After E3 2021 Bethesda fans know more about Starfield than they've been able to find out over the last three years since the game's reveal. Prospective players have been given the game's release date, the name of a major faction, and a batch of concept art revealing the kinds of locations they can expect to visit in the studio's first new RPG IP in over 25 years.
There's one major question hanging over Starfield, however; whether or not the game's protagonist will be voiced as in Fallout 4, or silent as in older Fallout games and The Elder Scrolls series. Although Bethesda has yet to officially confirm an answer, developer comments appear to point in one direction.
Bethesda's Protagonists
Fallout 4 saw a major change in Bethesda's storytelling style, introducing a voiced player character for the first time. Between the player's voice and the third-person dialogue camera, the game's dialogue had more in common with series like Mass Effect than previous Fallout games.
Although ambitious, many players found the voiced Fallout 4 protagonist too restrictive and prescriptive in terms of roleplaying freedom. Not only did the voiced player characters take away a great degree of player choice about who their character was, but in many cases lines were delivered and received in unexpected ways thanks to the game's vague dialogue wheel options.
There hasn't been a first-person single-player Bethesda RPG released since Fallout 4. It's unlikely, however, that The Elder Scrolls series will ever try and incorporate a voiced player character. The range of races in The Elder Scrolls is simply too broad, and having different voice actors read every potential player line in the game for each different race and gender would be a far larger task than the already monumental one undertaken to bring Fallout 4's voiced protagonists to life.
As a new IP whether or not Starfield is going to have a voiced protagonist is far less clear. There have been several hints that the main quest will have player's searching for intelligent alien life in Starfield. Combined with the hard sci-fi aesthetics revealed so far, and it's almost certain that players will only be able to play as human characters in the upcoming game. This would only make voicing Starfield's character as difficult as it was to voice Fallout 4's protagonist, but there are some good reasons to think that Bethesda may be going in a different direction.
Starfield's Player Character
For start, Todd Howard compared Starfield to Skyrim instead of Fallout when talking about the game, and said in an interview with the Telegraph that new game would let players "express the character they want to be." He also mentioned that Starfield will have some more traditional RPG mechanics than recent Bethesda games.
While this doesn't confirm that the game's protagonist will not be voiced, Fallout 4's voiced protagonist was certainly less traditional. It also prevented some other more traditional RPG mechanics from making it to the game. Perks which in previous Fallout games unlocked new dialogue, for example, no longer gave the player new dialogue options but simply made them more likely to succeed certain dialogue checks.
The comparison to Skyrim makes it likely that Starfield will attempt to focus on roleplaying freedom. Part of the secret of Skyrim's success is just how much replay value its blank-slate protagonist and totally open world give the game. Starfield is set for release exactly 11 years after Skyrim's 11.11.11 release date, which seems to be an attempt on Bethesda's part to draw more comparisons between Starfield and Skyrim than Starfield and Fallout 4. Although it has yet to be confirmed, the evidence revealed so far seems to point to a voiced Starfield protagonist being unlikely.
Starfield releases November 11, 2022, for PC and Xbox Series X/S.