Voice acting in Video Games

[Mordry]

An interesting topic at least.

What do you think of it? What do you prefer?

I prefer in RPGs silence (like in Zelda) but I hate a mix of silence and voice acting (Dragon Age: Origins as best example). And it if have a good voice acting, then I want that the person I play with have a voice and a good one too. I don't want to identify myself with the person, I want, that the person I play with have his own character. Then I don't care if the NPCs aren't talking who are giving the quest. So long as the cutscenes and important characters have a voice. Best example for a good mix like I imagine is Xenoblade Chronicles.
In Ego-Shooter games I prefer a silent hero like Gordon Freeman or a person with personality like "Ford" of "The Conduit". Heroes like in Crysis 1 are just... I mean they are saying two to five sentences and you have the feeling, that you could put them in the garbage can and give another one the role, you can sort them out any time. In Half-Life it's kinda funny that you don't say anything, but Half-Life 2 is for me the perfect Shooter.

Then there are games, where the english or german voice acting is ABSOLUTLY terrible, only way to solve this->another language and subtitles. Just a small example: In The Witcher 2 I played it in english first, because the german voice acting of Witcher 1 was terrible, every speaker there wanted to be so cool and sh*t. In Witcher 2 I was playing english and I thought "not again, not another >>I want to be cool<< voice acting" and then I switched to german. The speakers were absolutly great and much better than in Witcher 1. It's for me like in the case of Risen/Gothic, english voice actors are good but for me in german better. Another example would be Left 4 Dead, I prefer english voice actors because they just sound more realistic. 4 perfectly german speaking persons in Amerika hunted by zombies and good voice acting doesn't fit for me the setting. I liked the 4 english speaking people with emotions in voice (these are great speakers and I'm talking about Zoey, Bill, Francis and Louis) and where you can really imagine "that could actually happen!".

Anyway I wrote a lot now, what do you think of it?