Silent Protagonist in RPG games. An abomination? Thing of the past? Cool? What are your thoughts?

Honestly, there's good points and bad points about either.

A good VA can make a character come alive and add a lot of depth to the story. It amkes player interactions with NPCs feel more natural.

A silent protagonist can let the player's imagination fill in the blanks and make the character feel more personal. Plus it's likely less expensive.

I don't really see a problem here.

If a non-voiced character is causing a problem then speak it in your own voice how you want it to be.
However if a voiced character is causing you a problem -then it is simple: don't use sound.
That is what MUTE button is for after all. 


That being said we could all learn more from KOTOR.

An unvoiced protagonist is fine if they're on their own for most of the game, in the case of Isaac Clarke in the first Dead Space (because no-one is left alive to talk to) and Chell in Portal (who refuses to speak to spite GLaDOS and Wheatley).

It's a little harder to implement that if you're in a modern RPG that's going for a full cinematic look, rather than first-person.

I love DAO and KOTOR to bits, but it is a bit of a disconnect when your character is "supposed" to be talking in a scene, but we cut to a view of them and they're standing there silently with a slightly gormless look on their face.

If it were me, I'd try to justify being voiceless in the game, if I was going that route.

Maybe the protagonist was born or rendered mute somehow, so the dialogue options are presented in-game as texts being sent to the HUD of your allies, allowing you to more easily communicate? Maybe even have a line where the protagonist jokes about trying a Hawking-esque voice synthesiser once, but it wasn't to their taste?

Might be a cool change of pace to have a protagonist who uses a form of sign language. That might be too hard to animate though, unless we stuck to a first-person perspective and the game handwaves it as us "signing" our dialogue from the POV of the other characters. If we can accept not seeing our legs in First-Person view, we can excuse off-screen signing.

(Although pushing it off-screen would kinda detract from having a protagonist using signing in the first place)

There have been instances of this where the person can still talk after.

I definitely prefer a voiced protagonist mainly because it's just weird that the main character has no voice and every other NPC('s) does. And your character feels more alive when she/he has a voice. But on the other hand i agree with Robtherobber that if you don't like your protagonists voice ( i also do not like Geralt's voice one bit in the W3 ) that you somehow have to get used to his voice for the rest of the game.

How does this not yet have a poll?

Silent.
Spend more resources on the plot of the game instead of having to pay voice actors.
Hey!
Here is an idea make the crew voice the game's cast.
Yeah.
Doesn't always work but would allow more time spent on the gameplay, plot, hud, ect.

I didn't put a poll because i'm only asking for people personal preference not which one is better or more preferred overall.

Preference is for voiced, but a silent protag is not a deal breaker, I happily play both (Secret World even makes fun of the voiceless PC, which is a cute nod/wink)

I will say that sometimes for 'create your own character rpgs' a voiced protag can cut down the number of replays I can do. To often I end up tying the voice to a single play through and trying to do new characters with that voice just makes something feel off.

For the moment I wouldn't care if the RPG had no voice actors since I am craving for a game. The last game I bought was assassins creed origins which I consider a poor mans RPG with not much of a story and repetitive ultimately boring gameplay. Atmosphere only goes so far in carrying a game.

It is a harsh truth that the games I like are simply not being made anymore. I am not even counting on the next installment of dragon age franchise.

Kingdom come deliverance doesn't appeal me in the slightest.

For me, silent protagonists kicked the bucket the day I first played Dragon Age 2.

That's the thing. There are different ideas of what an RPG should be like, but what I want is create my character and have a world where I can do whatever I want. I hate to bring up that Skyrim vs. Witcher 3 comparison again, but it really highlights the issue. Unlike some others, I'm not saying Witcher 3 is shit at being an RPG, but it's shit at what I want from an RPG.

I just wanna do stuff. I want to explore, I want to kill, loot, craft, level up, and all other sorts of shit. I want to play a saint helping everybody, and in the next playthrough a murdering psychopath fusrodahing goats off mountains for no good reason. One time, I want to be a shield+sword warrior, the next time a stealth archer, the next time a fireball-throwing necromancer, the next time a ruthless assassin.

In all of this, I have no problem with fetch quests. You want me to get something from somewhere, yeah blah blah just tell me where I need to go. It may be just an excuse for clearing out another dungeon, but I'm fine with that. I just wanna do shit. If I don't care about the story, I want them to fuck off with it. If I don't care about video game romance, yeah just don't bother me.

And in this approach, there's no good reason for having a voiced protagonist. Just make me click on a dialogue option and have them respond instantly, it's not as if I gave a fuck.

That's my problem in Fallout 4. I just skip all the dialogue anyway because I don't care, especially my own. In Fallout 4, my own voiced dialogue is pointless, it adds nothing, it's just a waste of time. I just want them to tell me which bunker I have to clear and leave me alone with their half-arsed "story" crap.

The point is: if the next TES game has a voiced protagonist, I'm afraid it will limit the amount of responses, or even worse, the choice of races. It's not going to do much good because honestly, I don't expect Bethesda to give me a satisfying story. I just want them to cut the crap and let me play (and Bethesda's been pretty good at that for the most part). Giving the protagonist a voice only makes things worse in this scenario.

As I stated before, in games of other nature, like Mass Effect or Witcher, a mute protagonist is not an option. But in that oldschool style RPG I love so much, fuck it.