I've never been particularly bothered by the silent protagonist mechanic, and I realize it may be basically a necessity in any game where there are simply too many possible permutations for the "main character", but at the same time I've seen very few cases that manage to make it feel jarring as BG3 does currently... And I think after a while I even understood why.
It's mostly because of all the unnecessarily long and awkward shots at our main character:
- not saying a word for seconds
- being framed by the camera for way longer than he really needs to.
- being overly expressive and having way too pronounced body language, to the point of looking like a mime/parody.
- also, quite frankly, being a bit of a wimp. Constantly acting squeamish and/or scared like a kitten at any given chance.
I've been thinking about it as well and arrived at the same conclusions. You hit the nail on the head with all of these points. (This should go to some thread on this topic, tbh. Larian should see this.)
The easiest way to fix it would be to just keep the camera at the NPC we're conversing with most of the time and only include short shots at our PC from time to time. If that. That would solve like 90% of the "silent protagonist weirdness", I think.
Your point about overacting is a very important one and unfortunately not as easy to fix - but imo it very much should be addressed. Characters acting theatrical might be ok with isometric view, but it's terrible in cinematics. Cinematics mean we DON'T need overly obvious visual cues. We can see the characters very well and everything unnatural/jarring is painfully apparent.
And yeah, about being a wimp... It would be great to be able to choose "demeanor" (sensitive, stoical, aggresive, fearful...) in character creation, but I'm not sure how feasible it would be.
