At a recent presentation during GDC 2024, Swen Vincke, the founder of Larian Studios, made an announcement. He said the studio has finished working on Baldur’s Gate 3 and will now concentrate on new projects unrelated to the Dungeons & Dragons universe. Alongside that, he gave some information about the development of Baldur’s Gate 3 that would have involved it taking another direction.
During the presentation, Vincke discussed early design ideas for Baldur’s Gate 3 (Thanks, PC Gamer). One interesting idea was to have multiple narrators, like a Dungeon Master. You’d recognize this from Divinity Original Sin 2, which had a narrator. The studio even considered including voice actor Matt Mercer (known for Critical Role). However, they decided it would be too expensive and complicated.
In a practical move, Larian Studios used full-body performance capture to enhance character interactions and dialogue realism. While the studio initially tried facial capture techniques, they used a mix of procedural motion capture for movement and carefully crafted facial animations. This combination is on display in the final product.
“It was clear that if we were going to do it this way, it was gonna become incredibly expensive because every single scene would have to be edited to mix the Dungeon Master and the actors. And what’s more, we actually wanted to have multiple dungeon master narrated by multiple people. So we had Matt Mercer on the on our minds already back then. But we said, you know, probably not going to work.”
Swen Vincke
During the presentation, it was revealed that the character Astarion, a popular vampire rogue companion, was originally planned to be a tiefling. Images from mid-production concepts showed Astarion’s original design.
Vincke also talked about how the Russian invasion of Ukraine affected the development of Baldur’s Gate 3. Larian had to move developers from St. Petersburg, which delayed the game’s progress. The studio also tried to change the release date to avoid clashing with Bethesda’s upcoming game Starfield, but it didn’t work.
We’ve reviewed the move from Dungeons and Dragons in another article, but this new information is also interesting. Seeing the difficulties and changing creative choices involved in creating a big game is interesting. It also confirmed the conclusion of a phase, giving Baldur’s Gate fans a feeling of completion regarding Larian’s work on the series and getting them excited for the studio’s upcoming projects.
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