What if Mass Effect Andromeda had a silent protagonist?

The game would feel somewhat basic from a presentation perspective. I'd still buy it however it wouldn't be as engaging for me. It worked in the 90's but nowadays it's a standard to have a voiced protagonist.

That's just weird to me. In my experience, that's exactly how people act. Only if I get to know someone really well is this not the case (there might be 4 people I currently know this well).

What do you mean here? There isn't nearly enough content in the game for us to get to know each character well. Even one character would be a stretch.

Are you saying that the protagonist should get to know the characters well, even if the player can't? How would that work?

I don't perceive any meaningful relationship between my real world tone of voice and the reactions other people have. Sure, extreme tones do (shouting, sobbing), but the difference between a joke and a complaint seems invisible to others. So I don't understand what effect you expect tone to have.

People constantly misinterpret my tone. Does this seriously not happen to you?

I consciously ignore the tone of others, because trying to guess at the meaning never seems to make things better.

Thinking like someone who isn't you is the core of roleplaying. That's what roleplaying is. Without that, these are just adventure games, not roleplaying games.

Why do you think they should be working that way?

That you don't know what the explanation is doesn't mean there isn't one.

Remember, you can't read their minds. There are guaranteed to be things about them you don't know.

Not normal? This seems like a wild generalization.

That it's standard doesn’t make it good.

silent character , why ! It feels like watching a Charlie Chaplin movie , without the genius.
might as well have a black and white Andromeda !

i stopped Skyrim and DA Origin because of that.
Especially since the protagonist doesn't even move his lips, he just stands there like a dummy while i'm supposed to act out some dramatic statement ,
not convincing.

In your experience sure, but you've already admitted that your experience isn't really like the vast majority of people. Even if you don't see it from my way, you've got to understand that you're in the extreme minority here. Most of us learned about Human interaction through social situations.

You talk about shifting margins a lot, but they're heavily stacked against you here.



It's not a stretch to get to know a NPC decently well, especially over the course of a 75-100 hour game.

Ironically silent protagonists would actually let you do that better because you can fit more dialogue in without having to pay a voice actor.



It happens very little, and basically never for people who I talk to on a regular basis. Tone of voice, along with body language, is some of the best indicator of what the person's intentions are when you know how to read them.

I feel like only focusing on the words would lead to more misunderstandings, as people are often bad at wording things.



but noticing that almost every NPC is off isn't a roleplaying thing in this case. It's me noticing that the setting simply doesn't make any sense.

I could roleplay through it and have my character assume that everybody is insane, but out of character it's still breaking the setting for me if it's trying to pass that off as normal Human behaviour.

I can try to act like somebody else but one can never 100% escape who they are. Some aspect of you is always going to shine through in a character you're RPing, or at least for 99.99% of us it will.



Because that's how normal Humans act, and the setting has never given any explanation or suggested that standard Human behaviour is different in this setting.

Without the explanation, the setting is much less believable and worse off for it.



The lack of an explanation breaks the setting for me and makes the entire game worse.

Why would I use that line of thinking if the only outcome is to make the game worse for me?



Humans are predictable to a certain degree. The field of psychology has shown us this.

It would be a s*** storm of epic proportions. DAO was okay but going from voiced pretoaginist to silent would piss alot of people off. Myself included. You don't really get as much emotion with the silent protaginist

A silent protagonist will always offer more choices for both roleplaying and dialogue options in a game, because vocal work costs money. Mass Effect will, as noted, never have a silent protagonist, but I wouldn't take issue with a game having one.

How would you know?

I'm incredulous because I've never known anyone to have that good a grasp on me without years of contact, and not even always then.

My spouse often incorrectly assigns meaning to my tone. I've known her for 16 years.

What if you don't? What about early in the game? Shouldn't the characters still be a mystery to use then?

This is easily the biggest difference between us. I have no interest in being told a story, especially if there's just one to be told.

I have experienced more different stories in DAO than in all of BioWare's voiced protagonist games combined.

Then I would expect them to be better at it.

That would mean you could misunderstand someone because they said it wrong. That's a weird way to look at it.

I tend to focus on the things a person can actually do.

And yet they can't explain how.

That doesn't tell you anything, though. Humans are an awfully diverse group.

I 100% agree with this, but it doesn't work for people, because there's no established baseline for human behaviour.

Some, sure, but not necessarily any specific aspect. Any aspect can be changed. Some are more work than others. So far, the thing I've found the most difficult was changing my standard of evidence.

I know because I've been doing it my whole life. It's not 100%, but it is enough to start forming idea as to what kind of person they are.

I'm not sure you're the best example, because you've admitted to being pretty much nothing like most people =P

What if you don't? What about early in the game? Shouldn't the characters still be a mystery to use then?[/quote]

To an extent but that's not relevant to my point because even after exchanging thousands of words they'd still exhibit the behaviour in my example when assuming certain tones of voice.



I play different games for different reasons. I never saw Mass Effect as offering very good oppourtunity for roleplaying so I attached to the gameplay and story instead.

I play games like Overwatch purely for the gameplay, and games like Baldur's Gate is for the characters and RP.



but as I've said there is still certain set of behaviours that most of us will exhibit. If Humans were truly 100% unpredictable then society wouldn't function, at all.

That's why we can have far more discussion than should probably happen around things like Han Solo shooting first or not and what that says about his character for an action as simple as shooting first or second.

Ha. I would buy

If they'd stop voicing the NPCs, as well (I objected to the full VO for NPCs during DAO's development), we could have much longer conversations.

I favour the NWN model, where the NPCs are voiced just for their opening one or two lines, to help establish personality, but thereafter are silent.

We're all individuals, but we're also not all that unpredictable either once one gets to know said individual.

For most of us, anyway.



The baseline is established by spending time with them. The more dialogue, the more accurate it becomes. The mystery from not knowing them comes from having an inaccurate picture, which is corrected over time.

You can't decide how a NPC will react with a voiced game. Not unless you metagame by looking it up on the internet.

Personally I find Liara in Mass Effect just as predictable as Eder is from Pillars of Eternity. It doesn't change that one is from a voiced game while the other is largely silent.



The industry doesn't use a 20 year old definition for RPG that was never even agreed upon back in the 90s. If you're going to be inflexible in that definition, then any misunderstandings as a result of that is kind of your own fault. By the definitions we use now, Mass Effect is by modern standards a RPG and does allow for some roleplaying(just not enough in my opinion for me to really care, but that's a personal opinion and a personal choice to focus more on gameplay and story).

Pillars of Eternity, Shadowrun Returns series, Divinity: Original Sin are all recently released RPGs. Upcoming we also have Tides of Numenera and Tyranny.

I would argue that right now is a better time for old school RPG fans than any point since the mid 2000s around the time AAA RPG developers started trying to attract wider audiences. Kickstarter has been amazing for RPGs in particular.



I've never argued that one failed prediction breaks a character but rather a string of them.

I may only have a ~16.67% chance to roll a 6 on a 6 sided dice, but if 1000 rolls later I haven't gotten a single 6 then I'm going to think "Hey, maybe this dice isn't weighted properly" because even though it is theoretically possible with a perfectly weighted dice, it is statistically extremely unlikely.

I'm not going to be thinking that if on the 10th roll I haven't gotten a 6 yet, though, because that's still within reasonable doubt.