell. 

 

There's plenty of examples of excellent female narration out there (remember LOTR?). It doesn't have to be the baldur's gate guy or bust. For people saying they like this narrator, I have a question.

 

Would you want to listen to an audio book narrated like that? 

 

The voice is from Kath Soucie who also voiced Aerie in Baldur's Gate 2.

[rjshae]

I think Ashley Johnson (I think it's her, sounds like her) did a great vo for the narrator.

To each their own!

 

I suspect a big part of the dislikes is that many people aren't used to a female narrator, preferring the authority of the deeper masculine voice. Personally I think she's great. It was a nice change-up from the expected.

[Yakmann]

I generally like Johnson's narration, except when it's right inside other figures dialogues - so that we switch from an ingame character (like Berath) talking to some meta-game entity (the narrator) talking, back to the ingame character. I like narration on passages without any dialogue, but not narrated prose inside of dialogue - especially not all this "he/she says" etc stuff.

[Multihog]

https://youtu.be/ACGGglJQ7eM?t=426

 

I liked the old narrator better and I miss the music too. In my opinion narrating everything can be done even well but I've seen it only once in Original Sin 1. I really liked the narration of the Weaver of Time in that game.

Yeah, the old narrator was good. I never even acknowledged the narration in the first game because it worked well and felt natural. The narrator in PoE2 is anything but that and immediately stuck out, and not in a good way. As some people already mentioned, it's severely overacted. 

Edited May 22, 2018 by Multihog

[ophibii]

it honestly sounds like she's overcompensating for her lack of an accent (since most narrators have the british accent typical to the genre). 

 

like others have mentioned, i would have vastly preferred flemeth's VA - something about her voice is soothing to me! 

[EngelsLeMao]

I love her voice though but I guess maybe there should be an option to turn it off like Divinity Age of Sin 2, 

 

I'm SO glad there was that option in DA2 since the narrator's voice kept making me sleepy since it's some kinda slow talking old man lol

[Soki]

I also would love an option to turn off the narrator. It's not that I dislike her specifically, I just dislike unspoken text being narrated at all. It's distracting, cause I simply read way faster than her, and it also breaks immersion for me. It's just really weird for me that a voice is telling me what I'm seeing or doing.

[TheDogProfessor]

I personally really like ther narrator. I think she does an amazing job.

[Selky]

If people aren't aware already, there's a mod on the nexus to remove the narrator. I think she does a good job as Ydwin but I'm so glad to be rid of her narration.