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

For me BG3 is already much better than DA:I. The Mass Effect trilogy is one of my favorite games/game series. Once complete, BG3 will most likely be as well!

I dunno how many playthroughs of Inquisition you did, but my Inquisitor always sounded like the same guy no matter what. They went the Shepard route even through the protag is supposed to be your clay to mold. It was the worst of both worlds.

And that's not even getting into the horrendous blurb dialogue options that plague so many RPGs nowadays.

I was actually impressed at how many different characters just four voices suited in DA:I, and how the same voice could feel different just because the face and character were new. Though as I said earlier in this thread, I’d really like six options for BG3.

Whereas DA:O, which I think is a better game in many ways, I find difficult to revisit because of my mute Wardens, now I’ve been spoiled by having more vocal protagonists in other games.

And I recognise having a voiced protagonist involves some compromise on the number of different dialogue options, but for me it’s worth it for the sake of having my character brought to life by a voice actor. And I still think it should be possible to have plenty of opportunity to express our characters’ personality, class and background. Enough for me at any rate, though I can understand why others might feel differently.

I won't ever be able to understand paople that voted for option 2.
It currently look so wierd with everyone voiced and a mute Tav.

I voted for 1.
Fully voiced is the only option in a game with cinematics and close up dialogs.

Seems quite simple ...
Origin characters have pre-defined characteristics ... therefore their voices can allways perfectly corespond with who they are ...

Custom character is what we make it ... therefore his/hers voice lines can easily go to direct contradictions with what we would want them to think ...

I believe it was even talked about in some short living topic in the past.
When someone (i have feeling it was GM4HIM, but not sure) mentioned that he dislike Tavs coments on dead fishermans around the beach ... that voice lines sounds like our Tav pitty those fishers ... but if you wish to play arogant, evil, sadistic Drow ... it just dont fit your character at all.

For me the pc’s voice in DA:I and DA2 was too generic sounding. Still better than no voice, though! I prefer how it is done in the Mass Effect trilogy.

And even better in WItcher3. The poblem is that neither Shepard nor Geralt are custom characters. I heard them described as "shared protagonist" - mostly pre-defined protagonist with only some player input. Fun formula, adding some player agency to a pre-defined playable character, but hardly ideal material for an RPG protagonist.

DA:I (and BG3 Tav if he/she is fully voiced) run into the problem of not satisfying neither of the goals - they don't allow to create a true "custom" and they fail to provide a compelling protagonist to latch to.

In terms of design It's a simple conncept of a slider and "custom" and "pre-defined" being on opposites sides. The more you slide toward "pre-defined" the more space devs have to create a compelling protagonist to watch and listen to, but the further they go this way the less customisation is left to the player. The closer you go to "custom" though, the more you ask players to bring with themselves to the game. DA:I was actually pretty hard on "pre-defined" side, except it didn't do much with it. I don't think it counts as being "customisable".

Maybe I should just have said "won't understand" rather that "won't be able to".
You can't expect a video game to tell things exactly how you'd like to tell them yourself arround a table... and you can't choose exactly what you say nor what you do.

I guess only role player nerds (not meant as an insult at all!) would choose option 2. I'd personnaly go for a bit less "role play" to get rid of those weird dialogues during which Tav looks like a brainless character. It makes many dialogs/cinematics really cringe.

I would prefer silent since I find it more important what my character is saying, than how they sound when they are saying it, since i believe that a voiced protagonist makes it hard to have as many dialouge choices as i would prefer.

With that said, i don't think Larian will bless us with that much more dialouge in the full release, so they might as well record the pitiful few dialouge choices that do exist. With a toggle to mute your protag if the voices doesn't fit their character.

True ...
But silent protagonist = much more options ... compared to voiced.

So, the decision here is simple ...
While we cant reach our supreme goal, we pick that option that get us closer to it.

What "options" ? Is there really players that read texts when they play computer RPG saying "I will tell this line, but in a sarcastic tone because that's how I'm role playing my character" or "Oh my character is telling this in a humorous tone because he find it fun even if it is dramatic" ?
I guess even "hardcore role playing players" are just reading the story... but I may be wrong of course.

I can understand how stupid it may be when your Tav is supposed to be "evil" if his voice let us think that he is sad to see 3 dead random fisherman.. But I don't get how it could matter to anyone if Tav is sarcastic rather than glad when he see the dead fisherman.
Especially in a game that show dialogs as you would see them in a film.

Not aloud, but I generally have a voice and delivery of my protagonist in my head when I am reading his or her lines. Not so much in BG3 as in, for example PoE1&2, as it's writing doesn't engage me nearly enough, but even so moments like the one I posted before really take me out of the experience, as it isn't the voice I associate with my character. Either voice all, so I accept this is my protagonist voice, or don't and I will imagine something else.

Yes. I absolutely add to the text. I pick an option but also think of : What's my character's intention when saying this? Why? How are they saying it?

That's why not-overly-specific-characterizing dialogue options are better, in my opinion. Overly specific options do require various amount of mental gymnastics (in a way that's not as fun and more immersion-breaking) when there are no options that fit my character. And that happens a lot with BG3.

Neutral on the result, but just want to say...
More dialogue/RP options > Having a voiced character

Interresting.
I personnaly may have "a voice" or a tone depending the lines when I read books (like when you read aloud to children but in my head) or in games with texts dialogs... but it does not mean that my voice and my tone should be the one.
There are usually enough choices/role play elements in games for my tastes. Of course I'd like to have a few voice choices rather than only one no matter the race / the class and so on but I could live with the voice of your character. I guess it would look a lot less strange if it was more than just 2 or 3 lines of dialogs in the entire act.

I totally agree that it has to be fully voiced or not voiced at all... but not voiced does not make sense to me if there are close up of everyone else talking in the game.
It is breaking my immersion in many situations and immersion in rpg matter a lot more to me than the details of my custom characters personnality.

By "details" I'm talking about questions some players seems to ask themselves.

DnD nerds, that's what I said !
(No offence Melivy, I say this as a joke. I hope it won't be taken the wrong way! Sorry if that's the case, it's not my intention)

Dialogue options ... duh. O_o

Have you never wondered why Comander Sheppard have rarely more than 3 options, of wich they are all the same and differs only in flavour?
I mean ... even Renegade and Paragon were basicaly just "rough good soldier" and "friendly good soldier" when you think about it.

Voice is the reason ...
Recording voice lines is VERY expensive ... therefore, voiced characters as a general rule have less dialogue options ... compared to silent protagonists, who often have much more since, for them its cost is simply writing that line and tie it to some reaction.

Well kinda other way around but ... yes, actualy.

Not this way exactly tho ...
I dont need to pick a tone for each sentence, since i know my Tav ... when i read that text, i allready read them all in sarcastic/smug/smooth/seductive tone ... and then i pick wichever suits that Tav best.

To put it in words i believe you will understand easily ...
It breaks my immersion.

I dont really understand this argument ...

There are close up on people talking in many RPG with silent protagonist ... O_o

There is some connection to be made between fully voiced protagonist (and full VO in general) and less complex RPG, but I question whenever it is causality, or simple games that go for that kind of production value just don’t aim for branching dialogues.

Bioware is an especially troublesome studio to bring up, as their games were never particularly robust dialogue tree wise. The trend you mention can be easily traced as far as KOTOR, if not even Baldur’s Gate1&2. Their titles usually had two binary characters you could play as, but the conversation wheel made it a bit more obvious.

And as I mentioned before even of protagonist stays silent, in BG3 he still needs to be complemented by fully voiced and animated response by other NPCs making it far more tricky than creating few new nodes in the dialogue editor. Still, with voiced customs and origins, we would be looking at 10+ voice actors to record the same line. That would be an insanely silly thing to do.

Yes, absolutely. Not just "more", but "better" (see here, here, and here).

None taken.

Although, I don't agree with the reading. It's not so much because "DnD nerds", but because roleplaying a custom Tav is supposed to be part of the game. However, I'm currently unable to do that. Roleplaying is what allows me to be immersed in the story...not the game spoon-feeding me with various form of forced characterization (see previous post). That is what breaks my immersion.

However, like I said, if things don't change, I will just play Larian's Tav. Then, having a voiced-protagonist would be fine.
Not ideal (to me), but fine.

I'll accept that this game is more of a Dragon Age Inquisition than a Dragon Age Origins (this is not the best analogy/comparison but, the idea is there 😅).
With that mentality, I'll find it easier to enjoy the game.

In the meantime, I'll keep hoping for better dialogue options and less focus on Tav's reactions (facial animation and voiced lines).


Understandable. At the end of the day, people don't have the same criteria for what is and isn't immersion-breaking.
And that's ok 😸!

Yes, it’s absolutely essential in a roleplaying game where we need to pick from a fixed set of dialogue options (no matter how many of them we have) to always have a neutral option that will move things along without expressing a judgement one way or another. I don’t mind my character sometimes being silent about what exactly they think. And, in fact, most of my characters wouldn’t say what they thought about absolutely everything even if they could. But it sticks in my craw when I’m forced by the game to actively express an opinion that doesn’t fit my character. And I agree Larian’s current dialogues sometimes do that.

But as long as there is always a neutral option, then I’m happy to just pick options that actively express the character when they come along. And I don’t think that the restrictions on the amount of dialogue imposed by the need to voice protagonist as well as NPC lines would be so severe that it shouldn’t be possible to give me enough opportunities to express my different characters’ personalities and values, even if they can’t always say exactly what they’re thinking. At least, it should be possible to give me enough for me to count the trade-off between seeing my character brought to life by a voice actor versus more dialogue options one worth making in favour of the former.

And of course, I understand others might have a different attitude to this trade-off.


I struggle with this one. We undeniably linger too long on exaggerated facial expressions at the moment. But I do enjoy seeing my Tavs react on those occasions when the expressions and lines happen to work for the character I have in mind. I wouldn’t want them standing there like a lump. And I want to see them there in the world, interacting with NPCs. I don’t like games where we hardly ever see our character. The Outer Worlds was a really extreme example where it was possible to pretty much forget what your character looked like, but while I don’t think there’s any danger of BG3 going anywhere near that far, I mention it because I think there is a danger of cutting too much of our character out and for me that is far worse than showing them sometimes expressing stuff that’s not appropriate. In short, while I don’t think Larian have got the balance right now, I wouldn’t want them to go too far the other way. And as long as they remove the most egregious examples, I’m willing to compromise on having my character not always express exactly what I’d prefer as long as it’s not too far out, for the sake of seeing them being an active, reactive participant in conversations.

Again, it’s clear this is going to be a matter of taste!

I don't have a voice in mind going into a game for the protagonist, like for characters from a book, they occupy a kind of Heisenberg state that is gradually determined as they interact with the world. A lot of times when characters are voiced but given different, lets say personas, to play into, it can work well if you stick with one, but if you change it up at all they start sounding schizophrenic. I'm thinking of the one's like DAII Hawke's wild divergences in tone.

That's one of the beauties of the old-fashioned style of doing voiced lines, you say the initial line to establish the voice and tone, and then pepper in more lines at dramatic moments to sell it. If they did that for Tav I think it might work better than having every line voiced.