Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General performance as narrative, or: how important is voice work to you?

Hehe thanks. I was just trying to single out one of the stupider sequences from the opener, to highlight how silly it is. But now I'll probably be slightly disappointed when I don't see any meat to the face updates in patch 6 lol.

I also really don't get the choice of Minsc either. He was always dumber than a bag of hammers. I mean I guess they needed a touchstone, but it's basically doing BG fan service at the level of the lowest common denominator. Like Minsc is just recognizable enough such that an audience who never actually played BG1/2 (but maybe looked it up once on youtube) could still wax nostalgic about how cool it was "that Minsc is back!" Clearly evidence that Larian really knows what they're doing and fully understands the milieu they're operating within heheh. If Minsc showed up in Act 2 as a petrified Statue, but then a crazed Gnome jumped down from the rafters screaming "Tiax rules all! You fools!" just smashing Minsc and all our expectations into a thousand fucking pieces, I'd probably give Larian the gold star. But I know that's not gonna be the drill here lol.

As for Viconia, all the Romance endings in BG2 were mutually exclusive, so I think her death there could be explained away as "not my party." Trying to revive Khalid or Dynaheir would be more problematic, but they could have done Viconia if they wanted. Not that they should. Even though she'd probably have been a more compelling choice than Minsc. I fully expect we'll run into some actual space hamsters in BG3 though, cause of course that'd be where they take it. I mean Tiax yelling "Taste it!" while he cooks Origins for breakfast is probably a bit too much to expect, even for Larian's sense of camp. Alas

Despite what I said about the flying meat stuff, I still think the most expedient approach would be to just NOT show us our MC performing at all. If we can't control the performance in any way, then better not to have one. Maintain the first person POV and let the NPCs have the performance. I think the silent protagonist is only jarring, when they try to do the shot counter shot stuff all over the place, like you said. Of course it feels goofy in that case. Sure I can imagine funny ways to use super zoom or slow mo in a game like this, if they wanted to lean into the language of pop cinema parody and give us some inputs there, but I just don't see them pulling it off in any way that isn't pure hambone comedy. Not exactly the high water mark of a BG legacy for me. Though I agree, BG1 had the inside joke thing pretty dialed for its time.