Fallout 4 Backlash Partly Inspired Starfield's Silent Protagonist

thegamer.com:

Bethesda games have long had silent protagonists, even counting Skyrim's Dragonborn who goes from silently muttering sentences to Fus Ro Dah-ing companions off cliffs. Fallout 4 changed 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. Starfield took note.

In an interview by Polygon, 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 that the dialogue wheel was 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