Sure, but does Miles Morales sound like a white person to you? 'Cause that's what i'm talking about. Of course Tyrone Shepard, who grew up in spaceships and some such, could lack the speech cadence of a black person, but does it make it any less eyebrow raising for me, a subscriber of Tyrone Magnus? Not really.
The point is that accents are cultural, not racial. Miles Morales wouldn't sound like that if he grew up in South Africa.
America's one of the few countries where a racial minority is isolated enough to create its own distinctive accent. If someone grows up in Australia, they sound Australian. There's no way to tell their race with your eyes closed. It was actually pretty funny, working in a call centre when customers would spontaneously try to guess your ethnicity. One of my colleagues was a white guy who occasionally got accused of being black because he had a French accent. (Australia does take in a few refugees from French-speaking African countries.）
Anyway, that was just the initial part of my point, and i'm pretty sure it was in response to something you said about accents not mattering.
In a fantasy setting, it 100% doesn't matter. In a future setting accents also ought to matter less. The idea that the effects of American segregation would still linger 200 years in the future or whatever is something that would have pretty deep implications. Additionally, despite having some kind of accent, if you're still reading from pre-written dialogue, then you're not going to be using the correct dialect for the accent anyway.
What i really stand for is the second part of my argument, the one about how a character being voiced inherently takes away some roleplay options more than it gives in a 'classic' rpg, either because the two or three different personalities don't mix well together (see DA2), or because there are simply no different personalities but just slight variations (see Fallout 4 and Inquisition, where the MCs always sound mild-mannered).
I just find it inherently dull to be removing your character's personality just so that you can project personality onto them. In your head, when you're roleplaying an angry black dude or whatever, no one else cares. No one's going to feel intimidated because in your head you imagine that your shouting. No one's going to ask you to repeat yourself because your accent is a bit too thick and they couldn't understand you.
Of course, in a game where i can play 10 different races, i might also just find it jarring that Ghur-Druz, half-orc warrior, has the same voice as Pinky-winkle, halfling sorcerer.
They won't, unless you assign them both the same voice in the same playthrough. I'd definitely be hoping that Larian provides enough options that you'll be able to avoid that.
And if Larian isn’t interested in making a game about role-playing, [...] why on earth would you use D&D? It’s just a bad fit. That would explain why Larian feels the need to modify it so extensively, but if so: why use the IP?
Baldur's Gate is a Bioware game. That alone should speak for itself, but...
Baldur's Gate was never meant to be the roleplaying holy grail you seem to remember it as. Even at the time, there were plenty of other video games that were more built for roleplayers. The Might & Magic, and Ultima video game series for example. What made Baldur's Gate special was the quality of storytelling and the well-written prebuilt characters who joined your party.
Baldur's Gate came out in 1998, one year after Ultima Online, which was really the ultimate medieval roleplaying video game at the time.
