The non-english speaker under the church

[Fortigurn]

thats mostly a problem with time and budget, you can't really afford to model/sculpt, texture, animate and lip sync a character for such a small encounter. so they do tricks to try and cut corners. it was the same with TDD where Frictional Games made it that Alexander would only talk through memories or psychic abilities and in the end would only be a textured model with one animation (again no lip sync). or where aggripa had no mouth so they won't have to do lip sync and he was chained so the only animation was the head rotating to look at you.

Shortcuts are perfectly understandable and always necessary. But even if they'd decided a full 3D model was too much to include, they could have saved plenty of resources by having him in a covered cage, with you having a dialogue with him (however scripted). It just seemed like a missed opportunity to add depth to the story.