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.
