Baldur’s Gate 3 creators Larian held a panel at PAX West to celebrate a year since its launch, and it’s a well-deserved hour-long victory lap of a retrospective. While the making of Baldur’s Gate 3 has been well-covered since launch, there are still a lot of engaging things to discuss. Like the fact that there were almost no cinematics.
“During Early Access, we weren’t sure if we were going to do any cinematics at all,” says art director Alena Dubrovina. “We had a few proofs of concept and we were still like, OK, are we doing this? We’re not doing this? That’s when we decided to do it. We decided that the camera would be pretty far away from the character and we’d never zoom in that much, and then a moment later they’re zooming in on the goblin’s toe.”
Dubrovina is referring to a scene where a goblin named Crusher tries to intimidate you into kissing his foot. While the scene could play out in a number of ways—Dark Urge even has the option of biting off his own toe—it requires the camera to get up close and personal with the goblin’s nasty feet.
It’s difficult to imagine Baldur’s Gate 3 without its gorgeous motion-captured conversations, but another option considered was a more Bethesda-like camera. “There was a point where we actually thought about doing first-person dialogue,” says inventive director Swen Vincke. “So we tried it. It was quickly scrapped.”
He added that making Baldur’s Gate 3 cinematic was probably the biggest challenge Larian has faced. “And we had no idea what we were doing because we were about 120 people and ended up being 400, and a lot of that was because of the sheer amount of cinematics that we had to put into the game. It was a big leap for us, and dealing with that was really, really, really complicated.”
