I've seen this twice now with Kojima games. Both MGSV and Death Stranding hired big name, B list celebrities to voice their main characters. This is creating an obvious problem that sticks out to the players, and the reason is immediately apparent: Keifer Sutherland and Norman Reedus are expensive. Video games don't have the budget to bring them into the studio to record for days and days on end. Therefore they end up having to write a script for them to voice that is wildly truncated relative to their central role in a 20 hour long game. The result is an awkward, mute main character that stares silently at virtually every secondary character they come into contact with, while these NPCs are often having one of the most important, emotional, expository moments of their lives. The main character dialogue ends up being limited to thinly dispersed cut scenes and the occasional fixed expression reacting to something in gameplay, like Sam telling himself "Come on, Sam. Almost there," while hiking up a hill.
Wouldn't it be a better game experience to hire a solid voice actor, someone who doesn't cost a million dollars a day, so you can have them fill out all of the optional side-quests with natural sounding replies? Is the coolness factor of "Hey! Awesome! I'm totally playing as that guy from The Walking Dead!" really worth the awkwardness of his sparse dialogue? Every time he stands there silently staring at a character who is spouting his life story it immediately makes me picture Norman Reedus zipping through the recording booth in a day and hopping on a plane to do more TV shoots. It just takes me right out of the game.
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