Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Feedback after watching 18 June event

Hi All

Absolutely loved the game, being an old AD&D Player I can appreciate turn based, no issues with that. The only thing that bothered me a little is the lack of voice over when the player is using either the player character or the companion to speak with NPCs. A little strange when the character stares blankly at the NPC whilst the NPC is charismatic and engaging. I felt that this takes away from the player character and I felt less engaged. Even more strange when the character speaks with a companion and the companion is charismatic but when the companion is used to speak with a NPC, they stare blankly. We can still have the conversation options but after that voice acted and animated in the style of the companion or player character. Good example could be found in games like Mass Effect/Witcher.

Cheers and looking forward to the game!

The issue is usually cost vs benefit when it comes to voice acting protagonists.

Witcher and ME that’s easier because you have a set character. You play Geralt / Sheppard and thus how they appear and sound is pre-defined.

In a Game like this where you pick your character, would you be happy with just 1 voice option for male and one for female no matter your race etc?

I would be ok with it but others might not and voice acting dialogue is usually a costly affair.

i think the point of having the PC not beeing voiced is the same as with NWN2: so you can imagine yourself what your character is saying

Precisely.
Now in BG1 & 2 you could choose from i think it was 5 speech banks for Male and 5 for Female, but those were limited to interaction "statements" for movement and combat and were in esence pitch variations of the same comment.

To fully record speech for all of the dialogue is a long endeavour, especially given all of the options. To do so whilst providing the player with adequate choice... Especially when you take into account the variety in races that there are in D&D. Cyberpunkk2077 will have voice acted protagonists, but again, "only" 1 for male and 1 for female (at least as far as I can tell), because even though you have large variety in look of your character, they are still human.

Whilst I also prefer voiced protagonists, I equally understand those who dislike it and in fact know a fair few who disliked or avoided Witcher3 purely because they disliked Geralt's voice... I mean ok, but all the more foolish as W3 remains the best modern era RPG as far as I am concerned (BG2 remains my nostalgic favourite).

So there is no pleasing people with this and I believe it's easier to leave it out rather than put it in.

Though Larian, if you are able to add the soundbanks for combat voices etc like they did in BG1&2 then, I would be all for it.

I totally agree.
This is something that I find really strange yesterday (and immersion breaking again).

Come on man, name me an RPG where you design your character from scratch and can pick a matching voice? Mass Effect 2 was as close as one got and again, it was 1 voice for male and one for female and thats because Shep was a human and was a character defined by the game, just like Geralt is for W3. I would love it to be fully voiced wit multiple voice banks available depending on race and gender, but it isn't exactly realistic now is it!?!

the same thign happened in OS2, the reason for this is that evey NPC can also potentialy be the main character.
when you pick the NPC for the dialogue you essentialy turn the NPC into "Main character" mode.
Then apply the same logic that it alked about before.

Im not even gonna pretend that saving costs for mocap and voice acting isnt also a thing here, but there is a justifiable reason

It personally takes me out of my character concept when i only got one or two voices to pick from. It gives the character a predetermined personality and i dont lik ethat.
Especialy when i play classes like Barbarian that quite frnakly dont work without a heavy austrian accent

Hi All

Yup I understand cost benefit analysis and as a company Larian should do that and if they feel that my suggestion is valid and acceptable and beneficial from a product standpoint, then they will find a way to implement it within their budget. As a fan I am just here to offer feedback of what I felt will make my experience more enjoyable.

As a fan, today when I close my eyes and think about 2 of my best rpg experiences, Mass Effect and the Witcher, it's Mark Meer's(Male Sheppard) and Doug Cockle's(Geralt - witcher series) that I hear. It adds to my experience as a fan, if BG3 doesn't have this available, then it will not be an experience that I will have.

Hi Maximuuus,

Thanks for the post, great to meet like-minded friends.

Cheers and have a great weekend.

Precisely, this is one of those areas where you are always damned if you do or damned if you don’t.

It is just simply unrealistic to expect 20 different voice over options for the main character.

That said my preference would be to have a voice, but what about those who don’t want it, I’m not sure you could turn it off due the need to animate the mouth movements.

You can't choose to fully implement voice acting while at the same time you don't give voices to main character...
Not saying it's never the same in other games or it's easy to do it... but this situation is a little bit contradictory.
This lead to really strange 1-way voiced dialogues.

I agree with Sordak that it's probably because every origin characters can be the main characters so there are many works to do with them... But it doesn't mean it gives a good feeling when you're playing custom characters (which is I think what a large majority of players are going to do)

I don't like that idea of "origin character" that can become the main character, and this is exactly an exemple of why. As you said : benefits/costs.
According to me immersion is way more important than being able to play with a main character fully designed by Larian.

Not sure elves, human, dwarves, vampire or devils should have specific voice acting for each races...
At least, I could live without something like "(incomplete) fully voice acting", but this is another discussion.

You know what, I can add my own example...

Dragon Age Inquisition gave you 2 voices per gender. Hmm, like I said, I would prefer it to be fully voiced, but you do need options. So I am torn on this one. If Larian can find the budget for it then it would definitely get my vote.

I would rather have they use the resources on additional subclasses, and actual playable content opposed to voice acting. Or modding capabilities for that matter.

That's why I said I don't like origin characters for this game.
I would definitely prefer their voices to be choices for custom characters (without being able to play them as main character) than always having muted custom characters (and being able to play them as main char).

Not sur they'll add "additionnal ressources" for it.
If the muted main character is what we're going to have in the final release, this is another bad choice according to me.

Yup I guess at the very least when if someone chooses an origin character as their player character or if someone uses a companion to speak with a NPC, then the voice should remain the same, not a blank stare. Also whilst I can understand using a companions skill eg one with the highest intimidation, to speak with a NPC, totally taking over seems a little strange and unnatural. For example... At camp when the player character spoke with Lae'zel (Gith fighter) she had personality and was in fact a little blunt and mean. At a later stage when she was used by the player to speak with the goblins, aside from the blank stare, it was like a totally different character. In fact some are "nice" options and it seems like the player can make her character change just for that conversation.

Personally I liked the way Solasta: Crown of the Magister handled the way companions contribute and converse with npcs. 4 of them each having different personalities and voices, and the player selects which one is to chip in when a npc speaks with them. (go check it out on youtube if you wish). Once again its my personal opinion and in this case I am not expecting Larian to change this.

Anyway I originally started this post with the hopes that someone from Larian will read it and either take the suggestion or ignore it(and I am ok with that), just wanted to do my part and contribute. Now that I have done that, I guess that's that, so this will be my last post here, will not be back to check this thread so will not be able to respond.

Peace and all the best.

Some of the criticism the game receives is laughable. This is not Mass Effect or The Witcher. This game is supposed to be much deeper. You dont play with Gerald or Shepard. The number of options for the main character is considerably more. You dont exept them to voice 20 Geralds or Shepards do you? Plus this game will have more dialoge scripts thanthe games mentioned above, considering that your dialoge options change depending on your character. So if you ask me its impossible to voice all the dialogues without the bugdet of Red Dead Redemption 2 or similar caliber game, which they dont have. You must compare BG 3 with the games of similar depth of character creation/customization like original Baldurs Gate series, NWN series or more recent title Dragon Age Origins. Besides there are more valuable things to spend budgen than voicing all the main characters like making dialoge even deeper.

Witcher isnt an RPG.
its a movie game.

Mass Effect is bareley an RPG.

Playing your own cahracter is a big part of what makes an RPG an RPG. Im not saccrificing it for more movie game nonsense like dialgoue for the PC

and again on Dragon age. i dont like it,, i hated it.
i want to play grumpy charactes with a strong personality.
i dont want to play some low T generic movie protagonist but thats exactly what happened.
It ruins any character concept that isnt exactly what the developers intended.

ME and Witcher are a bit different beasts - they remove a lot of Control over the character for presentation sake. That’s certainly not what I would want Larian to do. However, you are not wrong.

I think it works better if RPG leaves more to players imagination. While adding more detail to conversations (closeups, full VO, animations) adds to the experience, it becomes really noticeable when it is not there. That has been the case with Bioware games since KOTOR. I think it works better in something like Fallout New Vegas where we mare simply in protagonist’s head.

And yeah, the companion thing is something that bothered me even in Divinity2 - companions being companions, but also empty shells to be inhabited by coop players - And with content being designed to be interacted With by 4 players, rather then 1, when played singleplayer, you will control 4 protagonists, rather then one protagonist with companions.

I felt lack of coop buddies in D:OD2 strongly and I fear it will be the same in BG3.

IF Origin characters are going to have additional voiced dialogue that is shall we say "standard" i.e. not JUST used in specific Origin character moments, then the solution would be to have voice as an option during character creation and allow us to decide if we want our custom character to sound like one of the Origin characters or simply leave blank. What that does to animation though I don't know.

But as one can see, there is an equal divide here between voiced vs non voiced full stop. It's totally subjective as to what is considered good vs not.

Could be that custom character voicing just wasnt ready for Swen's playthrough or even EA. We know we'll get to pick the voice for our custom made characters, like in DOS2, so I'm sure its just not fully implemented yet.

i still dont think that.
with all those dialogue options and every single origin character beeing able to say every one of them, since every origin character can be the protagonist, dios mio, thatd be a lot of viocelines to record.