Starfield's Lead Designer Explains Why We Get Silent Protagonist
We know why the protagonist in Starfield will be silent. One reason is the effect on immersion.
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Starfield will debut on PC and XSX as early as September 6 and I dare to assume that it will be one of the most talked-about launches in recent years. While we're on the subject of voice, it's worth mentioning that the character we're directing will be mute (we informed about this already more than a year ago). Now we have learned why Bethesda decided not to voice the protagonist.
Why isn't the main character in Starfield voiced?
In an interview with Polygon the game's lead designer, Emil Pagliarulo, shared information on why Bethesda decided to create a silent protagonist. The developer referred to the case of Fallout 4, in which the main protagonist was fully voiced, but a significant portion of players didn't like the fact that they had to choose an abbreviated version of an answer, sometimes getting a different line of dialogue than expected. Pagliarulo also suggested that reading the entire answer before selecting it often leads to players skipping over the dialogue line spoken by their character, making the effort to record them pointless.
The developer stated that it was the abandonment of the voiced protagonist that enabled the developer to spread its wings, and it is thanks to this, among other things Starfield is so big.
"We got to the point where we thought, why don't we just write the text? And that was really liberating. I mean, in Starfield we have more than 200,000 lines of dialogue without voiced protagonists. And it was the lack of a voiced protagonist that enabled us to create such a large world."
As Pagliarulo admitted, in Starfield players will be able to create almost any kind of protagonist, so the lack of a recorded voice by default was a good idea, as it will enable the player to better empathize with the character he or she is directing.
The protagonist was to have a voice
Interestingly, the decision to leave the protagonist silent was not an obvious one at first, as Bethesda hired a voice actor and conducted recordings. However, it turned out that the developers were not satisfied with the results, because, as they considered, the voice was too specific and because of this the game could lose immersion.
"We hired an actor, got the voice, listened to it and found that it was too specific. So what are the options? Do we have to, like in some RPGs, record four different voices? Do we have one voice, but hire someone else who is more versatile? The problem is that you can create any type of character in the game. We realized that the only way to let the player be the person they want to be is to have a silent hero."
