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.
