Starfield: Your character will not have a voice

During the Xbox & Bethesda Game Showcase, we received a full 15 minutes of new information and details about Bethesda’s new RPG Starfield. This also includes the first gameplay shown for the title, on land and in the spaceship.

Starfield will have a silent protagonist

The Showcase announcements didn’t end there, however, as shortly after, the official Bethesda Game Studios Twitter account shared a few details about the dialogue from the game. When your custom character interacts with an NPC, the game switches to a first-person view and your character will remain silent the whole time, because your character doesn’t have its own voice.

Whether your own character should be able to talk or not is often a hotly debated topic among gamers. For example, titles like Dishonored didn’t give their protagonist Corvo his own voice, but in the sequel Dishonored 2, Corvo was able to speak normally. For some players, immersion has been lost here, as they are now merely following a character’s story instead of actually being involved in it themselves. However, since Corvo isn’t a self-created character, it probably wasn’t that bad overall. In Starfield, on the other hand, each player creates their own character, and the lack of a voice could certainly make some users feel like they’re on their own adventure. This is exactly the feeling that Bethesda wants to convey with Starfield, as they explained in numerous interviews about the game.