Baldur’s Gate 3 does a lot to let you get up close and personal with some, er, bizarre stuff. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about, you DnDeviant. As it turns out, one of those encounters ended up how it is due Larian electing to violate its own camera distance guidelines, after going for the cinematic conversations we know and love over more Bethesda-style first person dialogue exchanges.
This change in thinking came up during a panel at PAX West Larian put on to commemorate the game having been a fully released thing for a year (congrats). It features Swen Vincke in full armour and a teddy bear named Felix sat at the desk with the devs, because of course it does.
In a section of the discussion that ended up morphing into chat about the challenges writing and putting together game with cinematics posed for the studio, art director Alena Dubrovina said: “During early access we weren’t sure if cinematics were going to happen at all. We had a couple of proof of concepts and we were still like, ok are we doing it? Are we not doing it? Then we decided to do it.
“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.” So, there you go. You got a really nice look at Crusher’s digits as you kissed (or didn’t kiss) them because Larian seemigly couldn’t resist violating its own camera guidelines.
Larian founder Vincke went on to add: “There was a moment when we were actually thinking of making the dialogues first-person. So we tried that out. That quickly got shot down.” He then cited the game being cinematic as “the biggest challenge” the team had to take on.
“We had no idea what we were doing,” he said, “because we were about 120 people and we ended up with 400, and a lot of that was driven by the sheer amount of cinematics that we had to put inside of the game. That was quite a jump for us, and dealing with that was really, really, really complicated.”
Adapting the DnD formula into what was needed for the game was another big challenge cited during the discussion, with current Larian director of design Nick Pechenin citing the fact they ended up going “deep down in community forums, reading through people arguing what exactly was meant by a certain passage and [about] how crit fishing on a paladin is totally legitimate” as being part of the “really long journey” of adapting establisthed tabletop quirks and lore.
Will you be thinking about all of this hard work Larian had to put in the next time your crit fishing paladin plants a smacker on a goblin’s unwashed tootsies? Let us know below, and make sure to stay tuned as we’ll let you know as soon as BG3’s Patch 7 arrives this week.
