Voiced protagonists in RPGs can be a contentious topic. Without voice actors, we wouldn't have the iconic deliveries of Commander Shepard, the Wanderer in Fallout 4, and plenty of other memorable player characters.
But Bethesda, for its upcoming sci-fi RPG Starfield, decided to take a different approach. Speaking with Polygon, the road to an unvoiced protagonist in Starfield wasn't a straight one, and did take some time to figure out.
"Early on in the game, we did have a voiced protagonist," said lead designer Emil Pagliarulo. "In pre-production, the plan was to have a voiced protagonist. We hired an actor, we got the voice, we listened to him and we were like, 'You know what, this guy is too specific.'"
"So then what are the options? Do we have, like some RPGs do, four voices? Do we have one voice, but hire someone else who's more convenient? But [in Starfield] you can make every different type of person. We realized that the only way to really do it and let the player be the person they want to be was to have an unvoiced protagonist."
"There's a big argument, if in Fallout 4 and other RPGs, players don't like reading a line of dialogue, a player response, and then they click it and get [a different spoken line]. But the problem is, then you read it, and then you click it, and you have to wait for them to say the same thing. So that's not ideal either. So then we just arrived at, What if we just go text? and it was just really freeing. And, I mean, we have over 200,000 lines of spoken dialogue in Starfield with no voiced protagonists. And it was not having a voiced protagonist that allowed us to create such a big world."
It does seem like the safer option to give players an unvoiced character, as they can then imagine the voice to sound however they like. We'll still be getting voiced side characters as well, so it won't be completely silent in space.