It would appear that Todd Howard has been hiding some serious voice acting talent from us, the rascal. Luckily for you, you can now experience it first-hand thanks to a secret Easter Egg you can uncover in The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion.
Note that the Easter Egg does involve a bit of dabbling with the game's console command, so isn't technically a canon thing. Either way, it's a hoot which is worth pursuing whether or not we were actually meant to.
We'll start by going straight to the steps you must take to get the Easter Egg, in case you want to go ahead and experience it first-hand without knowing what exactly to expect. Courtesy of Redditor u/-Jaws-, here they are:
- Save your game and backup your save files before doing this, just in case The Curse Of Todd Howard makes things go pear-shaped
- Open up Oblivion's console while you're in-game. You should be able to do this by hitting the tilde (~) key, but if that doesn't work you may need to enable the console first. To do so, make sure the "bAllowConsole" is set to "1" in your oblivion.ini file
- Type in "coc hawkhaven" or "coc TestToddCrazy." Both should whisk you away to otherwise inaccessible dev testing areas, where you will find a whole lot of interesting stuff
- Amongst this forbidden content upon which we were never meant to lay our eyes, there is one Elven armor-clad gentleman standing around in one of the buildings in the "coc TestToddCrazy" universe. That's who you'll want to speak to
If you want to cut to the chase, check out the video below showcasing all the dialogue options that come with the Elven Armor Man. You might recognize the voice.
You'll see that we are blessed with a range of heart-poundingly rousing monologues delivered by Todd himself, obviously as part of some behind-the-scenes dev test. Can't imagine why this never made it into the final version, can you?
Source: Reddit