Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Voiced Protagonist

It is NOT useless, the mute protagnist is so immersion breaking for me that I decided not to buy the game.

I quoted a specific comment about a specific issue someone had. I'm sorry it's so bad for you that you can't play the game. And I can certainly relate, but I don't think it's a good enough reason to spend so much time and money on it.

Its not even just the money issue. There are likely technical limitations involved. I remember an interview about Dragon Age Inquisition I think and the developers mentioned there were things like a limit to how long each piece of voice over could be so lines had to be kept to a 'twitter' like limit and also limits to how much dialogue could be loaded into memory at one time. And voice files are some of the largest files soaking up hard drive space. Plus if 9 people have already recorded a line, and you later decide it should be changed . . . well lets just say it greatly restricts your options.

Lacking a voiced protagonist will be one of the biggest drawbacks when this likely masterpiece finally releases. When everything is so superbly voice-acted, the protagonists silence is deafening.

Not a Bioware fan I take iti?

uh... soundfiles are actually quite small compared to everything else in a game (unless you go for raw uncompressed PCM which I wouldn't know why you would). Also, limiting changing dialogue later restricting options? isn't that already a problem for all the voiced NPCs? (granted, maybe not quite as much) they should just go for no voiceacting at all then.

I also keep seeing people mentioning how expensive it is - it's not like they are using Hollywood talent, an average voiceactor makes ~$200 an hour. For the money spent on a CGI movie like the intro (now THOSE are expensive), you could get a ton of voiceacting.

You haven't played games before like this one, yes? I mean Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, also Divinity 2?

They never do the voice acting of the main character, because it will take too much time and money. This is what happened to Dragon Age. You never play Origins? And after full voice (in DA2) we have only wheel of elections, instead of a full-fledged role-playing game...

Consider that this is not just a large number of default options. But also variants for races. Class. And other stuff like that. The worst thing is that everyone will have the same voice. The intonation will be the same. Dwarf and elf same voice? PLZ! Awful. Good and evil with same intonation? No plz!

It only makes it worse.

Or you need to do a voice for each race, at a minimum. I hope you understand that this is already expensive?

The compression between dragon age origins and it's sequels is very useful here. The difference in dialogue choices is staggering

Absolutely NOT. This isn't Mass Effect/ The Witcher/ Halo.
Having the exact same voice at every play-through is extremely DULL for this type of game. Defeats the purpose of creating a UNIQUE DnD character.
BG3 dialogue cinematic already butchered this game (makes having a load more companions impossible, no modded companions, very restrictive <movie like> dialogue options, romances look HILARIOUS, acting is cringy, looks silly/buggy/<face palm> and will age badly etc etc...
Now people complain that the only CREATIVE part of the game, the main character YOU create must have a Mr. Clean voice.
No thanks. Points to Larian on that. Now add non cinematic dialogues so we can have or create/MOD in more companions!

Although this doesn't bother me in the slightest, I think it's really unfair for me to tell people to "get over it". Not everyone grew up playing CRPG games and even I can get tired of playing something like BG 2 because of all the reading. I still think it's the best compromise between dubbing everything and dubbing nothing.

I would personally love to have the protagonist's lines fully voiced. But the way this game is set up makes that very unrealistic. First of all, they have four different custom PC voices. So all four of those voice actors would have to redundantly record EVERY line of dialogue the PC might say in the ENTIRE game. Thousands of lines, probably.

But that's not all. Because what if you're doing the conversation as one of the origin characters/companions? Oh shit, now we gotta have at LEAST five MORE voice actors also record every line of dialogue the PC might say in the entire game. That's if they don't add any party members, which we already pretty much know they're going to.

Paying to voice ONE, maybe TWO versions of the main character for the whole game, that they could do, and I'd expect them to. But ten or twelve different actors all recording the same massive number of lines? That would be more or less unthinkable.

They may do it, they've said it's going to be fully voiced on a couple of occasions... But it wasn't 100% clear.

And to add to what you say - even if they fully record lines for those twelve voices, we'll end up with four custom character voices. Only four. Two per gender. For all races, classes, backgrounds - all archetypes. A soft-spoken dwarven barbarian might make sense with a particular backstory, but not at all in most cases.

As I rarely find a voice I actually like (and in this game I barely can tell a difference but usually go with voice 3 for males). I have zero issues with a silent main character. I can imagine the voice as being pleasing to me for the character that way.

I would prefer a deeper voice (and not like solasta where deeper sounds like he smoked 4 packs a day since childhood, gravelly is not deeper). Just deeper. Not the higher pitched voices that seem to dominate the voiced main characters in games so far.

I played Baldur's gate 1+2, Icewind Dale 1+2 Planescape Torment etc. The HUGE difference between those isometric RPGs and this one is the cinematic conversations, those old games were almost half novel.

And stop saying it so expensive when it's really not.

And I'll take Bioware's conversation wheel and sacrifice some voiceoptions over mute protag any day of the week.

also, I REALLY wish Larian would comment on this subject and put this discussion to rest. It almost feels like Larian decided to not do full voiceacting even though they claimed it during an AMA, and hope people will just forget about it.

Well and this is kill roleplay gameplay like it’s dead right now in Bioware games…

The dialogs don't make sense in BW. And voices still sound absolutely boring, because we just have voice1 and voice2. We don’t have warrior, scientist, sly or other choices for the personality of our character with a change in intonation.

As a result, we completely lack the personality of the character, not only in voice, because it does not give the choice that we need, but also in the dialog wheel. Madness.

There is no chance that I will accept 1-2 options, but with a voice, instead of getting 10-15 options without a voice.

I can understand both sides of the argument, even though I personally vastly prefer unvoiced protagonist (though battle cries and occasional comments are fine, so long as there are a range of voices to choose from, like in DA:O and BG1 and 2).

I've had a hard time connecting to my characters in DAI and DA2 because they're stuck somewhere in between custom-made and pre-made. I can design them physically the way I want, but no matter what kind of personality I want to give them, I won't be able to do so freely because their mannerisms and voices will always be determined for me. Sure, there are a few options to choose emotional responses, but you will never be able to make ex. an Inquisitor as silly as Sera or as haughty as Vivienne, if that's even the right word. I love that Larian are making the protagonist have a lot of facial expressions (though I wish the player could decide what kind of behavior would suit their character in the CC, ex. stoic, smug and so forth), something I feel like DAI lacked a lot apart from some scenes.

I prefer my character not speaking for me, that way I can imagine the voice as I want <3.

I prefer non-voiced protagonists because of the extra dialogue options folks have mentioned and because it's much easier - and less jarring - to mod in new or changed dialogue with an unvoiced character. On the other hand, voiced protagonists can be very compelling if done well - back when I was into Star Wars: The Old Republic, there were some classes I played over and over just because the voice acting was so good.

Wish we could get a response from Larian around this

I also like silent MC. I love it how it is right now.