This was getting a little too off topic for the
Dragon Age - NextGen thread. Tuco and Lester where talking about the difference between a silent and voiced protag and over all the presentation of the custom character in the EA
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.
This is actually how I stress test a game, I try to play a shrinking violet, refusing at every turn the burned of narrative agency and how well the game deals with this is how I judge if it's really serious about giving you choice in how your character is played.
Except for one instance on the nautiloid where you literally fall over from seeing a dragon for the first time I haven't been too bothered by the silent film acting from the character, I heard Larian say that more lines would be voiced but so far when one
is voiced, it's still pretty jarring because of how rare it is.
What I really see as the issue here is the question of demeanor, if your character is going to react a certain way to a situation then that should inform you about the demeanor of that character if it's out of your hands then you should make us play the character that way or build a narrative where changes aren't completely dependent on the random whim of what choice we decide.
I don't like conversation systems that if viewed in retrospect make your character into a sociopath that can vacillate wildly form kind-hearted to cynical mercenary to violent maniac without any consideration that acting this way in real life would make you look like a lunatic.
When in the final game you get to play the origin characters I don't see this as being quite so much of a problem simply because the origin characters will be more fleshed out from the start so you won't be fighting the game in their presentation.
