Aesir maybe you missed it, but we discussed the whole issue of cost for quite a few pages. It is not as expensive as you think. Generally, unless you are a big star, it usually is like $300/day. So it is more of a preference whether you want it or not, than to associate to cost. Not to mention, the facial animations of the PC over the companions is just terrible so I hope either way they fine tune those before they launch. It is a totally different environment in development than what it was for DAO (although I agree the game does better than that game for interaction).
I'd like to see your sources for this information. A brief search on my end (
SOURCE 1,
SOURCE 2) indicates that voice actors are paid hourly at a rate of $200-$350 with a minimum number of hours per session (2-4 hours according to source 1 and 1-2 hours according to source 2). Source 1 also mentions mandatory bonuses based on the number of sessions worked. For someone voice acting as the PC, it seems likely that the number of hours and sessions alike would climb pretty high, especially for Baldur's Gate 3, which already has
45,980 lines of dialogue in early access alone. And who knows how many voice options we'll end up with (though to be fair, I wouldn't personally expect more than the ones we already have). One thing that may muddy the waters here, though, is where Larian's voice actors work; they sound pretty American to me, but it's not hard to imagine them being paid to if Larian expects the majority of sales to come from the US.
It seems to me that depending on the number of characters and lines in a game, the costs of full voice acting could certainly add up to something quite significant (again, especially for a game like Baldur's Gate 3) and thus there is something to be said for the argument that voice acting is expensive enough to detract from other features, particularly insofar as they'd require additional dialogue. As far as cutting into other development options goes, there's also the time it takes and the constraints it can impose on writing;
J.E. Sawyer brings this up, though admitted in nonspecific terms, in regards to its impact on Deadfire. Maybe full voice acting makes up for it in terms of added sales/profits; it seems very likely that there are far more people who will slam or flat-out won't play a game that is unvoiced for significant stretches than there are who will slam or refuse to play a game for being fully voiced (full voice acting isn't a deal-breaker for me even though I'm personally of the opinion that bad or even mediocre voice acting is worse than none at all, and I suspect that a lot of people who have problems with the current insistence on voice acting in games are similarly willing to buy/play games that indulge it).
All that said, Larian is already going for voice acting for everyone else in the game, and paying a narrator to read the unspoken lines on top of that. Whatever damage voice acting can cause in terms of time and money it takes away from other options will already be done in spades on the basis of its existing scope throughout the game, including the origin characters who combine PC and NPC voice acting requirements.
