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.
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.
