Lines are likely the same in UP, it's just that starting a dialog with head works a little bit different.
As for quality, it's the same as with animations - I think going for low quality just because it's always been that way is not a good policy. Either way, lowering q is always possible later. I'd give it a playtest first.
OK, I think I understand your reasoning, but I do not agree. It's not "just because it's always been that way". It's because the base game's assets
will never be better, or higher quality, without being recreated from scratch and replaced entirely, which is something that absolutely shouldn't be done with the wonderful performances of the actors in Fallout 2. With your animations example: unless the aim is to update all original animations to some new standard (which may be possible and would be rad) ... why would the goal for new animations, that will sit alongside base game assets, be to have them visually stand out against the base game's assets?
I don't know a great deal about how animation stuff works in FO2, admittedly, but I would most definitely argue that it's not "the same" situation with new animations + with new audio. With audio, dialogue especially, it's (to me, at least) extremely jarring when the quality of additions is inconsistent with the quality of the originals. It's a very common problem with mods for a lot of games. We will never be able to attain higher quality/clearer sounding voice lines for, e.g., Sulik, or the elder, or Harold or whoever. They're always going to sound crispy no matter what you do to their audio files. So I'm of the opinion that anything new added that claims to be part of a "restoration" should try to sit as seamlessly as possible alongside those original performances.
Here's a quick example. Say I'm doing a mod for half life 1 and I want to add some new voice lines for the HEV suit but have them work alongside the existing ones, and all the original voice lines and audio from the game.
Am I going to:
My choice would be based not only on which sounds closer to
the original work "just because" it was done that way before, but my consideration needs to be conscious that one choice will sound way more jarring to the player than the other.
Does that make sense?
Sorry for the monster reply lol. To be clear: with any fallout work I do I'm happy to provide my source files in the highest quality as recorded if that's what folks want, but I do feel strongly about the way they're presented in game. So many mods that add voice have such a bad reputation not just because of the quality of performance, but for how grating players find it when some character they meet just sounds "different" in a way that they can't put their finger on, and it takes them out of the experience and makes it feel amateurish.