WhiteGamer said:
Fully voiced. Just don't hire AAA actors that cost 100's of thousands of dollars, hire a bunch of war veterans and college actors to do the voices of the characters you so choose, for dirt cheap.
This. Let's recall that the rules of quantity and quality go both ways. Written dialogue is not inherently better than voiced dialogue, and if I don't notice that a game's dialogue has suffered because of the voice acting, then there's no reason to not have voice acting. Tons of bad writing is just as bad, or worse. It's wasting budgets on celebrities, casting people based on star credit and not ability, and a push towards non-interactive cinematics over gameplay that are hurting videogames, not simply voice acting.
Voice acting has benefits that far in excess outweigh any downsides, in my opinion. Much as a picture says a thousand words, you can communicate tons of personality through a character's voice. It helps create a better sense of mood and drama, allows for more natural exchanges between characters, it lets you say more with less, it allows you to give out exposition and plot during actual gameplay rather than pausing for dialogue pop-ups, and it gives a degree of life to the game that would otherwise be lacking.
Usually I'm tolerant of the lack of voice acting in indie, low-budget and older games simply because I know it's beyond their means and often because the writing is good enough to hold up without it, but... I mean, yeah, if I could have RPGs with good voice acting and good writing, I'd take that every time. If you need to have tons of text in your game, it's best kept optional. I like my interactive novels as much as the next guy but that simply can't be the rule or the norm.
People like to point to Fallout as an example of voice acting done right, and I agree... but I also think it would have been way better if they were able to get voice actors and talking heads for every character as well. You might say that the minor characters are less important and so it's a benefit players can just skim their dialogue and get right through things, but that only draws attention to the fact that you have boring content in your game. If the player feels the need to skip something because it's "just another NPC asking me to do an errand", then you've done something wrong.