Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Feedback after watching 18 June event

A simple option is to not turn the camera to the main character as often : you could only look at who you are talking to. With some exceptions of course.

So your silent responses are not followed by the un-animated MC.

In the reddit AMA some time ago they said

Larian_Adam
Hello! Yes, custom characters will have voice acting - you’ll choose a voice as part of character creation.

-Will those voices be for just comments during combat or will they be voicing dialog conversations as well?

-They'll have full voice acting, just like origins!

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fhk1u3/im_swen_vincke_creative_director_at_larian/fkbnauj/


So maybe you have the character voices at launch. The banters while exploring were voiced, tho.

Voices in video games are definitely a double-edged sword, at present. There is no doubt that they CAN enhance a game, but that doesn't mean they WILL.

I'm with Sordak in being very against MY character having a voice that simply doesn't match the role I'm choosing to play, even if my in-head barbarians don't sound like Arnie.

Some games I can go with the protagonist voice options, but not all. Fallout 4, for example, I find OK because the characters are simply 2 US citizens, and neither of the 2 recorded voice has characteristics that grate with me. Even so, while you can make your character LOOK very different, it will always SOUND the same.

DA:I on the other hand has 4 voices to cover 24 gender/race/class combinations. Of those 4 voices I only really like one, and it doesn't necessarily fit with all the classes.

Obviously, games like TW3, however good they are on other levels, require that you are able to put yourself into a very specific role, with no choice over gender/appearance/skills/personality, let alone voice.

In some ways, the previous generation of games worked best. Games like Fallout 3 had fully voiced NPCs, but left the player to mentally voice their own character. In 1st person perspective, that worked quite well, for me, at least.

Even then, there were issues with consistency of pronounciation, and choice of accents. I particularly remember Fallout NV where the voice actors couldn't decide how to correctly pronounce Caesar.

But even with the above criticisms, I'm not sure I'd really want to go back to text-only dialog; I wish more effort was put into synthetic voices ( which can be pretty decent ), and developing a method of annotating dialog for emotion/stress/intonation within the development process.

:-O I suppose that nothing is impossible with Larian.

Even if Larian decides to be a normal company and opts out of fully voiced protagonists, I think a big problem was we were not playing it. I never thought it was strange to not hear my voice in Skyrim or Original Sin II, cause I was playing and reading these lines and trying to figure out what to do. The lack of voice doesn't bother me too often. However, I have had times in Witcher where Geralt talking makes dialogue feel slow, cause I already know what he said, I don't have to listen to it again. I'm not saying it is bad either way, I think it will work out. But I'm just saying watching the game may have emphasized the silence of the player.

Just let me record my own voice during character creation. Then add some effects processing so I will sound like James Earl Jones.

Having the protagonist voiced would mean the dialogues would take almost twice as long to finish, because reading is much faster. Knowing the amount of dialogue is even bigger than what we have in DOS2, I am not certain I would be enjoying being locked into dialogues for more hours than necessary.

IF they have the budget to do it, I think it would be great. IF they don't have the budget, it is what it is and I'm happy with what they are making too.

You have to walk before you can run. Perhaps the game sells big enough that Larian can grow and expand on their games producing even better ones each time. So far it appears they are moving in that direction. Money changes everything. If they make enough, the next projects will be more bold. If they don't make enough, we may never see another game. We will see.