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

While I personally will be the boring person (yet again) to say that I can roll with whichever - full voice, part voice or no voice. I will agree on one thing Blotter said: it is REALLY weird to have your character making all of these weird expressions if it is not part of your character and voicing risks on adding to that factor.

I personally feel like about 50% of the time, my character is making faces not even remotely close to whatever reaction I'd imagine them having. If I could wish for something without regarding to the work or money behind it - then it would be some kind of pre-set animation personality. Kind of like how you choose your animation kit in PoE2, but yknow... Included in these cinematic sections so we don't have, like Blotters example above, a Lolth-sworn drow making weird faces when encountering death...

And thus, I can only imagine how I'd feel regarding full (or at least more) voicing for non-premade PCs if it is anywhere near the PoE2 voicing... I still feel this mix of cringing and laughing whenever I think of my character randomly screaming "RAAAAAAAAAWWRRGHHHH!" when I start shooting things... I literally went through every single voice option in PoE2 and almost died out of laughter every time my character randomly went screaming. That is not quite how I imagined my silent, sneaky ranger to approach enemies... :') Meanwhile, I'd say the voice acting in Pathfinder is a rather good "medium" option, where your character interacts and talks (out of dialogues), but in a more... Subtle and neutral way. Like our Tav does right now.

However, if we are to discuss full voicing for dialogues and cinematics ... Uhm, yeah - there's a risk it'll do much more harm than good. If it goes anywhere near Guild Wars 2 protagonist voice acting, then imma mute my headset and close my eyes when it is time for character dialogues. Not ever have I cringed so much at character dialogues as in early GW2 - I still to this day remember my first norn character that was supposed to be a calm, elderly, wise necromancer... Until the cinematic dialogues happened... >.< Now if it would move more towards SW:TOR character voice acting, then I'd be alright with voiced dialogues. Just... Uhm, remember to give appropriate descriptions to the actual voiced responses. Anyone who has played SWTOR have probably had more than one surprise experience where the voiced dialogue didn't match the written one AT ALL... x')