Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General The importance of PC voice in RPGs

That's my biggest issue with a non-voiced PC. They often focus on the non-speaking face of the PC long enough that it seems unnatural and awkward that they're not speaking. When they just focused for a moment to show a facial expression and then quickly moved on, it seemed more natural than when they focused on the PC for longer.

The problem with showing the character's facial expressions and giving only one (or two) voice options is what many people have stated already: it's hit or miss if the voice matches the player's idea of their character and if the facial expressions match how they think their character would react. Although I've thought the PC voice acting in many previous RPGs was good quality acting, I didn't always feel it suited my character. I can mentally adjust my character somewhat to fit the available options, but it only works so far.

Ideally, it would be nice to have a series of voices to select from and then do a combination of emotion/wording for selecting your dialgoue options (I like how they do it in the more recent Deus Ex games). However, if that's not practical, then non-voiced PC with shorter (or no) moments in the dialogue might seem more natural.

They've done such a good job with all the NPC facial expressions and voices in dialogue overall, so I really hope they are able to find a better balance for the PC as well.

This video is relevant to this thread.

I don't know about you, but it made me feel like I could totally roleplay that character better being so silent

It's not really. It's Halflife2 problem. RPG protagonists have voice - it is just your voice to add.

Thought frankly, most romances, in a game not revolcing around romances, feel that way no matter if they are voiced or not. There isn't simply enough time or focus on them to not sounds like a silly romantic comedy. No romances in adventure and combat oriented RPGs!

A good example of silent protagonist who didn't work was Corvo Attano in Dishonored1 - he was an existing character with his relationships, reasons and goals, so by making him silent he was not very well characterised, while still not adding any space for players to express themselves. DLCs and sequel changed that, and it was for the better.

Meanwhile playing with voiced RPG character be like (timestamp 2:32)

Actually more than anything else this video shows how stupid and pointless romances are in RPGs

Silent protagonist is perfectly fine. I don't need to hear how my character sounds I have my own imagination for that thank you and I certainly don't appreciate the game forcing facial expressions on me. What if my character doesn't care if a bunch of people got burned alive by a dragon so why that dumbass expression?

No more stupid or pointless than any other type of relationships with Npcs.



Yes, preset facial expressions don't work for custom characters.

If you hear voices in your head or talk to yourself, then you have considerably more than "Halflife2 problems" my friend.

Your argument would be more valid if used to advocate for a text adventure. The voices would still be yours to add, but at least then you wouldn't be constantly confronted with being a deafening silent protagonist that a world of sound revolves around. Kills immersion for me. A voiced protagonist was one of the main reasons I found all ME-games so compelling I actually finished them, I normally don't otherwise. Including DOS2 which I liked quite a bit.

That said, I understand voiced protagonists aren't compatible with the origin system for practical purposes. The sheer amount of voices required would be prohibitive. Perhaps the more precise issue is voiced protagonist vs. protagonist origin characters. For me...voiced protagonist all day, every day.

I used to think unvoiced protagonists were better, until I played Mass Effect with Jennifer Hale voicing my FemShep.

Voiced characters are great, so long as there is a voice fits your idea of how the character should speak. I liked JH in mass effect, but didn't like the male voice, so in that game, my Shep is always female. Similarly, in DAI, there are 4 voices, but I only really like one of them.

In some games, I don't like any of the voices; then having a voiced protagonist sucks, and would much prefer unvoiced.

Eventually, dynamically generated speech will probably allow you to "design" your own in-game voice; but not for a few years yet.

I'd much prefer that our custom characters had voices. Like many others have said, it also is jarring for me when everyone else is nicely voice acted and my character is silent. It's not what I expected, and it makes me wrinkle my nose. It would be great to have a few voice options to choose from when creating our character.

As an aside, in Baldur's Gate 2 there was an option that let you record your own voice for the 20 or so lines that your character says while walking around or fighting etc, and I actually made my own custom voice lines for that :- )

It really sticks out. Made worse by the camera looking at your character and them saying nothing, I thought it was a bug when I started playing. Unvoiced would be more acceptable if we just stuck with over-the shoulder or first person camera.

I thought it was confirmed the protagonist would be fully voiced on release though?

Yup, if you pay attention after talking with the dumb humans who got their brother killed by the owlbear, after the convo your character actually voices a line.

I hope they offer maybe 3 varieties, so the drow male can have something closer to Minthara, more menacing and less cheery.

I have completely missed this :O I will be very surprised it we turn out to be fully voiced by release, and I am not quite sure if it is for the better or worse - but I am keeping my fingers crossed!

I just... Hope that they don't have the same kind of awkward combat screaming that PoE and DA:O has... I always get so put off by my DA:O character screaming "LOOK AT THIS MESS, I LOVE IT!!!!" when she generally is quite still and put. . _ .

Personally I'd like to hear the lines of Tav +howevermanyoriginsweget ... it just feels right for this game in particular. Literally everyone/thing else is mocapped and voiced to high hells.

The buggy multi-tav-reactions/partial conversations just make it more apparent too, if anyone else has lan connected to themselves to have 2+ customs.

Obviously they need check boxes somewhere down the line for various voice options... so people can turn Mocap off, Tav voice etc - with the defaults naturally being all on. For those that hate, give them the checks they need without having to dig into mods.

The silent protagonist would be fine if it weren't for the cinematic dialogues. Due to the cinematic dialogues, the player character's behavior is idiotic. On the one hand, all NPCs have advanced facial expressions and the PC just stands like a stake and makes silly faces.
There is definitely a reason why games in the silent protagonist usually do not have cinematic dialogue, it does not fit together at all.

This gives me the same negative impression as in the metro series, where the hero also seems to be pulled out of a bad game.

ps. The true soul scene is probably one of the weirdest moments I've come across in a game. If a character isn't speaking 99% of the game time and speaking suddenly, it's at least weird.