What if Mass Effect Andromeda had a silent protagonist?

In theory, yes. I will concede that having the voice, all else being equal, is better than not having the voice. It improves the performance of the protagonist and makes it more fun to watch.

But all else isn't equal. Not being able to choose the voice, and the tone, and the full line, all independently, just kills the voice. In order to implement the voice, we lose far too much.

If I still got to see the full text, and got to choose the tone of delivery (independently from the line), and I could have a voice that actually suited the character I designed (which means a different voice for each character), then the voice would actually provide a net benefit.

As the voiced protagonist has been implemented so far, having the voice means that I don't get to control the character of design the character's personality, which is the whole reason I play RPGs.

Adding the voice, eben as implemented, may well make these games better at telling a story, but being told a story has never been something I was particularly interested in in BioWare's games.

That would be a major disappointment for me. I don't think we can really go back to the silent protagonist after Jennifer Hale.

Just have everyone silent

A box shows up with different dialogue for the player to choose. The character, that is being talked with, responds with dialogue shown in a box. When walking around an area, black boxes show up on the screen of characters saying whatever.

This is a point I usually bring up in the whole silent protagonist discussion.

Assuming your own tone of dialogue can break how believable the characters in the setting are very easily. You can sometimes get away with it depending on the line and how crazy you want to go with the tone, but in a lot of cases the game will assume very specific tones of the dialogue and run as though you used that.

Which just makes the people in the setting come off as crazy if you don't run with it as well and while I can wave that for one or two NPCs, it starts becoming a problem when it's half the city.

Playing the Silver Shroud quest in FO4 wouldn't be the same without the hilariously bad delivery of the Shroud lines. It always makes me smile when Sole Survivor tells Charlie "It is not wise to come between the Silver Shroud and righteous....justice!"

At least Bethesda lets us mod the game to turn the voice off. And see the full text dialogue options.

You can't serve all players without empowering those players to create the game they want to play.

They're obviously not looking to serve all players, or EA would be supporting modding the way Bethesda is. Voice acted RPG protags are now popular enough that developers are willing to pour money into it.

In my opinion, silent protagonists made sense when most NPCs were silent. However, when literally everyone except the PC is a chatterbox, it becomes really jarring. Fallout 3&NV got away with it because the dialogue was in first person and centered on the NPC as opposed to the PC.

Which is why I argue so vigorously against it.

On EA, I think they want to use one engine for all their games to keep costs down, and an unmoddable engine helps reduce post-release costs for MP games.

I complain vigorously about that, too.

I never found that jarring, because when I talk to the real people I don't listen to myself talk. I know what I'm going to say, so I don't listen to myself talk. The silent protagonist mimics this better.

What's jarring is how I NEED to listen to the protagonist talk in order to find out what he says, even though I supposedly am that character. I'm inhabiting his mind, but I don't know what he's going to say. That's absurd. That's immersion-breaking.

The thing is that I learned about people from talking to people IRL, and if the character in a game is believable or not is going to vary based on how well done they do it. Assuming my own tone of voice that goes against what the developer obviously intended I find can very frequently make those characters significantly less believable. If not for that fact, I would agree with the notion you've said multiple times that developer intention doesn't matter.



I can tell the difference because people aren't 100% unpredictable. It's similar to the uncanny valley except instead of visuals, it's with behaviour. When something is almost but not quite there, it becomes very noticeable and off putting.

Individual people can do it as well at times which is why I say it could be ignored if it were a single character, but it becomes far less believable when it's entire groups of people doing it.

I would agree, but that happens every time the protagonist says something I specifically wanted him not to say.

The NPC reactions are way less important than that. How the NPCs react doesn’t even matter if the thing to which they're reacting is something I didn't choose.[/quote]

That's why dialogue selection menus need to get more accurate as to what exactly the character is going to say.

NPC reactions are still important, as the setting isn't believable if the people don't behave in believable ways unless there is some kind of in-lore explanation for it.



The best example for what I'm talking about is with Alistair and assuming that let's say half of the dialogue he responds to as though it were a joke is actually said insultingly while the other half are said jokingly. We'll also assume the same for the insulting lines, where half are said jokingly and half are said insultingly.

This makes Alistair seems like he has multiple personalities, which is going to break the immersion for me if every NPC I hold conversations with is doing this. It's also going to make my PC seem that way as well, but that was clearly my choice.



It works for you because you've already admitted that you learned most of your knowledge of Human behaviour from BioWare's older games which all had silent protagonists. That's going to be an extremely small percentage of people who are like that, though. You haven't really offered any reasoning as to why this would be beneficial to the rest of the people reading this thread who don't think like that.

I think Deus Ex Mankind Divided has a pretty solid dialogue system. The actual options you click list the intention of the dialogue(ie. comfort, insult, goad, etc.) and when you mouseover them the tooltip tells you exactly what the character is going to say. Conversations in that game feel far more natural than most other games I've played.



Having full text dialogue would help and I've never been against it.

It's the silent protagonist offering the benefit of being able to choose your tone of voice that I'm calling into question.



The icons would be as detailed as they need to be in order to convey the proper information, or just use text to tell you the tone(which is probably better because the icons can be misinterpreted).

I still think silent protagonists have a fit in Bethesda games. IMO they made a mistake in using a voice for FO4 and I think having a voice for Elder Scrolls would be a monumental disaster. Too many race options for that to work.

For BioWare games that are more story and character driven, having a voice seems more fitting. I hope we get multiple options again like we did for DAI though. That helped with having a voice fit my character and definitely added re playability.

When it comes to AAA releases, they kind of did.

Although there's still some kickstarter RPGs with silent protagonists like the Shadowrun Return series and Pillars of Eternity.