Summary
In past Larian Studios games, likeDivinity: Original Sin, conversations stayed top-down with voiced text boxes. Sure, you had personable characters as rich asAstarionand Shadowheart like the Red Prince and Ifan, but scenes between you and them were far less intimate than inBaldur’s Gate 3.
In Larian’saward-winning cRPGthat skyrocketed the studio to fame, they brought in cinematics that allow characters to be more expressionate, showing off incredible facial animations that allow for the most miniscule emotions to shine through in each actor’s performance. It’s what let us connect to these characters so much more deeply than in past games, but it was almost even more intimate.
“There was a moment when we were actually thinking of making the dialogues first-person,” Larian CEO Swen Vincke said at a PAX West panel (as reported byVG247). “So we tried that out. That quickly got shot down.”
“We decided that the camera is going to be quite far away from the character and we’re never gonna zoom in as close, and the next thing we know they’re zooming in on a goblin toe,” director Alena Dubrovina noted.
Cinematics Almost Never Happened In Baldur’s Gate 3
It’s inarguable that the cinematic scenes were a big part of what set Baldur’s Gate 3 apart from not only past Larian Studios work, but also the myriad other cRPGs out there.
The genre neverdied, but it became more and more niche as the most popular RPGs moved into the realm of story-driven action. Larian was able to finally bridge the gap. But things could’ve gone much, much differently.
“During early access we weren’t sure if cinematics were going to happen at all,” Dubrovina said. “We had a couple of proof of concepts and we were still like, okay are we doing it? Are we not doing it? Then we decided to do it.”
The rest is history, with the rich cast of Baldur’s Gate 3 bleeding out of the game and becoming icons in their own right and mainstay staples ofDungeons & Dragonsas a whole.
Baldur’s Gate 3
WHERE TO PLAY
Baldur’s Gate 3 is the long-awaited next chapter in the Dungeons & Dragons-based series of RPGs. Developed by Divinity creator Larian Studios, it puts you in the middle of a mind flayer invasion of Faerûn, over a century after the events of its predecessor.
