Nope! CDPR will do voice - that's one of their "things".
What did I play that was text based recently...hmm. I found it odd, too. Weirdly silent. I fear I've been recoded by the modern way.
Voice have little to do with gameplay, but a lot to do with immersion and role-playing. Bad voice acting grates on people and is a primary complaint in games. Many would rather have no VO than crappy ones - VO is that significant a part of play experience.
Gameplay isn't king for many people, myself included, or I'd still be playing Counterstrike. I like Cyberpunk because the setting and the stories are so great. Gameplay in most VG RPGs/sandboxes consists of what? Talk/Punch/Shoot/Drive? Many people and games dispense with the first and fourth as is.
Of course, terrible gameplay is never a good thing, but I love Planescape Torment and Fallout 1 and 2 - gameplay there was pretty terrible. Fallout was better.
So I hope they devote serious resources to the voices they will use anyway. I'm not sure if it's worth having a chosen Handle/Name in-game that you hear, but if I can have a great game AND that, bonus!
The cons of having a name, or a handle, outweigh the pros I am afraid. 9 different possible roles, each with the choice of male or female. At least some measure of multi-plauyer... be it pvp bullshit or co-op no one knows, but they have brought in a MP specialist. So everyone is running around with the same name?
Choices for handles isn't going to work... it's just too many resources waste. As I have said before, audio files take up a significant amount of resources. To have this option you would be sacrificing other areas of the game (assuming they actually going to try and fill the disc, and give us as much "bang" for our buck as possible). And, it just falls into the same trap that only having one name gives us... it's still not OUR name.
The resources are going to be taxed for audio as it is, because they have to compensate for a players choice of 9 vastly different roles, all running through the same story. Everyone wants to compare this to the Witcher games... when the reality is, this isn't going to be anything like the Witcher... it simply can't be.... the subject matter and character choices are going to prevent that. The Witcher was a fantasy story about one person, a pre-defined character with little room for personalization beyond the scripted events. This game isn't going to be that, it can't be that... even if customization gets dropped (and that would be a monumental fuck up on the game designers part) there are still up to 9 Roles to choose from, most of them with very little in common. By the games very nature, they are going to have to leave the in game dialogue somewhat vague and informal. Otherwise its going to be ten minutes long. The only game I can think of that comes remotely close to being able to pull off something like this is Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, where you could take your character in drastically different directions in terms of personality and specialty. And in those games the protagonist was completely silent, and everyone just kind of referred to you by a vague title. Really, they should just call you "specialist" or "Professional" and leave it that.
Seriously, It's becoming yet another standoff... people who want to create their own character, and people who for some reason or other prefer playing someone elses.
The "shepard" argument is absolutely irrelevant... No matter what first name you gave them, whether you were male or female, you were still just the exact same character, a badass soldier type, with absolutely zero variation beyond that. You were playing someone elses character, not your own. Which is decidedly NOT the way it should be done in Cyberpunk.
I still believe the protagonist should be silent in fact, because that gives you the most dialogue and personality options possible. It also allows you not to have to put up with a voice acting choice that in no way matches the character you have built. Trying to effectively voice the protagonist, in both male and female voices, even if its just one choice each, is stuill going to require different recorded dialogues for each role, because a corporate does NOT talk the same as a fixer. A rocker boy does not talk the same as a solo. So right away you have 18 different voice recordings. You want more choices, then start multiplying that by factors of 2.
You want to have "handle" choices, because apparently if someone is not referring to you by name you are going to forget who you are... that means that everyone that talks to you is going to have to record their lines as many times as there are choices... Well, now you have to multiply every line of NPC dialogue by the number of choices...
Hell you aren't playing a game anymore, you are listening to a book on tape.
Its a game... if gameplay isn't important to you, then you should be reading a book, or watching a movie... While the story IS important in the game, it's not more important than the gameplay, and the resources used to tell the story should not negatively impact the game itself. They should enhance it, not detract from it.. I don't play a game like this to watch the cut scenes... I play the game so I can see MY character running around doing the cool shit I never get to actually see him do in my tabletop games.
