I'm going to use the words "characterization" and "characterized" a lot...sorry 😅
I voted for no voiced custom character. I think for a custom character that's meant to be specifically crafted by the player, a full voicing just cuts off the ability to provide a breadth of options. Even in Mass Effect, we were always playing Shepard, who always was meant to fit into a defined character archetype. Here our Tav is in theory meant to be whoever we want them to be, and full voicing limits that and limits the possible choices we can make. I already feel as though Larian hasn't given us enough to really make the character truly ours, full voicing will only make that worse.
I agree that it would be best (and that it's possible to have that in games, with proper writing), but given the current situation, I don't believe it would be possible to have a Tav that can be "whoever we want them to be" anyway 😔 (far from it, actually).
I voted for voiced protagonist. It is not my usual choice, but the game, as it is, doesn’t provide a satisfying custom PC anyway. It already imprints behaviours on PC during cutscenes, and dialogue choices are limited.
Pretty much this!
The way it currently works, we have a lot of forced characterization (in my opinion) :
1) limited dialogue options that are very characterized.
2) a lot of cuts to our Tav in conversation to see their reaction (aka characterization). Some of them are weird, like *SPOILER* Tav smiling when Astarion talks about his scars after they had sex *END SPOILER* .
3) several random comment such as Tav asking Laez'el not to be so hard on the Tieflings (again, characterization).
So, I made my peace with it (well, sort of). At this point, I would almost prefer the "three archetypes" given to Hawke in Dragon Age 2 (which I liked, but is a bit more jarring here in a D&D game).
Plus, it does feel weird to have a fully-animated-yet-mute Tav (although I would love to have the option to only speak without words, like nodding and shaking heads throughout the whole game).
Also, I will admit, I did enjoy hearing
my Seldarine Drow react to Lolth sigils.
I really liked that Hawke felt so much like a real character, but it fell completely flat in DA:I. With the state of our character's expressiveness, I don't think I'd like looking at it for twice as long. The dissonance is often not so much the voice as the visual.
+1
I would love if they didn't cut as much to our Tav's face during conversation. It's often unnecessary and what could be easily avoided characterizations.
So, in the end, I voted for "I’d like custom characters to be voiced, but only if I could turn this off if no voice suited" because I like options 😄. It's not what I had initially expected from this game, but what would fit best at this point.
