I should clarify that I don't dislilke the very notion of having the PC be voiced. If technology should get to the point where you can control the voice as much as you can currently control the face, including at least some control over the inflections used, I wouldn't have a problem with it at all (assuming one was able to know what the actual lines were, but that's a problem with the paraphrasing rather than one with the voice per say).
I feel about it now much as I felt about head selection in Knights of the Old Republic, which was the first game I played that had that instead of selecting a portrait for the character. It seemed very limiting, since there were only a handful of heads I actually thought fit any characters I was wanting to play, and it was a big step down from the near-limitless possibilities of finding an appropriate portrait for the character. However, at this point in technology, I'm fine with not having portraits; face creation has got to the point where you can do just about anything, and it's a reasonable replacement. I still like games offering the portrait option, but I consider the two roughly equivalent with tradeoffs now, rather than one to be far superior to the other.
However, so far at least, voice customisation has proved to be much more difficult than face customisation. I'd much rather have no voice than a very limited selection of voices, particularly with not being able to control the tone/inflection (which would be really hard to do).
I originally had a bit about this in my response, but deleted it. One way that it helps is in the difference between male/female. My Inquisitor is a man, but I'm a woman, so hearing the man's voice helps me to get into his head space. This is especially important to me with something like the Dorian romance, since Dorian is gay. I want it to feel like the scenes are between two men, and not myself with my character as a proxy (since I'm a woman). I couldn't do that if I had my own voice in my head.
Thanks for explaining! I find it very interesting the way different people approach things like roleplaying, really, and I often find myself falling into the trap of assuming that whatever I do must be the thing that most people do -- when of course, it often isn't, as people vary wildly and there's no logical reason to assume that I would tend more towards the average than anyone else.
That's not a reason that I would have thought of, although now that you mention it I can see that it would probably make sense for a good number of people. I don't hear my own voice in my head when I read anything, in-game dialogue included, so I hear either nothing at all for a silent PC or whatever voice I'm purposefully imagining (which I only do occasionally, so it's usually nothing). As such, when the PC is voiced, instead of a void to interpret or ignore I'm getting something that may actively contradict what I'm thinking of -- particularly if the voice option(s) don't include one that I like for the character. I do know some people who hear their own voice by default when they read who also prefer silent PCs, though, so I expect they just work harder to imagine the character voice -- I'll have to remember to ask, since now I'm rather curious about that. That sort of level of attention to gender is also something that almost never occurs to me, because gender itself is not something that I've ever really understood on a deep level. I have trouble wrapping my head around it having any effect on personality or making any difference in interpersonal relationships, and I often forget it exists at all as anything other than a grammatical/taxonomical distinction until I'm reminded of it.
Also, I must say that the accent helps. Obviously, they're not really speaking English with the various British accents, since that language does not exist in Thedas, but they've established that certain groups sound a certain way. Being American, hearing the British accent also helps me to get into the human Thedosian character. It might be different if I played a dwarf or qunari, since they use American accents for those, but I don't.
In other words, hearing the voice helps it to not be me.
For whatever reason, the character I'm playing never really feels like me, even in games that aren't roleplaying games at all. I generally end up feeling like I'm playing a character even in first person shooters or racing games, and I'd have to actively try and exert a fair amount of mental effort at it to actually come close to playing myself in a roleplaying game. I can see that it would be helpful to have something to distance yourself from the character if you have trouble with that, though. I can kind of understand this, perhaps, in that I prefer to play Elder Scrolls games third person because it's more of an RPG experience for me that way.
Another difference is just in the way that the games are designed around the voice. As mentioned in my other posts, the non-voiced games like DAO have an over-the-shoulder view of the PC's conversation partner the entire time. I suppose you might say that it helps to put you in the correct RP mindset since that's how real-life conversations are presented: we don't see ourselves while talking. To me, it only has the effect of pulling me out of the scene. Also, I have a strong sense that my character is a mute in a speaking world, which is just uncomfortable.
In general, the PC in DA2 and DAI just feels more engaged with the world. I find it very difficult to go back to DAO after playing those games.
I do like being able to see the character's face from time to time, but I'm cool with the over-the-shoulder view as well. I'm actually quite neutral about the two cinematic styles, save that the one focusing on the character requires the character to be voiced.
I've heard the "mute in a speaking world" thing said quite a lot by people who prefer voiced PCs, but I admit that I mostly assumed it was hyperbole used to express a simple dislike, but here it sounds as though it really does make you feel that way. That's interesting. It's never had that effect on me, nor had it actually occured to me that it would actually have that effect on somebody, and I wonder why that is. The silent PC overall feels more natural and integrated to me than the voiced one, although perhaps some of that is that the voice is often drawing my attention by saying things in a way that I didn't want them to be said (or things that I didn't expect it to say at all).
For all my dislike of the voiced PC, except for the paraphrasing and inflection problems (which do show up inevitably), I don't mind the idea inherently if there are sufficient options for voices. If I can select a voice that I feel really fits my character, and if there are enough voice options that I can proceed to select a different one for each subsequent character, I don't mind the simple fact that they are voiced if/when all the problems are worked out -- but having only one voice per gender, even two, is a real strain on replayability. Odds are good that not all of them will even fit any of the characters I might like to play (in DA II, for example, the female voice really didn't fit any character I was interested in playing, so that narrowed my options down to exactly one), and once I've used a voice for one character I'm not going to be able to use it for a different character -- it'll feel too strange, having that character sound exactly the same as the other one. Maybe this is partly because I'm not used to hearing anything at all in my head when selecting dialogue options when the PC is unvoiced, because I know that this specifically isn't as much of a problem with the voiced PC for most other people I know, but it is a big problem for me.
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