I don't mind a voiced character as long as they use a decent actor with an awesome voice AND of course as long as my choices are not made for me. Still I think getting an actor for this job to say a few thousand lines would not be very ideal. Just imagine a response to every response from all NPC's in Fallout 3, how that would have been. Not having a voice of a protagonist leaves something mysterious and opens up your imagination, and this essentially is what made previous Fallout games great. Many successful games had no voiced protagonist, games such as Half Life for example.

We don't know very much from the trailer to it's too soon to know if we're getting a voiced protagonist or not. The guy could just be the father of the child you play, or the child itself that just said something during the trailer for the sake of saying anything at all. Or it could be someone from Vault 111 that the protagonist knows, much as how the Lone Wanderer from Vault 101 went after his father, but that would probably not be the case since we've already seen it in a previous title.

Oh and if this is the parent and we're having both male and female characters, they'd have to find someone to voice the mother. This means having two actors for the same job. Just imagine [censored] up on the voice actor, how it would affect the game as a whole. You'd be stuck with this voice of the character you play for the next few dozen hours or so. Much can go wrong, but I have some faith in the ability of the Fallout team on this one. Hopefully they'll do the right thing!

lol this change hurt da1->da2 so badly.

No what hurt Dragon Age 2 was that it was written under the effects of heavy drugs.

My brother asked me why I hated DA2 so much, and I was playing Inquisition at the time.

I showed him a vein of Red Lyrium and said "SEE THAT? THAT IS THE PLOT OF DA2 IN A NUTSHELL. IT MAKES PEOPLE CRAZY."

The voiced characters were just the top 1/4 of an inch of an iceberg bigger than the one that did in Titanic. The deformed elves, zombie clownspawn, not allowing you to pick your party or your class, a ten year game-span that you play half or less of, truly idiotic plot blindness, one cave that was rented in turn by all the bad guys [they just changed the name], over the top stupid combat, a story that made no sense whatsoever and ignored just about everything that was built in DA:O, waving it off with the line "A wizard did it." are all issues that contributed to the mess that was DA2.

I'm still intending to not play it until I run out of all my steam games and gog games if the protagonist is voiced. But I can't see Bethesda managing to create anything close to DA2 even if they actually tried to ruin the game.

I dunno Bethesda could remove quests, character stats and combat altogether and make the game 100% about exploring and finding items at each and every turn.

A voiced main character and the rumors of having a wife and kid is making me think twice getting this game day one. Hopefully they are addressed at E3.

Skyrim? Oh wait that had combat

I can see plenty of room for discussion about this, just as there was when Mass Effect, Dragon Age and other games introduced voiced protagonists.

Whatever the debate, there is only one direction of travel in the industry and that's from unvoiced to voiced.
(excluding non-AAA retro throw backs).

It remains to be seem whether the protagonist in Fallout 4 is indeed voiced,

but if it is, it isn't going to change because there is some grumbling on a forum about it.

A game like Fallout 4, particularly given the number of years since Fallout 3 is going to attract a significant new audience

and that audience is increasingly used to voiced protagonists.

That's not to say that from an RPG perspective there isn't a good and bad way to handle voiced dialogue, I hope it's done well,

but if it's happening, best to just deal with it.

Many people are speculating from the trailer that Troy Baker is the voice behind the protagonist. If this is true then we probably won't be able to change the voice of the character except maybe the pitch.

How do you feel about Troy Baker possibly voicing the main protagonist?

I personally wouldn't mind. Judging by TLOU he definitely has the chops to deliver.

My problem isn't how good he is it's that it's limits our character.

Sure, it limits the character, but in this case for good reason IMO. For example Dragon Age has voiced protagonist you can customize to your desire, but in turn many of the lines are delivered choppy and emotionless. With a single voice actor the lines will be delivered with precision corresponding with every situation the player encounters. Thus the dialogue won't feel out of place or shoehorned in the game.

The choppy sentences Bethesda litters their games with will sound really weird if they're read back verbatim. Plus. Troy Baker. It feels like he's everywhere these days. Maybe I've just been playing too much Bioshock tho.

Would that actually be so bad of a thing? In FO3 I spent more time exploring than questing, at least until I opened up most of the map. I had fun. I know it isn't everyone's idea of fun, though.

I'm not sure how that makes sense, it's down to the actors not the number of options. Dragon Age has four protagonist voice actors (2 male, 2 female) principally to allow some variety for different races, and at least two of them are wonderful (the ones I've played). How a voice actor delivers their lines is down to their acting skill, and many voice actors are regulars across RPGs, with some appearing in Dragon Age, Mass Effect, The Witcher and Skyrim. This is also about budget. I'd expect at least two voices in Fallout 4 if the protagonist is voiced, one male, one female. This is exactly no different to other games who had 4 voices, they just spent more money recording it so you get two more choices.

For me? Very much so. I purchase the games to play a good RPG with a world and lore that I like and with in-depth choices and consequences. I prefer deep characters, factions and story. What I do not want is the Fallout series as a whole to be [in my opinion] degraded to become a game that favors exploration at the expense of all else like TES has become.

I really did like Morrowind and Oblivion, but after the release of Skyrim I've decided it might be best for me to give that series a rest. There are plenty of other series that favor exploration above all else, but as has been said too many times here: That was never Fallout. Did I like playing Fallout 3? Very much so, it's what got me into Fallout. Do I think of Fallout 3 as a good Fallout title after playing New Vegas and trying the classics? No.

Again that's all my opinion and others are free to have their opinion, but I'm sure you can also appreciate that Fallout and TES are different entities. Some want Fallout to become a game almost indistinguishable from TES and some want Fallout to be its own franchise (obviously those aren't the only opinions). Personally I'd appreciate getting a game that resembles the classics and New Vegas instead. I like the FPP perspective and some of the additions that Bethesda and Obsidian have added, but I would also like Bethesda to "explore" beyond their norm and focus on something different from TES.

First of all, those are examples, extreme ones, but examples. Second, I have RP'd those very types of characters.

However, the bottom line, a Voiced Protagonist does not let me RP the character I want, just the character that is provided to me.

The voiced protagonist doesn't bother me one bit. What is alarming are the single line responses that the leaked scripts revealed.

No, you really can't customize Hawke to your desire. Not in my opinion. You are limited to what they had the voice actor do. In DA2's case, you picked a phrase that might have little to nothing to do with the line Hawke delivered. When you chose paragon or renegade Hawke's tone and delivery could be the opposite to what you wanted. You have no control over the character.

A voiceless character can use the exact line you want, not an approximate sort of almost nearly kind of maybe what you want. https://www.youtube....atapunc/videos?/a>Both Hawkes sound really cheerful in the middle choice one; that is supposedly the "neutral" one. I played DA2. Once. I used the female Hawke, because the male Hawke's voice was Vaughn, the wedding crashing rapist from DA:O. I didn't hear Hawke. I heard Vaughn. It was one of the many things that ruined the game for me. Female Hawke didn't do much for me either; my idea of the character and the voice never meshed.