Baldur’s Gate 3 does a lot of things to get you up close and personal with some, well, weird stuff. You know what I’m talking about, you DnDeviant. As it turns out, one of those encounters ended up causing Larian to choose to violate his own camera distance guidelines, after having the dialogue we know and love from the movie, rather than more Bethesda-style first-person dialogue exchanges.
This change of heart came during a panel discussion hosted by Larian at PAX West to mark one year of the game’s full release (congratulations). It features Swen Vincke in full armor, a teddy bear named Felix sitting at a desk with the developers, because of course that’s what it is.
Manage cookie settings
In part of a discussion that ultimately evolved into a discussion about the challenges of writing and producing games and animations for the studio, art director Alena Dubrovina said: “During Early Access, we don’t Determines whether the animation will occur.
“We decided the camera was pretty far away from the character and we were never going to zoom in that close, and the next thing we knew they were zooming in on the leprechaun’s toes.” So, that was it. When you kiss (or don’t kiss) Crusher’s fingers, you can clearly see them, as Larian can’t seem to resist violating his own camera guidelines.
Larian founder Vincke went on to add: “For a while, we were actually thinking about making the dialogue first-person. So we tried that. But that was quickly nixed.” He then looked at the game’s cinematic approach as The “biggest challenge” the team has to face.
“We had no idea what we were doing,” he said, “because we were about 120 people, but we ended up with 400 people, and a lot of that was driven by the sheer amount of cutscenes we had to put into the game. It’s a big leap for us, and dealing with this is really, really complex.
Adapting the DnD formula into what’s needed for the game was another big challenge mentioned in the discussion, with current Larian design director Nick Pechenin citing the fact that they ended up “digging into community forums and reading what people were arguing about exactly what it meant” through a certain paragraph and [about] How Paladin Crit Fishing Is Totally Legal” as part of a “really long journey” to adapting to established tabletop quirks and lore.
Next time your crit fishing paladin lands a slap on the goblin’s unwashed ass, will you think of all the hard work Larian had to put in? Let us know below, and stay tuned and we’ll let you know as soon as this week’s patch for version 7 of BG3 is released.
