TO start my spelling sucks, it has always sucked and always will so, try to over look the bad gramer and mis-spelled words. Thanks
There are 4 well known actors M/F and 10-20 something others doing other voices. There is also the option of readable text if you want to set it for voice or both voice and text.
I really like the Idea of being able to stand off to the side and over hear two or three NPC's talking about things happening in the country without a box poping up with the same thing in print. Afterward moving to another group and hear someting different that may be what I need to know or maybe entering into the conversation with any of the groups myself or just taking what I hear and useing them as I see fit or leaving the quest selection alone all together and moving on.
There are alot of things in Oblivion that has never been done before and some people are going to like it and others will complain but, they will have to live with it or go play something else.
If you don't like PC's and NPC's talking to each other and really prefer to read the story then go buy a book.
Bethesda Has done what no other game company has ever done and that is taken the time to give us NPC's with a high level of artifical intellegence with synchronized speech and mouth movement. Its what thousands and thousands of us have asked for. I think it's going to be great to have some NPC walk up to me and not have to read or hear the same line over and over from every NPC in the game and I hate that big POP UP BOX with the list of what you want to hear for the NPC.
Then because of what I do throughout the rest of the game it will determin what that same NPC will say to me the next time I talk to him or her.
For those of you that want to read everything, there are 80,000 other games on the shelves for you to read and 40 million books at the library with much better stories.
To worry about MODS and the voice acting later is kind of dumb or else you are really a Newb to RPG games. Alot of us have been playing RPG's scence the early 80s and with only pencils and GraphPaper with each of the players sitting around a coffee table makeing up everything on the fly as we played and you want to talk about crapy acting and really stupid sounding voices you should have been around back then. The RPG world and the Modders of today have come a long way and to worry about bad voice acting is a waist of time as long as the MOD's are good and they get the ideas across then who really cares if they are not perfect voice actors its only a game and all about having fun so try to do that because I really like what I've seen so far and can't wait for the day its in my hands.