Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General So, how's the game?

In BG3 we see NPCs interacting with surroundings (blacksmith hammering, workers using their tools, people near tables and chests interacting with them) as a part of their routine, there are more animations and voice over for idle NPC routine in BG3 act one than whole BG2, even the text for idle NPCs is very limited, used mostly for town criers and quest NPCs trying to get your attention, usually you have to actually talk to them to see their dialogues with other NPCs.

You remember the rock-paper-scissor mini game in DOS, through which you and your other custom character try to settle a difference in opinion? If you want to go with option A then LOSE the rock-paper-scissor game, your characters would go with option B, and you'd feel like tearing your hair out. This is literally "the character you play made a decision you disagree with".

I'd also like to point out that "play the game the way you want" is not the same thing as "everything works out the way you want". It is understandable if we want to avoid unpleasant consequences that result from NPC autonomy. However, there are times when that makes sense and adds life to the game. For example, the idea that two party members suddenly becoming unselectable and trying to kill each other off. I understand that this could cause inconveniences, and many players can't see the amusing side of it and to them this idea is just bad. Personally, I find this amusing and wouldn't mind either reloading the game or just moving on. I also understand that this is actually a consequence of my choice, which is "forcing people who hate each other to travel together".

I guess many players can't stand NPC autonomy when it's something unpleasant, especially when the situation stems from inconspicuous, seemingly "innocent" choices (meaning they can't anticipate that a certain decision they've made is going to lead to something unpleasant). Things like party members suddenly leaving you to do their own things, becoming unselectable, trying to kill other party members, hating your actions to the point that they immediately turn hostile, disappearing from the game for good because you don't help them in time, etc. The old BG games weren't afraid of creating such situations and putting you in a rough spot, and I respect them for it.

So we're just talking about two different kinds of "being alive" here. You're talking about the animations, voice-overs, and idle interaction between NPCs and world objects. While these are nice and they make the game feel exciting and animated, they are just cosmetic, on-the-surface things that you can see, and rarely have real consequences. Let's take the blacksmith hammering for example. So what if he's interacting with his anvil? Does that mean anything? If not, then he's no different from an NPC standing still doing nothing - the only thing the blacksmith has that a static NPC doesn't is the animation. Now, however, if you can take his anvil away, and he actually realizes that his anvil is gone, and reacts to that in some manner (maybe go out and buy a new anvil, post a notice about his anvil being stolen, etc.), then that would make him more "alive".

While "NPCs looking lively" does add to the feeling that the world is alive, the kind of "being alive" that the other guys and I are talking about is beyond that. It has to do with the personality of NPCs, the things that they say, the stories that they tell, their history, their reaction to world events, and the way world events happen. These are the things you don't immediately perceive like all the cool animations. They involve more writing. It takes good writing, and it takes reading and playing time to see and appreciate. Voice-overs certainly help add personality to a character, but it takes more than that for the character to feel alive.

I agree, writing is the most important part here, but writing alone is enough only for some people. Many people, including me, never read popular plays, but we love going to theaters to watch professional actors act in those plays, because the way those actors present their characters is what makes these characters "alive" for us.

Those plays are only fun to watch because the characters are doing something interesting.

Let's take Chekhov for example. His plays are legendary because of the subtext, the concealed emotions and thoughts that are manifested not in the text itself, but the way that text is presented by actors with pauses, intonations, inflections, etc. being more important then the words they speak. The "doing something interesting" part of his plays is not what the characters do, but how and why.

You know it's not a question of one thing is more important than the other. Like..it is for me but I see what you mean. Yes, standards changed. Still, if they decided to voice over every single dialogue and add a cutscene to it and that's the reason to loose all those things mentioned on the last 2 pages of this discussion than what's the point? I hope they manage to mix both. I love what they did so far to some extent, of course graphics and animations from Larian are just sweet. But you can't trade graphics over dialogue in Baldur's Gate just like that.

Best example I can give is the first encounter with Astarion. The guy literally jumps on you with a knife. During this time the rest of the party is 100% silent and just looks at you. I guess it will be changed over time cause EA but ....will it?

Will Astarion at some point decide he had enought of Shadowheart's bs and just leave to live in peace? Or at least mention he has problems with her other than " Astarion disaproves " every single time " Shadowheart approves"? Or will it be too expensive to get yet another dialogue and it will be cut off from the game?

Yes, interrupting the game every single time at random moments when one of them has something to say in multiplayer might feel akward and they did the camp only discussions exactly because of it. But at least show a dialogue box to let us know they are talking while our camera is on the other side of the world making us unable to hear them?

Shadowheart at some point due to one of my decisions started screaming at me, saying she had enought and at that point she's ready to die to the tadpole rather than spending one more minute here. That was perfect! Of course I wanted to know that. I need to know it. Why did it happen in the camp? Like if she felt like this she decided to keep it for herself and not let me know during the whole day? Oh I also made a " shadowheart approves" decision that day so just after that dialogue she started a new one. A dialogue where she was " so thankfull to be in this group". Like that made her feel bipolar, dangerous and at most 14 years old.

Eh I could go on like that for hours. Maybe weeks. On one hand they want to show more of the characters, show their emotions in cinematics and close ups. Have a more" alive" dialogue. And precisely for this reason they " cut off the balls" of every single one character in our party.

BG2 had the same problem so they voiced over the first dialogue + the most important parts. Worked well for Viconia. You kinda knew what she felt when being nearly burned alive+ she had time to say a bit more than that. In BG3 they have voice over for all dialogues so...less dialogues. Less of everything. 20 years later. Just mix both. Cinematics and dialogues. Simple ones. It won't interrupt for long if shadowhearts says something, you answer her and she just answers with one line. No cinematic. Just a quick exchange.

If shakespear was voiced by Baldur's Gate actors then the first sentence + " To be or not to be" would be said by an actor and the rest would be text.

We know this considering a stage play of Romeo and Juliet is in the game :p Or was it Othello?

More seriously, I've been trying to find out how many lines of dialogue were in Baldur's Gate II, how many voiced lines were in The Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 and what rpg has the most voiced lines (the mmorpg The Old Republic)

I haven't had much luck googling it but...

For Baldur's Gate II the best I could find was something about the word count being 1060k and 57k lines of dialogue, though I couldn't find a source for this. That same source put Planescape at 75k lines of dialogue
Baldur's Gate EE said that it added 350k words. in that same thread someone said BG:I had 24k lines and BG:I EE had 34k.

Fallout New Vegas had 65k lines of dialogue to Fallout 3's 40k these were the games with a silent protagonist as well, Fallout 4 claims to have 111k lines of dialogue though they also say that the main characters recorded 13k lines of dialogue, I'm not sure what that means or indeed if those 13,000 lines are between them or if together they voiced 26k.

the Witcher according to The Witcher by the Numbers said something about 30k lines of dialogue

Least pertinent, The Old Republic has the Guinness World Record for most voiced lines of dialogue in a video game at over 200,000, at launch. that's between 8 classes and two genders for the main character.

confusing things a little, there's a number of instances conflating word count with lines of dialogue. Word count being an easier thing to determine. Average word count per line of dialogue being what I would consider more telling than anything else. Fallout might hold records for voiced lines, but if every exchange is monosyllabic and linear it doesn't really amount to a more interesting game.

compare this to the EA of Baldur's Gate 3 which according to this pcgamer article has 45,980 English lines of dialogue.

Text based games still have the most freedom with their dialogue, but games like New Vegas (mostly voiced), The Witcher and even the Old Republic, we shouldn't take for granted that depth is exchanged for voiced lines.

If anyone has more information on this, I'd love to know more, I'm fascinated by this.

Sozz, check Disco Elysium.

New Vegas actually had issues with how many voiced lines there were cause they had to cut a companion who was taking too much space on the disk cause he had way too much dialogue because he was to be the singular companion who'd be sympathetic to the legion. And I( read that they actually had a limit on how much voiced dialogue they could have in the DLC so they had to plan it out and make the best of it, leading to tightly written DLCs (and them actually conserving lines enough to blow their load so to speak in old world blues with so much dialogue).
Though this is what I read and could be wrong. I do remember New Vegas having a lot of well written dialogue, especially in the DLC.

Abso-fucking-lutely, I just replayed the Final Cut, which made me even more anxious for the sequel from ZA/UM. I should have added that in to my sum up for why voiced dialogue shouldn't be a bugbear to RPG design.

At a million words of dialogue the next contender is likely dwarfed.



I'll have to look into this, I think this says more about how long ago New Vegas was made that this was a concern, I don't think disc space will ever be a concern in PC gaming anymore at least. Did NV launch on the X-Box or something? And people wonder why we can't have nice things. I actually haven't played the Outer Worlds, it seemed like a holding maneuver for Obsidian to make some business, but I'm keeping my eye on the sequel.

Copied from the wiki so grain of salt and all that:


I think the Disk size concern was for PC and Consoles at the time, it was still an issue in 2011 where cinematics and such could take too much of a disk, and I think I remember a few PC games still releasing with multiple disks roughly within a few years of New Vegas, like Final Fantasy 13 has three disks I think for Xbox and PC? Nowadays not as much of a concern at all.

Just because Astarion disaproves your actions that other characters aprove doesn't mean he hates them. Shadowheart and Laezel hate each other. Astarion isn't hating Shadowheart just because they seem to aprove different course of actions, Astarion is more likely to just dislike everyone else simply because he is a self-absorbed sociopath with 0 empathy. Actually he is probably more ready to work with people that he dislikes than other party member exactly for that reason, he is using you and others because you are resourceful and he is trying to manipulate the PC all the time.


Companions can talk to you during dialogues with other characters, during the day when something happened that they want to discuss with you immediately and in the camp when they have time to process and decide how they feel about you based on your actions, which makes total sense, because often people tell you their opinion about your actions after some time.

Also let's compare that to BG2. Lot's of dialogue in BG2 didn't make companions alive or have complex interactions with them. There is no approval system in BG2, relations with companions are based on 3 things: having a romance with them, doing their personal quest and you reputation. They will leave you only due to certain actions (like attacking Aerie's surrogate father) or if your reputation reaches certain levels. For example, you can't become just friends with Viconia and change her aligment, you can only do that if you romance her. On the other hand in BG3 you can be doing good deeds that irritate Astarion, but if you are nice to him (by letting him drink your blood, getting approval from personal dialogues) he will be okay with you and only occasionaly make remarks about his dislike of your heroic actions.

If each entry in the dialog table is a line, then the first BG with TotSC has just above 24k lines and 529k words. BG2 with ToB has around 74k lines and 1270k words, and about 62k lines and 1080k words without. Bear in mind, however, that there are a lot of empty and unused lines.

I have heard different fun fact (even tho im not quite sure if that was fact) about Kotor ...
They decided to start voice acting before rest of the game was done, so they "save time" ... sadly, there was changes in script a little later, so almost 40% of voice acting was scrapped ... and creating it all again, would be too expensive. Studio was suposedly even concidering cancelatin of whole project. Luckily for them, someone had bright idea to replace voice acting for changed sentences by "alien speech", and keep in only subtitled ...
So litteraly every alien you meet in Kotor, that is not talking english was added afterwards.

Wa molay rah? warengi muchu puku sculpa!

All the aliens couldn't have been added later, it wouldn't be Star Wars without some, but I can totally see them spackling the gaps in with extra Huttese.

And on a unrelated note, there's been a recent reluctance on the part of Lucasfilm to have characters speak alien languages, and I think the universe is poorer for it. That would have gone for Kotor too.