Wow! Just checking back here after a few days and I'm super happy this thread is actually getting some action. After waiting around for 2-3 hours after my initial post without seeing any responses, I was getting a little disheartened lol.
I can see where the people who dislike voice acting are coming from. In a way, for those who have a bit more of a creative mindset, it can be better to imagine the scene in your head. That is not all of us though, and I think there are a lot of people such as myself who don't necessarily like playing table top DnD but still love a great RPG with cinematics. I for one really loved how Bioware were able to voice Commander Shephard in the Mass Effect series. As someone mentioned earlier, this made it so much more immersive/emotional when your companions died or when your character made an important speech.
Dragon Age 2 and 3 are other good examples of where we had a lot of character customisation going on, but we were still able to comfortably weave a voice protagonist in. Admittedly, I enjoyed Dragon Age 1 the most out of the series, but this was mainly due to the story line.
I think the main thing that people are forgetting is that this RPG is quite unique in that it provides MULTIPLAYER functionality. This is a HUGE selling point for my fiance and I, as we are struggling to find any kind of multiplayer RPG to play together other than the DOS series. Text-only is perfectly serviceable for single player games, but it can be extremely jarring when playing with others. You end up having to ask "has everyone finished reading this?" and "what did you end up saying?" over and over. It is just totally immersion breaking, at least from my experience (again, not a DnD fan and really not into physically role playing my character out loud for others).
Really excited to see that some people have indicated that Larian will include full voice acting. I hope this is true, but I don't want to get my hopes up just in case. I don't think my heart could take the disappointment :'(
