Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General The importance of PC voice in RPGs

Ok, I have to say this because it just really is bothering me. Not to mention it literally KILLS immersion. So bear with me...

You have to have PC voice in your interactions with other characters. I mean I get it, I have BOTH Divinity games, but in todays game environment it really just comes off as lazy. It totally breaks the immersion, not to mention, there are times in the game that the PC speaks during random conversions while in the world. So why not just go all the way with it? I mean this all started in Dragon Age, where everyone spoke except the PC, but I mean even they integrated PC voice in DA 2.

All in all, the game is really, REALLY impressive. I love it so much more than the Divinity series (but that was 4 years ago). Great world building, I recognize a lot of the lore from D&D, the party members are really interesting, and so are the quests. I honestly am CHOMPING AT THE BIT to play more content of this game. I just got it like 5 days ago, and I am already 30+ hrs in, and on my second play through. But the whole silent PC thing, it just kills it for me. I mean especially in the dream sequences. If nothing else, put it in the darn dream sequences...PLEASE.

Thank you.

Sure, but only if it was an option and not forced on us. Silent PC is less immersion breaking for a lot of people. Showing our character's facial expressions is already bad enough since they are assuming a reaction for us that we may not have. Can only imagine how much worse it would be if we were forced to hear them speak for everything.

The problem occurs for me when everybody BUT the player is fully voiced. It makes <charname> seem like a passive observer in the story instead of the protagonist. This drives me to distraction.

My personal preference is no voice (and lots of text) or partial voice for everybody supplemented by lots of text, but I suspect I'm unusual in that regard. If everybody else has to be voiced then I really need charname to be voiced too.

I'd be fine with PC voice, but if Larian doesn't implement full PC voice, then they should almost never show our character reacting to events. The current combination of silent PC with shown facial expressions is immersion breaking for me.

In my head, my character was a serious and stoic person.

In some BG3 cutscenes, they are silently going like:

I gotta hard disagree here. I hate voiced protagonists in RPGs where I am supposed to be making my own character. Nothing is more immersion breaking for me than to hear a voice that utterly does not match the character in my mind or hear them inflect differently than I would've wanted, thus changing the meaning of the dialogue choice I picked. Tone is a pretty massive part of characterization.

It is a big reason I keep bouncing off Fallout 4 every time I try to play it. The calm, gentle but firm male protag voice is just completely alien to the eccentric, slightly mad scientist I have in my head. it doesn't work.

I would be happy with text only as an option.

I wish they would take our reactions out entirely or at least let us select a demeanour at character creation.

Agreed entirely but I am ok if the option is there for others. I play most games with sound off or at least dialogue off and subtitles on if I need to hear environmental sounds because the voices are so annoying to me. Fo4 is pretty good, not sure if subtitles only are an option for you?

I agree the lack of a voiced protagonist sticks out like a sore thumb relative to all the superb voice acting of all other aspects; from characters to narrator. If a silence can be deafening, this is it - jarringly and repeatedly.

Fully agree.
Single voiced protagonist is completely immersion breaking( unless you have dozens of options...) for me too, especially in a game like Baldurs gate. I remember in BG2 importing TONS of custom SOUNDSETS for my character to best fit his personality, so much fun AND IT WORKED ! At the time You had around 30 unique sound triggers (a couple different ones for selection, death, overloaded etc etc...) Nowdays they could make TONS more.
But being stuck with one or two fully voiced protagonist?! NO WAY.

Ironically my BG2 protagonist feels more alive and has more personality than what we get with BG3...

How the game handles the player character and the silent, almost comical facial expressions in cutscenes compared to the voiced and better animated origin characters is yet another sign that the origin characters are the true protagonists of the game, not the player character you create.

I agree with OP, this is really immersion breaking and once again, custom characters looks less interresting than Origins.

But I'm nearly sure they'll do something about that. They said they were going to focus on better custom characters. I guess they just haven't showed anything yet about that.

It would be a shame in a TT inspired video games if premade characters were more interresting to play than customs ones. Any poll related to this on reddit showed that a huge majority of players just don't care about Origins and prefer custom characters.

I can't conceive that more than a very tiny minority imagine their characters down to so minute detail as to have a specific voice in mind. Objectively being mute is *much* more immersion-breaking in a world of sound. Especially when playing the protagonist the world reacts to and somewhat revolves around.

Contrary to BG3, BG2 wasn't a world of sound. The few precious voiced moments and those of the protagonist rather harmonized the somewhat muted surroundings. Clearly this isn't the case in BG3 and this dissonance between the very much voiced world and the almost completely mute player character is so obtrusive you can't not notice.

Besides, implementing an option for muted protagonist would require all of 5 minutes development time.

Well I did not keep the same memories. I remember so many sounds of BG1 and 2 : birds chirping, little music effects, tons of sound with various atmosphere. Which I lack in BG3.
So I would say BG3 soundscape is more long beautiful musics & a lot of talk and former BGs soundscape more immersive & diverse sounds and more shorter musics.

I think picking a demeanor as zarna suggested is a step in the right direction. I would also like to suggest a voice tone as well, but I don't know how much voice work that would be. Maybe a voice program could help.

I'm not a fan of full PC voice at all but I don't think that matters since it's obviously incompatible with the origin system. You'd have to voice every line at the very least with every origin character and then probably twice more for a custom male and custom female character. Even voicing everything the PC says twice massively cuts down on the choice of options you get in conversation so 7+ is a non starter.

If we can get a few barks, reaction phrases and so on then sure I can see how that will help. But full voice surely isn't happening.

I'm ok with how it is now - they could work a bit on the facial impression ... although sometimes it's spot on: Astarion said something stupid and my girl looked incredibly annoyed - perfect fit.
I'm not against a voiced protagonist in general - best example and still my favorite character up today is female Hawke. The voice and how the lines were delivered were great imo. But Hawke was a predefined character, whereas our protagonist can be different races with different backgrounds and not every voice fits there.

For me it isn't specifics, rather that voices don't fit or are overly fake. I would take mute any day over sitting there cringing and wishing the character would just shut up, then turning off voices (or sound) altogether. If you are playing a quiet type character and all the voices are shrill and obnoxious it can be rather jarring. Likewise if you are playing a loud and crass character but all the voices are polite sounding, it doesn't fit. For a game where we have the freedom to make anyone we want, I doubt they could have enough voices to please everyone so silent needs to be an option if they decide to go fully voiced. Even if it is just a separate sound slider for our characters in the menu.

They have a choice for 2 male, and 2 female voices. I am sure they could make a choice from that drop down as mute rather than say "screw you" to all the people that want voiced PC's.

They should add several other voices in addition to the mute option if they decide to go the full voiced route.

Oh I totally agree with that definately.

And just like that, the quality of roleplaying and dialogue options from Dragon Age to DA2 got extremely downgraded. Unfortunetely this is unavoidable as quality of roleplaying and dialogue options are diametrically opposed to PC voice acting in video games, due to resource constraints.