Summary
A senior Bethesda developer went on record to explain the decision to haveStarfieldfeature a silent protagonist. This insight into the highly anticipated RPG arrives a year after the studio confirmed thattheStarfieldprotagonist won’t be a voiced character.
Bethesda’s AAA role-playing games have historically featured silent protagonists. However, the Rockville, Maryland-based developer ended that tradition with the 2015Fallout 4, which featured a fully voiced main character. While that presentational shift proved to be a polarizing move among the fandom, lead designer Emil Pagliaruloexplained that the decision to have voiced main characters inFallout 4was rooted in a desire to deliver a more emotional story than what mute protagonists would allow.
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Eight years later, Pagliarulo found himself explaining Bethesda’s reversal of that decision in regard toStarfield, having described the return to a silent protagonist as “really freeing” in a recent interview with Polygon. Elaborating on that notion, the veteran developer revealed thatStarfieldhas over 200,000 lines of spoken dialogue, adding that such a massive script could not have been voice-acted if the studio also had to record the main character’s lines.
In spite of that benefit, Bethesda wasn’t planning to havea silentStarfieldprotagonistfrom the get-go. On the contrary, the studio was originally looking to do a repeat ofFallout 4, having gone as far as to hire a voice actor and do some recording sessions before ultimately dropping the idea. Seeing howStarfieldallows players to create any type of character, the most immersive way of presenting such a protagonist is to leave them voiceless, Pagliarulo said.
Asked whether the player pushback againstFallout 4’svoiced protagonist influenced Bethesda’s decision to abandon that practice withStarfield, Pagliarulo conceded that it “certainly played into it.” Nevertheless, he insisted that the developer only decided to go the silent protagonist route once it considered all alternative approaches. As part of that train of thought, the designer also acknowledged that the way dialogue worked inFallout 4was imperfect, not least because many players disliked selecting an abbreviated response only to get an entirely different line from their character. However, reading the entire response before selecting it often leads to players skipping their character’s voiced lines, making the developer’s effort to record them less worthwhile, Pagliarulo suggested.
All of that ultimately resulted in Bethesda deciding against doing another voiced protagonist for its next AAA RPG. And while it remains to be seen how that decision will play out among the fandom, there is little doubt thatStarfield’ssilent protagonist will benefit choice-driven role-playing.
Starfieldlaunches September 6 for PC and Xbox Series X/S.
