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!
