http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/48848
A rather interesting read on why its not that good a thing. I'll post my comment/textwall below
A non-voiced main character is usually a bad thing in my experience. HL2 is a perfect example, it was clear that they intended it to be a story driven game but I actually didn't give a toss about freeman simply because his silence and the fact that I had no input into the story made him seem irrelevant. That then spilled over onto the rest of the world, if he didn't care enough to speak to people then it hardly seemed like the world was important. It's as if they didn't want the character to speak but they also didn't want the player to speak and something that had potential really suffered for it. Add all that to a tedious generic shooter and the only reason I finished it was that boredom was a slightly less preferable alternative. At least Bioshock had the decency to have well characterised antagonists so the game had SOME personality.
Dead Space is the worst offender in recent memory though. The game was excellent, the story was well delivered and the surprises actually managed to surprise the first time. The downside is that without a voice, Isaac felt like a machine, he had a name and didn't use it. He was told to go somwhere and do something so he did it without question. He found his crewmate who he thought was probably dead and accepted it without a word. He was in the middle of a flood of necromorphs without so much as an "oh bugger".
He even remained silent during the big revelations in the last act even though the character model had some wonderfully emotive body language. I can understand them not wanting to go down the Darth Vader/Calculon "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" path and IF he'd had a voice up until then, the silence during such a revelation would have been a brilliantly shocking move (like the near-silent vaccuum sections) but going from silence to silence doesn't do much.
In something like Fallout 3 it doesn't matter since you're selecting your own dialogue so you still drive the story, the only downside is the lack of appeal to the n00b gamer who hasn't grown up playing real RPGs where getting the first line voiced was a luxury

I guess I have a somewhat different stance on the subject; starting with the first Half-Life, his silence seemed normal to me as he was an alien to all the events happening around him, trying to understand the implications of his actions and making haste to get his ass out of there alive. I guess that's the charm that Half-Life brought, the hero isn't really a hero; instead he is a normal person trapped in an unknown situation and environment from which he tries to escape via all the means necessary. Thus his silence is for me justified as he knows no more than I know relating to the story and inter-character interaction which to be honest is minimal. Along with this we need to remember that HL was launched in a period when story in FPSes was just at its beginnings.
Half-Life 2 takes this even further; Gordon is now a messiah return from an atemporal plane, doing the whims of a master he does not understand. He is thrown in a conflict he didn't see start and is surrounded by characters who know everything about him despite him knowing seemingly nothing about them. His silence is justified in my view even by the hypothesis that he became jaded after the events of the first Half-Life where he seemingly didn't manage to truly save anyone, not even himself.
I can't say that in general a speaking character in a FPS takes me out of the world just as I can't say that I feel more connected to Gordon because he chooses to be silent. It depends on the scope of the game and how all elements are combined together, on the way the developers choose to tell the story to an audience. I can compare this to interactive fiction where dialogue is hard to create properly because of this desire to drive to player to explore the world without being told what he sees; instead the goal is to create a relationship between the player and the world, not the player and his avatar.
I guess that's where the focus should be: do we want our avatar to be a real person with whom we empathize and accompany in his quest or do we want our avatar to be merely a proxy, a silent being that lets us interact with the world of the game and doesn't come between us and the setting put forward by the designer.
Both options have in the end both advantages and disadvantages and cater to different styles of story telling as well as different audiences so I can't say that one way is superior to the other.
Either way, nice to see another fellow GWJ listener and +1 rating for an interesting post.

I enjoyed HL2 and its episodes despite the fact gordon freeman doesn't say a word. I think the games would be better if he spoke but if they really wanted him silent they could of tied a mute storyline into the overall game. Gordon took shrapnel to the neck and can't speak anymore or something like that.
As for Deadspace I know what you mean, your meant to be some asteroid minner/mechanic and after the first little sequence you become a stone cold monster killing machine. The game is just Doom3 in 3rd person. Some personallity on the character may have gone a long way in shaping the atmosphere of the game as something even more scary.
Overall though if a game has strong story I generally like my character to say something. Bioware style games with dialog trees don't matter so much as I still get to pick whats being said, but most other story style games it would be nice to hear a voice and have a character to play as. Someone to relate to(or not), but a character all the same.

I don't think a protagonist needs a direct voice, not in the way you're describing. There are so many ways to express a character without shoving dialogue down his throat, keeping it open to the player.
For example; though Isac never spoke in Deadspace (outside of his grunts, groans, and cries of pain) his mission log is where he expressed his emotions and thoughts. They didn't just list "go do X" but gave you insight in his silent mind.
A good example of non-verbal protagonists would be the Quest for Glory series by Sierra from way back when. The Narrator was your voice, he described your words and actions, but left the exact words up for interpretation. He described what the Hero thought, felt, and experienced for the player, and spoke for him. "You tell the Burgomeister about Piotr's death...." for example.
Personally, I tend to lean towards a silent protagonist over a speaking one. Simply because you, as a player, as guiding him. A character with a personality you dislike is much harder to play than one that is left to seed and grow within your mind.

I believe that is right up there with "exposition heavy dialogue" and "need for a narrator"
Maybe I am old fashioned, but I always felt that the point of a journal in a game was to provide information on what to do next and provide secondary information.
Imagine if Empire Strikes Back was reliant upon a journal. Luke gets his hand chopped off, finds out that his dad is a black guy who used to to Bell Atlantic commercials, and he starts writing stuff down on a dataslate (Star Wars has no paper :p)? Funny as that would be, it wouldn't really be all that good plot-wise.

Those I think are different since the character HAS a voice, its just not a spoken one. Most of the time that's just because its fucking expensive to have an actor voice every possible line from a primary protagonist and doubly so if there's a gender option. Its one of the reasons I didn't mind paying RRP for Mass Effect 2
The grunts & cries are one of the main reasons the lack of dialogue jarred so much, he was clearly capable of some sort of verbal output but he didn't even yelp in surprise when the dead necromorph stopped playing dead and tried to bite his face off. Admittedly he'd be a bit over the surprise when it happened 5 times in a row but he should have been surprised the first time.
I'm not asking for a complicated and emotional soliloquy but take as an example the section at the start where you have no guns and have to run like fuck to get away from the first necromorphs. It seems inhuman not to have him scream or swear or even try to call his squadmates when he finally gets into the lift to see if he might be the only person left alive on this nightmare death ship.
Certainly don't make him a foul mouthed ballsy action hero douche, plenty of that with duke nukem and other infantile shit but he can at least be human and therefore more sympathetic. The silence does allow the player to project their own emotions into the scene but since its trying to conjure one specific emotion, they might as well have had him running like the clappers saying "ohshitohshitohshitohshit"
"Dear Diary: Thats not true! THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE!!!!"

I dunno, when I played Deadspace the silence was big factor in giving it a scary atmosphere. Granted if he had talked during the 'cutscenes' it wouldn't have broken it. But in your example of him running I would have lost focus on how tense and serious the situation was. After all, as the necromorph takes swings at you as you run he screams in pain.
But if I was listening to him swear, beg, etc... I dunno, I don't think it would have come off as frightening as it originally felt to me.

For half life 1 +2+ep1; I feel that the silence worked good enough as it the characters didn't ask him for a verbal opinion. In Ep 2 near the end, It didn't work when Ellie had a discussion about the G-man with Gordon as I felt it was one sided. To be fair though, there were times during hl 2 and ep 1 where I would have liked to tell charters about the G-man and what happened.

Voiced protagonists in RPGs are mostly a bad thing for me, with Mass Effect a perfect example.
If I make a character, I want him to sound a certain way. ME didn't allow for this (it would have been too difficult to have a choice of voices), so the only choice you get is male or female.
Sometimes having a generic American male voice is not what I want for my character.

I like to think that Isaac screams, curses and spits like the rest of us in his situation, but the fact that he is wearing that suit dampens his voice.
Maybe he can only talk like your other crewmembers, through video feeds? Since we dont play them, we'll never know ;-)

It would not have been difficult, but it would have been expensive. Voice acting is expensive, both in terms of cost and space. If I recall correctly, VAs get paid on a per-line basis (although, I am sure there is room for negotiation and the like). So you either have to pay Jennifer Hale three times as much money (so we can get her to record her lines with three different voices), or you have Shepard voiced by Whatshiface AND Steve Blum (so twice as much money, at least).
Then you consider the size of the disc. People are already pretty peeved about having multiple DVDs for ME2, imagine if they had three or four, as opposed to two.
The reason why the older RPGs let you pick a voice is because they, by and large, weren't fully voiced. You would mostly just have a few lines in combat, and maybe some important dialogues voiced. The rest was text-based.
And I am going to have to agree that Gordon being mute in HL2 was jarring. In HL1 they got away with it, largely because most other FPSs didn't have voicing. But there is really no reason he shouldn't speak in HL2. Hopefully Ep3 reveals that G-man stole his tongue or something.
And as an example of doing the voiced chase-scene right:
ME2 SPOILERS
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Joker sneaking through the Normandy SR-2 when the Collector's attack. He speaks, but by and large, you are pretty quiet. Admittedly, that is because Joker is hiding (and Seth Green isn't the best actor, let alone voice actor :p), but it worked. But you never feel that you are silent because you are mute, but instead silent because you don't want to get captured by a bug.
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END SPOILER

I think a voiced protagonist makes the game as if I'm not playing it, the guy I hear talking is in the game instead. with a quiet protagonist I can think what I want to think, but this alone isn't a good solution because with HL2 as an example it can feel awkward where everything is worded so you don't need to reply. So when you get a voiced character game is taken away from me, with a quiet character the story can be a little odd but it's not as bad.
Best thing to me was in the 90's where you could simply pick a sentence and it was not said verbally but put in word form what you said. Again not the best but until we get reactive AI's that respond to anything you say there can't be any good option really.

I had no problem with Dead Space in that regards. I loved it.
Don't really see how it would be any better by isac chattering non stop.
Desolation was a major part of that game and some heavy nervous breathing and groans of pain was all i required from my protagonist.

That does sound like a BDSM game though... all it needs is a little moaning, and it'll be complete.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbR49Qaut9k = BDSM Hardcore