Of course good voice acting adds to the game, I can't imagine anyone honestly saying it doesn't. that said, there are a lot of other issues around it (for me at least). First, the protagonist. with a voiced protagonist, you have to be very careful how they're voiced. If it's not done well, it can lead to people hating their own character, which is about one of the worst things you can have. Well it's done well it can work, but again, it limits role playing options. As GM4Him was saying in another thread, when your main character is reacting a certain way to a situation either by voice or expression, it limits how you can interpret their response. if my character sounds scared but i want to role play them not being scared at all, it takes more effort.
I tend to prefer a non-voiced protagonist as well, so no argument there.
My only issue with this is that, while I can interpret delivery, tone is often inherent to the actual diction and connotation of the responses. Like Zarna, I’ll often find myself staring at options and find myself thinking that none of these responses fit the character I had in mind. Especially if I want to play a meeker character… most of the dialogue options imply the character is naturally confident. I could ‘interpret’ the responses as meek, but that feels less like interpretation and more like willfully ignoring the text and substituting it with my own. If you’re going to forgo voice acting for more dialogue options it would be nice if the dialogue options actually felt varied and distinct. (Which is a criticism applicable to BG3 as well, to be clear.)
A good example of a wasted opportunity is how, early on, WoTR has a dialogue option asking who Deskari is. Which is strange because the game specifically employed a Tyranny-style mouse over option for world building. While there’s an argument to be made that it’s to allow you to play an amnesiac if you like, the amnesiac route has been done so often in games it feels like a complete waste of a slot. Not to mention there’s only so much you can interpret when the dialogue often has all the subtext of a block of wood.
Second is the amount of dialogue. Despite the modern trend to think that all voice all the time is the only way to go, i think it's very clear that for anyone other than the biggest studios, having hundreds of thousands of lines of dialogue and having them be entirely voiced well is a massive undertaking and could increase the budget of a game many times past what they were hoping for originally. You can see the different if you just look at BG3 and WotR. in BG3 voice acting adds a lot, but the conversations are often quite brief. In WotR, you'll have key moments and conversations being voiced, but a lot of the extra information gathering bits are not, and that leads to a massive amount of extra information that can be given to the player.
For me, I'd much rather have a game where the important parts are voiced but there is still a ton of non-voiced text over a game where it was all voiced, but there was a noticeable lack in the length, variety, and number of conversations
I would like to point out conversations are probably also briefer because long blocks of woolen, expository dialogue would result in marble mouthing from all but the best VAs… and perhaps Jonathan Majors. (Seriously, though, I’m replaying the opening and the dialogue is somehow even more grating than I remember.)
That said, if we compare the opening act of BG3 (which isn’t even complete) to the opening act in Kenebras, I’m not certain there’s really that much of gap in the amount of dialogue. The only area where WoTR was superior to BG3 in that period was in the conversations between companions during camp as well as the amount of companions. I do think it’s a lot easier to miss a lot of the dialogue in bg3, which is extremely irritating.
