Larian Studios Forums Active Threads

It's really not. Most of the time Voice Actors are SEVERELY underpaid.

Like, we're talking a few HUNDRED dollars to VA a protagonist for an entire game (Not hundreds of thousands or hundreds of millions. But hundreds. Less than $1000). Due to terrible rates (Normally fixed price per session and then only needing a handful of sessions for a reasonable VA that doesn't require lots of retakes)

It only becomes expensive when hiring high profile actors who charge obnoxiously high rates (Where you're simply paying for the prestige of their name rather than necessarily any quality as less prolific VA's can still do stellar jobs).

The main factor to consider is time. Finding VA's and scheduling them to go to the studio to record their lines. With it being made more awkward due to the timing, as it will have to happen after all the writing is done (Then any rewrites needs you to get the VA's back in to record the new lines and changes).

Voice acting is immensely expensive, i would rather they do one language well and fully voice acted and well translated subtitles than multiple languages with varying quality. Leaves more money for everything else, including more content, some of which could need more voice acting.


Interesting, i have never had that be an issue, and Finnish is even more different from English than German. Only thing that annoys me is if subtitles are not accurate. Once i got good enough with English, i started to prefer having closed captioned subtitles in English.
I guess you find it more jarring because a ton more stuff is available in German, so you are less used to it than someone like me who is always dealing in foreign language and either foreign or native subtitles, dubbing here is pretty much only thing for children too young to read.

I must admit watching Honor Among Thieves in German was a bit painful because of how bad D&D's official translation is. They translated names and places, often in a very distorting or unpractical way. For instance, the very books they translated state that the prefix "ever-" in places like Evermeet or Evereska means "elven", yet they went ahead and often rather translated individual parts of words regardless of its combined meaning just for the sake of having it translated. In the case of Evereska they didn't find anything to translate -eska to, so they just left it. Other bad examples are awkwardly contrived names that nobody would use in every day speech, like 'Windsperrberge' or 'Sibrigmond'. I mean, even in German, we say Rocky Mountains, not Felsigberge, because that would sound kind of daft. However, if done well, I could imagine using German dub for a co-op play, since some of my friends would struggle with playing in English. This was one of the roadblocks for the planned reunion of my old AD&D group for BG3.

Is a Linux PC, a viable concept with Steam & BG3?

I get the Auntie Ethyl's hair choice popup, and then Marina starts her post-fight yapping. Both are up at the same time. I decide to do the Marina dialog first, click on one of the choices, crash to desktop.

I’m more and more learning how much *good* voice acting adds.

Currently I play the old Dragon Age Origins, and I feel every dialogue that’s not voiced. There’s just something missing.

I’m used to listening to English, but several people I know are not. I’d say that at least 20% of people in Germany would back out of movies without German voice line.

Though my priorities for that would be:

1. Excellent story.
2. Excellent voice lines matching the story (regardless of the language, likely English)¹
3. Good translations (when I played through Divinity Original Sin 2 the past months, I was often horrified at the mis-translations: some questions were actually not answerable without mentally translating back to what they may have meant in English).
4. Good German voice lines. Maybe you can get some of the voice actors Netflix is alienating right now. Trailers voiced in German would also be great.

¹ also I found that good voice lines stay good even when technology progresses. They typically age well.

I’d hope that with the motion capturing quality they reached for bg3, they will be able to adjust lip movements to the voiced language for Divinity.

I've been playing through as a Berserker Barbarian Dark Urge, and I just have to say "thank you Larian, for the Barbarian". The dialogue options are so good and so much fun.

I can recommend this playthrough to anyone.

Its a good idea, so maybe they'll add it.

Is there a tool to scour the logs, to find out what happened to a particular item?

I have lost my Luminous Armour

If you had as much money as it would take, which German actors, would you have?

Update: Part 4, Chapter 34 is now published. Jaheira and those with her arrive in Ysgard with Demogorgon right on their tail. Will the already battered Ark of Kwalish make it beyond the borders of Jotunheim, or will the dangers they face end the journey of old heroes prematurely? Hope you enjoy it!

BG3.5 - Hellraisers (Fanfiction)
Baldur's Gate 3.5: Hellraisers - an original fanfic story that is a sequel to Baldur's Gate 3 Fanfic: The Afflicted. It picks up immediately after the events of Baldur's Gate 3 as characters from the previous fanfic - Fiovay, Kai, Aelun, Vlyn, and the other members of their party - travel to Avernus. Their quest is to save Karlach but also to hopefully find and rescue Darson, Aelun's father, from the clutches of Demogorgon.

Here is the link to the blog site: https://baldursgate3hellraisers.blogspot.com/2025/10/baldurs-gate-35-hellraisers.html

"I hope no one sees me back here..."



Not even an honor run but I'm not holding out too much hope for her.

No, it's a suggestion only. We can turn it on and off currently, but it's cumbersome to do mid-fight when that ask popup appears, and you then have to remember to turn it back on later.

In my suggestion above, it will disable asking for the remainder of the current fight, then restore it after. This would be useful because in certain situations you don't want to automatically swat at things, say, the owlbear cub.

Never had this, is it a new feature? BTW, a more interesting question for me were, what outfit/armor is the lady with the big sword wearing?

If they had orcs, imps, dwarves, lizards and undead as companions, I hope there would be at least three human or elven companions or hirelings to fill my party.

Be nice to each other.

I like voice acting. It adds a lot to immersion. One big advantage of Fallout 4 over Starfield for me is, that my character (Nora, mostly) speaks. I hope for fully voiced characters and don't have any problem if it's English only.

Possibly a bit more information for the real expert tech minded people - like where exactly you were when it started etc might be helpful.
Try verify the installation - you can do this in either Gog or Steam. In steam the option is under Installed Files and click Verify File Integrity.

I've only had this happen once and it was because the game was stuck thinking I was in dialogue with someone, I just had to find them and chat to them again but this was ages and several patches back so probably not much help.

As far as I know the respect works just fine. I can respect Shadowheart and Astarion to give them booming blade for example. I do you a mod that auto does that so maybe that is part of why I can manually change it. Not sure. I think the mod is called "booming blade for all" or something close to that. As for respecing Tav, it should work fine when respecing also. The only things you cant change are your actual race or sub-race, your origin background and MAYBE your sex? Might be able to change sex, not sure. But thats with the magic mirror if you can I believe. I think Larian made it possible to change Shadowheart and Astarion cantrips in one of the patches but maybe not.
If this is not what you're meaning then I'm sorry, I'm not sure what else you mean. Please try to explain more Happy to help.

THANK YOU! I honestly though Larian was going to do this when then mentioned and "all" button for mods. But theirs simply turns EVERY mod on/off at the same time. It doesnt work like yours does. Your's is way better. I got it a couple days ago and the only thing i dont like is that after I click the "conform all" i can not then re-select the newly dissabled mods to re-enable them for existing games. I use a bunch of dif mods but not always all the same ones with dif saves. Like if im playing a dragonborn I will load the dragonborn mods but if I play a non-dragonborn I dont load them. But I'll take it! THANK YOU very much!!

And that doens't mean I have to care about what you think and even less that I have agree with it, on the other hand.

I used to be a grumpy young moron who disliked voice acting in RPGS as well, for the record.
That was in the early 2000s when the feature was too costly and (in my judgment at the time) it came with compromises too heavy on the quality or flexibility of a game.

We are WAY past that point now in the modern market.
Games like DOS 1 and 2, BG3, Deadfire, Disco Elysium and plenty more (including everything Owlcat will release from now on, apparently) are here to conclusively prove that point.
Games that at no point ever made me think "You know what? It's a shame that these are voiced, because they would benefit from having multiple times this amount of text to read".

If anything stuff like POE 1 and Kingmaker/Wrath of the Righteous made me realize the opposite:
"These are games that could definitely benefit from some restrain on being so gratuitously verbose. Voice acting would probably help a lot to rein it in".

ANYONE who's even barely literate can, so that's a pretty weak bragging point.

And as an argument it misses the mark by a landlside, almost to a comical degree, since the benefit of a good voice performance is bringing life and personality to a character, not how fast one could speedrun through a conversation with the help of weaponized autism.

P.S. I'll tell you this: No one remembers Vampire Bloodlines for how quick they could go through dialogues.

That doesnt automatically mean you're right though.

I find full voice acting highly overrated.

I absolutely miss nothing when playing BG1 and BG2 with "only" partial voice acting.

Plus I can read much faster than the voice acting can talk anyway.

An overwhelming amount of the work of lip-syncing these days is done through automated software solutions rather than manual fine-tuning of the animations.

That said, given that not long ago even just the notion of having a CRPG fully voiced was already considered prohibitively expensive (and just recently we started to move toward a market where it's considered a necessary cost that more or less repays itself) any expectations of having it done in multiple languages is more than just a bit naive.

I couldn't disagree more.
Not only I got to the point where I actively dislike the "Just few barks and your first lines are voiced" you are suggesting here as a cheap-ass solution and I certainly wouldn't want to REGRESS to that point for games that can afford to be fully voiced (which is a lot of them, these days, since you can basically write off the expense as something that "repays itself" with the increase in sales that it brings), but I also disagree in general with your statement that listening voice acting in a foreign language is a problem in itself and "jarring".

I'm already into the habit of watching american/english movies in english, Hong Kong cinema in Chinese, Japanese stuff in Japanese and so on... And I wouldn't have it in any other way.
Hell, I even played Archolos in full Polish VO and that sounds basically as an alien language to me. Intonation goes a long way to convey meaning.

I generally prefer the originally-intended voice acting to watching/playing something dubbed in my native language (italian, for the record) in the 99% of cases.

P.S. And for context Italian is even one of the few lucky cases where the average quality of dubbing tends generally to be on the high end of the production value.

I started a Wyll origin run. And got to the point where Volo offers to remove the parasite, but it's not possible here because Wyll has only one good eye. So the permanent "see invisibility" buff is not available to him.
Which made me wonder. The stone eye could itself give some kind of buff in the origin run. Why not "see invisibility" ? It's not very useful until act 3 anyway. But it would remove this "handicap" with respect to the 2-eyed PC's who can get it from Volo.