Fallout 4 was the one Bethesda RPG that broke tradition and decided to give your character a voice. The male and female both had a set voice and talked during dialogue with NPCs Mass Effect style.
Now that worked in Mass Effect since you were Commander Shepard, an established character in the game's universe and the main point of the game was you were roleplaying Shepard, and chose what Shepard did and didn't do. Why does it not work for Fallout? It doesn't work for Fallout since your character is supposed to be whoever you want. Giving your character a voice and having them talk during NPC conversations means you can't imagine what voice the crazy character you created would have, since they would always have one fixed voice.
But that's the least of the problems having the player character talked had. The biggest issue is the fact being fully voiced means dialogue choices are scaled back tremendously to save money on voice acting.
Here's the traditional view when having a conversation with an NPC in Fallout or Elder Scrolls:
In older Bethesda RPGs your dialogue options are full sentences of what your character would say, followed by special dialogue choices and what stats are required to say it. You know what you're gonna say. Plus, there's more dialogue options than just the ones shown as you can see there's a scroll bar, so you could have long conversations, or short and brief, selecting whatever you want to roleplay as.
Now here's Fallout 4's in comparison
Gone is the list of sentences to say. Instead you are limited to at max FOUR choices, and they all have the same theming. Top choice is asking for more detail, left is a humorous response, down is a positive response, and right is a negative response. ALL of the dialogue trees follow this. You have no idea what your character is gonna say, and a lot of times you select what you think is something your character would say but the voice acting says something else.
This also means extra dialogue dependent on your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats are gone too, including the fan favorite low intelligence dialogue choices which are absolutely hilarious.
This dialogue selector was so hated one of the very first mods made for Fallout 4 was deleting the directional dialogue select and bringing back the original extended dialogue list with the full sentences.
Unfortunately this solution wasn't perfect since you were still limited to just four options at max but at least you knew what your character was gonna say
Which segways into the final problem with having the player character voiced: Modding. Modders love adding new quests, new locations, new characters and conversations with those characters. Just one problem: Your character has a voice. So how do you add new dialogue options for a character who is fully voiced. And that's where the problem came in: Making mods that added new dialogue was a nightmare since modders had to take in account the fact the player has a voice. Some had to reuse previous voice clips from other dialogues, some tried to hire a soundalike but then remembering they gotta make a female voice too so they give up on that plan and try to use Youtube Poop style sentence mixing to make new voice clips. Some modders just said screw it and ignored the voice acting altogether.
So thank Todd Bethesda realized their mistake and got rid of voice acting for your character, returning the old dialogue choices we love about their games.
