In my view, one of the best games in recent times that actually fuses story-telling and roleplaying with roughly equal weight is Disco Elysium. In that game you don't get to customise your appearance (beyond choosing your clothes). You don't get to create your own backstory either. You definitely weren't given a blank slate.
What you get to do is character creation by selecting your starting stats, and those starting stats have a very substantial social/story impact in the game. Your stats literally have verbal arguments with each other to help you with your decision-making and this has a profound impact on the feeling you have as you play the game.
It's actually an example of a game with an unvoiced protagonist though. lol. He's almost like a empty vessel for these internal personalities to assert themselves onto.
It actually never bothered me in that game that there was an unvoiced PC and many unvoiced NPC lines. But I think that was an example of a game that was just really well written and presented in a manner that the lack of voice lines was practically invisible to me.
Additionally, I thought it was impressive that Disco Elysium is all basically just one game -- unlike Baldur's Gate which essentially has two main gameplay modes: the combat game mode and the story/adventure mode.
Anyway, I think Larian's decision to go cinematic with its dialogue will make it more difficult to get away with voiceless dialogue.
