Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback POLL: Voiced protagonist?

I agree, and that’s why I think DA:I is the best example (that I’ve played) for comparison, where a limited number of voice sets need to suit a wide variety of characters. To do that, the personalities expressed by means of the voices would probably, I concede, need to be more neutral than Shepard, Hawke or Geralt (though I’ve still not got all the way through the second Witcher game so can’t comment on the third!).

I think there’s still a lot of scope to express emotion and personality based on the specific lines chosen, but I agree with Sozz that the need to have all lines work for a character means this needs to be toned down a little compared to a character with a fixed personality, otherwise many characters could end up sounding as though they have dissociative personality disorders, even if that’s not what we’re gong for!

That said, my favourite Shepard to play is one that talks tough, and is certainly chaotic rather than lawful, but has a heart of gold (and tends to end up fairly evenly balanced between Paragon and Renegade). And my favourite Hawke is usually unserious, can be sweet when her sympathies are touched … but you wouldn’t like her when she’s angry. I have found some lines in both games that jar when playing changeable characters like these, but overall I think they can work really well. But these are still examples of variations on a single character, so I would accept that the limitations on the range of the vocal performances might be greater for voiced custom protagonists in BG3.

Still worth it for me, though!

Sure ...

All im saying is that several dialogue options can lead to same set of "fully voiced and animated response by other NPCs" ...

Its allready happening ...
If you reload certain dialogues enough times and pick different options, you quickly notice that there is sometimes single sentence added to acnowledge your decision ... and then i replay the same generic response that is there for them all ... sometimes that one sentence is even missing and all responces are same.
And i dont think that is anyhow bad ... it helps us to better build our character.

What i mean is something like:
*blah blah blah*
1) *Attack*
2) I was hoping i get the change to smash your face! *Attack*
3) It pains me, but i do what i have to. *Attack*

Yes i know this isnt mid of conversation, but its ender that dont really need any reasponse from npc ... but i hope it ilustrates the point well enough.

Indeed ... there is stil room for improvements.

I believe this is core of the problem ...

For example when you play a Barbarian.
Your Tav have option to force a Goblin eat a shit ... litteraly ... there are some noises as he is fighting against his urge to puke and coments about that its still warm and fresh ... its disgusting ... and during all those noises and coments, our Tav is standing there smiling like an idiot. :-/
I dont know about your characters, but such expressions wouldnt fit any i would ever made.

It would possibly help if Larian would include personality pick in our character creation that would help the game wich set of reaction to use in certain scenes ...
Same as it was in Dragon Age: Origins ... when you picked the voice for your character.

Either that, or give us option to express our mood by simply picking it.
I mean ... there is lots of unused space during that dialogue, personaly i wouldnt mind at all if there would be some icons (Like smilies! laughing ... flirting, or intrigued ... sad ... happy ... disgusted ... :? confused ... >:] sinister ... eh, i dont know scared smilie so, youl have to imagine that one) we could click during shots on our character, to have fitting facial expression.
Yes, im aware that many people would pick bullshits, or change them every second, just for the fun of it ... but quite honestly, i dont care, if they find it enjoyable what is the problem?

To me this makes the game sound unfinished.

I suppose you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

Apart from one (which I will come back to), every objection to a voiced protagonist can be overcome by giving an option in the settings to toggle the MC voice on or off. In fact this is even better for those who don't like a voiced protagonist because it could also switch off the currently voiced thoughts of the protagonist too.

The only objection this doesn't solve would be cost, i.e. it is costly to voice the lines and that money could be better spent elsewhere. However, it is actually not that costly at all, in proportion to the other spending because they have to voice all the non-custom origin characters anyway. This is just one more (or a few more for multiple voice choices). Also, that argument for keeping down costs by eliminating features YOU don't like could be applied in many places. For example, I don't like the romance arcs - I find them cringe - and I won't play them. Getting rid of them would also keep down costs, but I acknowledge that they are here to stay. (I would like a toggle to remove them though.)

Well, while I am strongly in favour of voiced protagonists, I do think there’s more of an argument in the other direction than just the opportunity cost of an undesirable feature.

As folk have argued in this thread, a dialogue tree that is designed to cope with fully voiced protagonists is probably going to have to be less complex than one where this isn’t a consideration, in that dialogue choices are probably going to have to be more restricted to avoid the cost and effort in recording lines being prohibitive. Yes, the number of options is already going to be limited by the need to record NPC responses, but this would be a further constraint.

If this is right, and I think that to some degree it must be, then people who don’t want voiced protagonists but do want lots more options to express their custom characters are going to be negatively effected even if there’s a toggle to turn voiced dialogue off.

Oh, and you say they are going to have to voice origin characters anyway. They might do so, but don’t have to as far as I can see. Currently, origin characters are just as silent as custom ones when they’re the ones controlled during conversation. Larian could keep it that way.

I don't think that is true at all. The main "cost" of including complicated dialogues is in the writing and the scripting, making sure that all options are consistent and consequences are followed through. It is not including the voice acting. The voice acting in conversations will be appropriately tagged files that are called from the dialogue scripts, so should be no issue to include. The only extra effort created by having them voiced is producing the voice acted sound files, but these are just a script of lines given to the voice actor. Sure, it will be more expensive to make them say more lines, but then we are back to the arguments I was presenting earlier.

Edit: On the last point, the origin characters already have a fixed personality, so then all the arguments about not voicing them go away. It would be completely ridiculous not to have voice acting for them and you may as well throw away all the voice acting for NPCs too.

Whether they decide to have full pc VO or not, I doubt they would redo dialogue tree design at this point in development.

I don’t think it’s quite the same argument. Your initial point, as I understand it, was that it’s not a good argument against voiced protagonists that the resource it would take could be spent on different features. I agree.

The argument I was presenting was that, for resource reasons, a dialogue system designed for voiced protagonists will likely have fewer branching options than one that doesn’t, and that would affect everyone, whether or not they listened to voiced protagonists.

Okay, you can argue that the constraint on dialogue choices is not a hard one and that Larian can choose to put just as many options in whether they voice the protagonists or not, in which case the arguments come together again. But it feels that there are diminishing returns here, and even people like myself who really want fully voiced protagonists would balk at spending so much of the available resource on that feature. While there are actually many more choices available, in practice it feels as though Larian would and should make a decision between fewer dialogue options and fewer custom voice sets but fully voiced, or mainly silent protagonists and more options both in dialogue and for custom voice sets for barks and the odd line.

Of course, questions of exactly how expensive adding voice acting for protagonist lines actually is will affect how far adding voice acting really does, in practical terms, restrict the number of dialogue options and voice sets. That’s not something I have knowledge of, but I hope you’re right that it’s not so expensive as to make a massive difference.

Apologies, that was ambiguous. I didn’t mean the approach to dialogue would need to be redesigned, just that Larian would plausibly be constrained in the number of additional branching dialogue options they could add. I should probably have have said “written” rather than “designed”.

I like something in between best! I love having character creation options, such as picking gender, appearance, and for fantasy rpgs being able to play an elf! These are missing from the Witcher. I also like my character to be memorable and to have some personality, which was missing from DA:I.

As voting has slowed, I thought I’d just take stock of the results of the poll.

As of this post, there have been 56 votes, and it seems as though voiced protagonists are something most of us have a firm opinion about one way or another, with only 5 people (9%) saying they didn’t care.

A narrow majority of respondents (30 out of 56, or 54%) want all protagonists to be voiced, including custom characters. And I was surprised at how all-in most of us who want this are, with only 3 people making their support of voiced custom characters conditional on being able to toggle the feature off if no voice suits.

But there’s also a substantial percentage of us (38%, or 21 people) who actively don’t want custom characters voiced, though 6 of these people would nevertheless like origin characters to speak when they are used as player characters.

(And yes, I know that adds up to 101% - that’s just the rounding.)

In the admittedly uncertain event that this small, self-selecting group is representative of the player base as a whole, it looks as though around half of players could really want voiced protagonists, and if Larian have reached this same conclusion then hopefully they will have a strong incentive to provide this feature. But it also looks possible that adding voiced custom protagonists could alienate almost as many players as it satisfies, and therefore that Larian should be making this optional if they include it. But it is recognised that adding the feature could impact all players whether or not they use it, if it limits the total number of dialogue options and voice sets Larian are able to provide.

And, wherever they fall on the question of voiced protagonists, almost everyone seems in agreement that the animation of our characters when reacting to NPCs and events needs to be improved, and that dialogue choices shouldn’t railroad us into expressing opinions that don’t fit our characters. And that there is a gap in the voice sets currently available, particularly when it comes to appropriate voices for tougher characters.

Thanks to everyone who responded and commented on the poll!