This can work very rarely ( Half-Life, BioShock), but for the most part, it just makes for a strange experience. And if your goal is to try and tell a good story, it is way, way harder to do so when your lead doesn’t speak. I get that recording voicework for a male/female lead would be a decent amount of work, but in a game with hundreds or thousands of lines of dialogue, it’s probably a good idea to make sure the other halves of these conversations are voiced to make them worthwhile. The overwhelming silence made Far Cry 5 a weird experience because you have these sequences where the cult members are spewing some truly awful stuff at you, but you just have to sit there and taken it because no one wanted to be bothered to craft any lines in rebuttal. And of course there’s always good old Gordon Freeman, who comes up every time this debate is had, but he’s clearly the exception, not the rule, not to mention that even if he’s silent, he’s at least still a named character in the story, unlike Anonymous Deputy in Far Cry or Anonymous Super Guardian in Destiny. And for games like Dark Souls or Bloodborne, I could understand why it would make sense to have your character not speak given the nature of those stories and your hero’s role in them. Characters like say, Link, who have long been established as silent should probably not start speaking in their games. I think there are shades of grey when it comes to this issue. It’s ridiculous, and hard to craft a compelling story when in every scene, everyone essentially talks around you. I would argue it’s almost worse in Destiny where yes, story may be less important than in Far Cry, but your character is frequently seen in cutscenes where makes you standing there like a frozen tree all the more unnerving as characters address you directly, and instead your Ghost companion speaks on your behalf. Destiny 2 also went backwards by stripping away all dialogue from the player’s central Guardian character, who had few lines before, but now has exactly zero. Far Cry 5 is not the only game to do this lately.
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