Honestly, if full voice acting is too big of a budget sink, I'd completely settle for a compromise like the old-school RPGs used to do. Just give us fully localized voices for the main companion intros, key story cutscenes, and combat barks.
Leaving the standard exploration dialogue to text-only with just a few atmospheric grunts makes it way less jarring than hearing an entirely different language than the subtitles you are trying to read. Plus, it would save Larian a ton on studio time while still giving the localized versions some much-needed flavor.
I couldn't disagree more.
Not only I got to the point where I actively dislike the "Just few barks and your first lines are voiced" you are suggesting here as a cheap-ass solution and I certainly wouldn't want to REGRESS to that point for games that can afford to be fully voiced (which is a lot of them, these days, since you can basically write off the expense as something that "repays itself" with the increase in sales that it brings), but I also disagree in general with your statement that listening voice acting in a foreign language is a problem in itself and "jarring".
I'm already into the habit of watching american/english movies in english, Hong Kong cinema in Chinese, Japanese stuff in Japanese and so on... And I wouldn't have it in any other way.
Hell, I even played Archolos in full Polish VO and that sounds basically as an alien language to me. Intonation goes a long way to convey meaning.
I generally prefer the originally-intended voice acting to watching/playing something dubbed in my native language (italian, for the record) in the 99% of cases.
P.S. And for context Italian is even one of the few lucky cases where the average quality of dubbing tends generally to be on the high end of the production value.
