Ääninäytellyt päähenkilöt videopeleissä herättävät jatkuvasti keskustelua. Tällaisia ovat olleet muun muassa Mass Effectin Commander Shepard ja Fallout 4:n Wanderer.
Bethesda ei kuitenkaan moista halunnut 6. syyskuuta julkaistavaan peliinsä Starfield. Polygonin mukaan päätös ei ollut tehtynä alusta alkaen. Asiasta kertoi johtava suunnittelija Emil Pagliarulo.
Lopulta päätettiin, että äänetön päähenkilö antaa pelaajille mahdollisuuden ajatella oman äänensä dialogiin.
"Early on in the game, we did have a voiced protagonist. In pre-production, the plan was to have a voiced protagonist. 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? But [in Starfield] you can make every different type of person. We realized that the only way to really do it and let the player be the person they want to be was to have an unvoiced protagonist."
"There's a big argument, if in Fallout 4 and other RPGs, players don't like reading a line of dialogue, a player response, and then they click it and get [a different spoken line]. But the problem is, then you read it, and then you click it, and you have to wait for them to say the same thing. So that's not ideal either. So then we just arrived at, What if we just go text? and it was just really freeing. And, I mean, we have over 200,000 lines of spoken dialogue in Starfield with no voiced protagonists. And it was not having a voiced protagonist that allowed us to create such a big world."
