Talende hovedpersoner i RPG'er kan være et omstridt emne. Uden stemmeskuespil ville vi ikke have ikoniske karakterer som for eksempel Commander Shepard fra Mass Effect eller the Wanderer fra Fallout 4.
Men Bethesda valgte en anden tilgang til deres kommende sci-fi RPG Starfield. I et interview med Polygon fortæller lead designer Emil Pagliarula, at det tog Bethesda noget tid at afgøre, hvorvidt protagonisten i Starfield skulle tale.
"Early on in the game, we did have a voiced protagonist. In pre-production, the plan was to have a voiced protagonist. We hired an actor, we got the voice, we listened to him and we were like, 'You know what, this guy is too specific.'"
"So then what are the options? Do we have, like some RPGs do, four voices? Do we have one voice, but hire someone else who's more convenient? But [in Starfield] you can make every different type of person. We realized that the only way to really do it and let the player be the person they want to be was to have an unvoiced protagonist."
"There's a big argument, if in Fallout 4 and other RPGs, players don't like reading a line of dialogue, a player response, and then they click it and get [a different spoken line]. But the problem is, then you read it, and then you click it, and you have to wait for them to say the same thing. So that's not ideal either. So then we just arrived at, What if we just go text? and it was just really freeing. And, I mean, we have over 200,000 lines of spoken dialogue in Starfield with no voiced protagonists. And it was not having a voiced protagonist that allowed us to create such a big world."
Det ville måske også blive småirriterende med en talende protagonist i et spil af disse proportioner, med over 200.000 linjer dialog. Heldigvis har alle sidekarakterer stemmeskuespil, så der bliver ikke helt stille i rummet. Havde du foretrukket en talende protagonist?