Bethesda games have long had silent protagonists, even countingSkyrim’sDragonborn who goes from silently muttering sentences to Fus Ro Dah-ing companions off cliffs.Fallout 4changed that with two voice options which, along with a watered-down dialogue wheel that never laid out exactly what you were going to say, drew backlash.Starfieldtook note.
In an interview byPolygon, when asked about whether Starfield’s silent protagonist was a deliberate choice spurred on by the response to Fallout 4, lead designer Emil Pagliarulo said, “Not directly, but it certainly played into it. Early on in the game, we did have a voiced protagonist. In pre-production, the plan was to have a voiced protagonist.
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“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? […] We realised the only way to really do it and let the player be the person they want to be was to have an unvoiced protagonist.”
Pagliarulo also explained thatthe dialogue wheelwas partly implemented because Fallout 4 had a voiced protagonist - players don’t like reading a line of dialogue to click it and find their character says something different, but they also don’t like reading an entire phrase just to hear their character say the exact same thing again, making them hear it twice. With no voiced protagonist in Starfield, Bethesda was free to return to text, giving you the whole sentence that you yourself can read and pick without hearing it back or saying something else entirely.
Starfield cutting the voiced protagonist is also why it has “such a big world” (or in this case, I guess it would be a big galaxy), according to Pagliarulo. “We have over 200,000 lines of spoken dialogue in Starfield with no voiced protagonists.”
If Xbox boss Phil Spencer has anything to say,Starfield is actually closer to Oblivion than any of Bethesda’s other games. With no voiced protagonist and a shift to traditional dialogue, it certainly looks less like Fallout 4, despite the base building and breadth of customisation, but Spencer said that “it’s more Oblivion than Skyrim”, harkening back to an even older day in Bethesda’s history.
Withthe return of the Adoring Fan, there’s certainly some cheesy charm tucked away among the stars, but what else about Starfield screams Oblivion we’ll just have to wait and see for ourselves.
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