The voice is precisely what creates the disconnect for me. That even if I am given free reign otherwise and told to make my own character, it is still dictated to me that ”this is who you must play”, the voice forces a characterization. It’s very limiting (not only to me, but also to the creative design choices insofar as dialog options and ways of character expressions go as you can’t have dialog options that would sound out of character) and it’s not really ”my” character anymore.
And I’m stuck with the voice through the whole game, whether I liked how it sounded or not; and in the latter case, it can have pretty devastating effect to the whole experience.
Yes, but I’m not entirely sure why you’re asking me that.
I’m not in favor of multiples, I’m critical of even the one we have.
Even without a voiced protagonist there would still be limitations -- in Dragon Age Origins the main character had no voice because of the different background races you could choose from. And while there were a lot more dialogue options available than in the later games (I would attribute this only a little to the increased cost in voice acting and mostly to Bioware's general disinterest in branching narratives and dialogue options these days) there was still a limit to the number of options the player was presented with, depending on the situation.
I'd much rather have a voiced-protagonist and a reasonable amount of dialog options in as many conversations as possible. That's a big task on its own for a male and female protagonist. That's all any developer can do-- its not like they can climb into every gamer's head and present dozens of options for every conversation. And you want multiple voice options on top of all that? What if they did the impossible and gave three voices for each gender, and you didn't like any of them. Would that still be devastating to you?
You should probably have a good look at Destiny 2 if you want to play a game that has a totally silent protagonist that never has any actual interaction with the rest of the characters (so you can IMAGINE what they sound like! Immersion!) aside from killing things on their orders. Bungie totally made things awkward because even conversations directed toward the Guardian
aren't really written well enough to gloss over the fact that only one party is contributing, and they have your Ghost answer for you all the time.
