Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Partially Voiced Main Character

BG3 will have english VO only. Partially voicing the protagonist or not voicing him/her at all won't change that.

Yes. That's a lot... but I also can see Larian doing that - giving Origins VO coupld improve their characterization a lot. I would think that doing a game like BG3 with cinematics and full-VO would be an insane waste of resources but here we are... is recording lines for PC, perhaps with some minor variations to give the origins more personality is really such a jump in investment compared to what they are already doing? When I think of COOP it would make so much sense - one wouldn't need to read lines your companion is picking as they would be acted out. BG3 has at least one instance of the protagonist speaking out during a cinematic dialogue. It might be just a leftover, not confirming anything, but I think it's a possibility worth entertaining.

With D:OS2 Larian released with surprised full VO for NPCs. They might do similar stunt for BG3 but with protagonist: "You can not only play as custom character, but pick one of 8 origins, and they are all fully voice acted!"

I am trying to find original, pre-EA Q&A, but I can't locate it. Can anyone help?

Here’s the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fhk1u3/comment/fkblil7/

SWTOR has 16 total (2 for each class), but it is an MMO with a huge budget. Not sure if they could afford full pc VO for BG3, but it would be great if they did!😊

I would almost rather have less lines but more VoiceOver voices. Like a different option per race per gender. Or at least by class.

The voices right now are too similar, there's no-one too rough and tough to pull off a good half orc or dwarf or Dragonborn voice imo. I wonder how they're going to tackle that.

I wonder how many custom character voices they have planned besides the 2 they already have?

Ideally, we'd have a fully voiced PC throughout the whole game, with multiple voice options to fit different personalities/races a bit better...

But that seems like a lot of work and unrealistic, but who knows.

Thank you Icelyn. The exchange was:


Yeah, it seems clear cut that:
1) Origins will have full VO
2) Custom characters will have full VO too.

I'm for the group that doesn't want full VO for the player character; it's simply not feasible to do it acceptably.

Right now, we have two feminine voice sets, and they are "30-ish Vaguely Posh British" and "30-ish Vaguely City British", and I'm pretty sure it's the same situation for male voices... and that's it - it's a super narrow band for voice set. To have a character voiced fully in either of those for all dialogue would be a major interruption and destruction of character; it would create an insurmountable degree of character dissonance, especially if you play the game more than once, or make more than one character. A character's in-game voice and sound, if present, constitutes a large part of their characterisation and the feel of the character - so in games with a customisable main character, such as a D&D game, the PC is almost always left unvoiced for this exact reason - they have efforts and bark sets, and you can usually choose from a wide selection of those, because they're much more straight forward to prepare a suitably broad spectrum of.

It's like Larian looked at the market and were told "Generally, games with full custom player characters don't give them full VA for everything..." and Larian cut them off there and said "Well WE'RE going to!!", and didn't bother to ever ask "why not?"

I'd like to see an extensive and broad spectrum of character voice options, encompassing many choices on the rough-refined spectrum, many choices on the young-old spectrum and many choices on the masculing-feminine spectrum; I want to be able to pick out a voice that sounds young, feminine and rustic or simplistic - I also want to be able to pick a voice that sounds like a masculine, elderly academy scholar and an androgynously delivered middle-aged fervent zealot.

Necessarily, in order to have that selection, these voice sets would be comprised of their effort and bark sets, to help give the feel of the character as you play, but wouldn't include full voicing for dialogue (wherein our character is presumed to voice, in the way we imagine, the line that we've just read and selected; we don't need to hear it enunciated on top of that). We also need to be able to choose to have no voicing at all, as an option amongst the others - this is actually important!

Now, if Larian had the time and resources to create full voice acting lines for every permutation of every line of character dialogue delivered in the game, and to do that for a satisfying number of voice sets - which is a massive number once you add it all up - that might be great... however, they Don't, and I honestly feel that anyone suggesting that they might is being disingenuous for the sake of the argument - they simply do not have the resources to do that, and doing full VA with just the two or three voice sets currently on display would be worse than simply having no voice acting at all.

If this would be a matter of vote between silent protagonist and properly made dialogue choices covering all basic reactions with few more to add a flavour ... and voiced protagonist that would read for us the sentences we just pick even tho sellection will be limited ...

I will allways vote for silent one.

And just for the record right now we dont have either ... bcs quite often our dialogue options dont even cover the most basic reactions.

Well, it's not, really.
This answer was vague and worded dubiously to begin with ("fully voiced" in this context may even just refer to the "barks" during combat and the arbitrary remarks the character makes, but excluding any dialogue choice you manually pick... Which is exactly what we already have now) and what's worse it was an answer from a time months before the EA even launched.

It wouldn't be surprising at all that even IF the idea was considered at some point, they'd be forced to reconsider as development goes.

What brings me to believe they meant full VO, is that two post before asked precisely about that: does voiced mean barks only, or will dialogues be voiced as well. To which answer is "it will be full VO". I will not hold them accountable if they won't do it based just on this post, but it seems to me they meant it in this post.

Response to couple points made earier:
What you are discribing is Bioware conversation wheel - it's goal was to have conversation options so short that players can make decisions without interupting the cinematic look of the game. What we have in the game isn't far of from what you are describing. One of my issues with BG3 is how dry the writing for the protagonist is. I am used to cRPG allowing player express their character - not only actions, but how they feel about things. Compare it even to good old BG2, and see how much intent concersation options have, and that's nothing compared to stuff like Planescape on PoE1&2.




BG3 protagonist writing wouldn't work if it was just read out - perhaps Witcher3 could be a good comparison, where lines are more comprehensive, but VO delivers a more comprehensive and characterised response:





Interestingly the initial BG3 demo had lines written in this werid past style, that would make much more sense, if after picking a line a character was meant to say something. In the demo Astarion (who Sven plays as) seems to be doing his own narration... is that the full VO meant in the reddit post? A unique narration for custom PC and origins? Was it "magic" of a demo? I don't know




I agree with all you have written, but I have some thoughts specific to BG3 - I dont think we get enough tools to characterise our character. While I usually prefer to fill the gaps in my imagination, to me BG3 doesn't have "gaps" but a big, black hole where my character should be. As such giving my Tav one or two specific voices doesn't really diminish how little characterisation I can do at the moment. I think that in an unlikely case that BG3 would have full VO for protagonist it would either be: origins only and no for protagonist, or origins and one or two choices per sex for the protagonist, like it is in Inquisition. Putting customs aside, I think origins would benefit a lot from having custom VO to better support their characters - and I do believe that once again origins will be THE way to play, with origins being an option for long time RPG players.

While lack of voices to choose from would be a disadvantage it could be enhanced, if those few voices had some variation in them - like depending on class or race, some lines would be different.

While it is not something I would want and would consider it a massive waste of resources, at this point I would welcome full VO - something to give my PC some presence in the game. It would be a big expense but at this point I am not writing anything off as impossible.

This may interest you:

The problem with a voiced protagonist (where that protagonist is not a predetermined character like the Witcher) is that the game will need to provide a wide range of voice choices to make people happy. The worst thing you can have is forcing players to go with a voice they hate and have that voice represent them through 100+ hours of playing a game. On top of that, any given player is also going to want more than just one voice that they like, so that when they replay the game they're not limited to the same voice again and again. And I don't buy that any game developer out there has the resources to provide this level of voice acting for the protagonist. So then if the game only comes with a limited set of voices to choose from, that would really suck (although a way around that is to provide an option to turn off the protagonist's voice, because I'd rather turn it off altogether than be forced to play the game with a voice choice I hate).

It is interesting stuff. With it I might make lean toward a belief that "Full Voice acting" meant different narrators for each origin, and tadpole lady for custom. However, I skimmed through the videos and they all seem to be using past tense, which indicated to me it's all pre-EA-release stuff. Perhaps originally EA was to launch with playable origins, and it was scrapped when they decided to change writing style based on feedback. It would explain why in their first showace they played as an origin - it is something that they have never done again. It might still be plan, and perhaps they are waiting closer to release to record Origins, as it is cheaper to re-record one VO, then all of them as changes are made.

This is exactly what I was trying to say. I'd rather have them spend money and resources on OTHER things - more important to me items like Day/Night and a better resting system and maybe more D&D 5e ruleset difficulty and fixing shove and all the other things we've discussed at great lengths out here than to have them focus tons and tons of money and resources into voice acting enough MC voice options to make it good enough. Voice acting all the set origin characters is great and expected, but having enough voices to match half-orcs, dwarves, humans, elves, cutthroats, bloodthirsty marauders, sinister and sadistic evil characters, crafty and vile, etc etc etc is too much - and for what? So the MC can read the dialogue lines you select or so the MC can say things that you could have one Narrator say? - like that part right after you run into Ed and his siblings which could be done by a Narrator instead of the MC.

As mentioned a few times on other posts, I'm replaying Icewind Dale, and do you know what I discovered? There are a TON of voice choices, and I still hated 90% of them. I even picked one that I thought matched on of my female party members, and as we're traveling she keeps saying, "I'm ready... and willing," and stuff like that. Her sexual innuendos, though they may make other people happy, is not something I enjoy - especially since she says them ALL the time. I'd much prefer her to be quiet. And that goes for most of them, actually. They just don't fit with the concepts for my characters that I have in my head. One guy character, who I have as the main party lead, I've changed his voice like 4 times now, and I still don't like it.

I can't imagine how it would be with BG3 if they add even MORE lines that the MC is going to actually speak with voices you have to choose from. They're going to need like a hundred voice actors to provide enough solid options for all the races, personality types, etc. that players are going to want to choose from.

Yeah... I think it's a terrible idea once you start to really do the math. It's going to be SO much work on Larian's part to do it well enough that players aren't going to be totally ticked off that their sadistic, twisted and conniving Drow Sorcerer with goth appearance is sounding like a happy, friendly, smiling and warm-hearted cleric of Selune.

One or two voices per a gender for Tav is enough for me as long as they get great voice actors. 😊

Two voices per gender is exactly what they have now and most people seem to be unhappy with how restricting that feels.

For context, I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with their performances, either. It's just that these four options don't really fit what most people have in mind for their characters' archetypes.

If they added full VO for Tav, I meant. As it is now, Tav doesn’t say much!

Yeah, I guessed as much.
My point is more that a lot of people are already unhappy with "Tav voices" not being a good fit for their characters with just a handful of barks and occasional remarks, let alone if they got the "Any dialogue selection voiced" treatment.

This exactly.

Picture this. I create a Barbarian Half-Orc named Gorm. Big guy. In my head, very gravelly voice and deep and gutteral.

Which voice fits my powerful and deep voiced Gorm? Instead, I have to hear him say, "Hells. Something just woke up down here," sounding like some average guy I just met at Starbucks. I like the current voices, but when I created my evil, con artist conniving Drow sorcerer with black tattoos and black eyes and hair looking all scary... The facial expressions and voices fell REAL flat. None fit him at ALL.

That said, let me add that I'm all for more voices, etc. as long as they also provide us with the option to simply select None - with NO voice for our MC. But, if they do that, they need to then have an alternative to those scenes, like right after talking to Ed and siblings. Something where instead of my MC talking, someone else does, OR the Narrator says the lines, or something.

That’s my Qunari Herald in DA:I.

Best game and best RPG of the year awards… somehow.

Hmm... While I am not necessarily for or against full voicing per se, I cannot help seeing two very big issues with the approach:

1) The famous "Wait wtf did I just say"-scenario. You select a option thinking "Yeah, this is probably it." and then your character spews out something *completely* different from what you imagined. Has happened to me soooo many times in SWTOR that I even lost count. X]

2) And - "ah yes, my dwarven fighter has the same voice actor as my dragonborn wizard!" Full voicing (as in, character dialogue choices being voiced as well) means limited options when it comes sheer amount of voice actors.