I feel like you can have a good game with a silent protaganist if you do it right, for example undertale,mario etc. They have mostly silent protaganist but you still feel like you know the characters personality, it depends more on what type of game your going for. If you want to have a game that is exploration/ adventure you should probably have a speaking character but for games that are heavily fighting based like for example pokemon games it's better to keep your character silent because it's kind of the players character in a sense.