I have been a voiced protagonist hater for years. Fully voiced games drastically increased the cost of creating branching dialogues.
this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Yeah there’s a reason they dropped it for bg3
It depends on the game, I’ve liked games in both styles and I don’t think every game should be one way or the other, but it does influence the kind of story you can tell and one is more apt than the other for certain things
Totally agreed. Also I listen to podcasts or whatever when I play games and prefer not being interrupted by voice overs. Also I can read faster than they're gonna character act
It's interesting how often silent protagonists DO have their own personality.
For example, in The Legend of Zelda series Link is practically mute with only way to express itself is couple dozen lines of text and grunts. But 90% of people playing him - end up with the same annoying, unpatient little rascal who's going home to home destroying everyone's pots for fun.
Another good example is Doomguy - he's unhuman, full of bloodlust and anger, unstoppable force. You can't project yourself onto Doomguy, he's it's own character without any lines of dialogue and even before Doom games had any cutscenes.
Other silent protagonists that I believe have their own distinct personality: Jack from Bioshock 1, Kirby, Samus from Metroid, Chell from Portal, Claude from Gta 3, ...
Return to tradition! Based Soviet game devs didn’t give John Tetris any dialogue and people still play it decades later.
itd be kinda fun if they had a local ai trained on your voice and just inject it into the game
im sure it wouldnt make me cringe in disgust at all
Thesis: Silent Protagonist sux, bc. other voiced characters indirectly become the 'voiced protagonists'
Anti-thesis: Silent Protagonist good, because self-insert and choice
Synthesis: force players to use their own voice to choose dialogue edition,
because I am who am...
No, the obvious synthesis is a game like Scribblenauts*, or alternatively this heraldic blazon based FPS idea I've been working out for the past five years, where the player literally uses human language to play the game but where the player character is nevertheless 100% mute.
*if Maxwell has any dialog in Scribblenauts then I don't remember that part
Silent protagonists >>>
not everyone needs a voice - I don't want to play a game to hear the main character shout "OMG DID I JUST DO THAT???" whenever they kill a goblin. I certainly don't want 30 minute long fully voiced cutscenes that just.....meander and lead nowhere but THANK GOD they paid some voice actors pennies to the dollar to record lines like "Get him Torgal!!" that I'll hear over and over in combat. Really makes me feel like I'm Clive Finalfantasy. (I've genuinely forgot how to spell his name - Rothsfield right, no disrespect to FF16 but it certainly is the worst one I've played out of all 18 mainline games)
they are both valid ways to make a game imo, like its obvious that Gordon isn't the Protagonist as much as a Plot Device and Cameraman for the other actually developed characters, but thats like an ok way to tell a story. its the same with call of duty campaigns for example (imperialist though they may be), you are mostly there to see the Cool Named Characters do Awesome Scripted Animations. FPS games still basically control as if you are a wheeled boxy drone with a gun attached, so until they can make the Awesome Scripted Animations an actual real-time gameplay feature, it makes sense to go the Player As Secondary Protag/Cameraman route - since you can't do the Cool Scripted Animated Takedowns that Captain Price does, due to the limitations of FPS controls, they just make you watch other people do it.
in terms of self-insert i think voiced protagonists with voiceover options are better, a silent protagonist means that any voiced input of your own that you might 'self-insert' into the silence goes entirely ignored and unremarked on (the NPCs will never respond to your DIY 'freeman's mind' act), the silent protagonist kind of relegates you to a passive observer in terms of character interaction. not that this makes the silent protag 'bad' but i don't think the reason it can be good is because of self-insert/freedom of choice. an exception is if there are dialogue choices for the silent protagonist, but then the writing chooses your tone and you might as well have a set of voiceovers to choose from.
I haven't played any Persona games but I don't really care for the thing many Japanese games do where you're placed in the shoes of a Generic Japanese Youth that you're supposed to project onto. As a non-Japanese non-youth they always feel alienating
Either give me a fully characterised main protagonist or let me fully create and roleplay my own character CRPG style
GOOD bit.
Normally I'm a fan of silent protagonists but I looove Garrett from the Thief series. Stephen Russell brings a lot of personality to him and I love how it feels like he's on the journey with you; he has a dry wit and comments on a lot of the strange happenings, the characters, enemies etc., and it really feels like he's a petty thief (who might know a little more than he lets on) getting into some trouble that is absolutely out of his league. It's very relatable and fun as a player experiencing the world for the first time.
people do seem to swing both ways on this but in an RPG especially i cannot stand a voiced protagonist, throws me out of the game