Huvudpersoner som talar i rollspel brukar kunna vara ett omtvistat ämne. Det är till exempel svårt att tänka sig Mass Effect utan Commander Shepard, men Bethesda har generellt valt en annan lösning. I en intervju hos Polygon avslöjas dock att det var nära att även Starfield fick en talande huvudperson. Lead designer Emil Pagliarulo förklarar:
"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."
I Bethesda-äventyret Fallout 4 fanns dock en huvudperson med röst, men tydligen var spelarna inte helt nöjda med detta:
"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."
Att ge spelarna en karaktär utan röst tycks alltså ha varit det smartaste i detta fall, eftersom spelarna då kan föreställa sig att rösten låter hur de vill. Alla andra än protagonisten pratar dock i Starfield, så det är gott om röster i universum.
