Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General A relatively fresh article from Techradar with S. Vincke; IGN article added.

Just yet another reason why I'm not too pleased with full voice overs slowly becoming the industry standard. Or at least it seems to be what Larian aims for in all of their games.
Once a string of dialogue has been recorded in the studio it's much less likely to be edited or outright rewritten.

Surely Larian does not expect modders to fix their story in post. Paricularly because of this. The quality would never be the same.

I think until AI voice acting becomes standard it's going to be the same story of "one devs grows big, develops game with big budget and mass market appeal in mind, old fans grumble, an indie dev develops an old-style game with lots of unvoiced dialogue, the game is acclaimed for its writing, the indie dev grows big...". Rinse and repeat.

Sadly, yes. This does seem to be the case.
Don't get me wrong, I think the current voice acting for BG3 is very good, but it still pains me to know what the unintended side effects of a game having voice acting.
Good writing/story and full voice overs are by absolutely no means mutually exclusive, but when a game is made with full voice over in mind the writing and dialogue will ALWAYS be affected one way or another.

My thoughts exactly. I don't hate cinematic approach. Not at all. It's just that it's not "for free". It has a cost, and that cost is something I'd rather not trade away. I'll take more choices/better writing over huge cinematic production any time.

voice acting is standard for at least 15 years mate

based on larian's responses concerning evil/neutral companions already in game and the discussion about 12 or 8 npc companions in total im getting more concerned about what impact this may have for other aspects of the game, mainly the 4v6 party debate and the incorporation of blank merc companions. I could see larian keeping the party size at 4 (not a fan of btw) bc there is a limited roster to work with (which may be even more limited post act 1 companion/map locks - also not a fan of) and just rely on modders to up it to a party of 6. like others have posted, one npc per class i would have assumed being the bg standard, and then taking into alignment, you have a minimum of 24 possible good v evil npcs but it seems that larian prefers their origin character approach and supplemental mercenaries to round out a party of 4. While i dont dislike the merc approach (pretty sure we havent seen this in game yet) i would likely have preferred if larian chose one or the other - all origin characters that are full fleshed out but limited in number or all merc companions that have some limited dialogue but are larger in number and more variety in class, race, alignment, etc. irregardless, for both options i still think 6 party slots is more in the spirit of bg but we'll have to wait to see the direction/implementation larian chooses

There's a new factor on top of the years-old "Make it appealing vs make it deep" that is fairly new of our times and sometimes encourages even mid-sized devs to go with full voice acting: streamers.

Streamers and youtubers these days can be a HUGE part of the popularity of a release and the thing is: they absolutely hate to read dialogues aloud when playing for their audience.
I never tried to stream anything myself, but to be honest, I can't really blame them. I would hate doing it, too.

Ya, I know exactly one youtuber who has enough guts to read everything or almost everything. Others (nice ones) just scroll down so viewers can pause. Streamers are another world beings, hurry as much they can.
Personally, I can read my part but companions and NPCs should be voiced.

Don't forget about neutrals! That's 36. :P In seriousness, yes, 12 would be just barely enough to have some decent choice.

On the topic of mercs: I think they won't be what you think they would. From what I understand, they'll be completely customizable and without personality. Just custom characters without relation to the plot.

I think the best would be to add a dozen (or Hells, why not two) of non-origin companions that range from BG1 to BG2 companions in terms of depth. That way you'd have all the choice: want intricate, massive storylines - go with origins; fussy about companions - there'll be lots of characters with personalities to choose from; want control over stats or custom roleplaying - go with custom party or mercenaries.



Huh, that's true. But I'm not sure how much real impact streamers have on the developers' decision-making in this regard. I don't think it's a huge factor, but I really can't say that with any certainty.

Well, I can tell you that in his Deadfire's post mortem Josh Sawyer from Obsidian openly stated that both this and DOS 2 being fully voiced influenced their decision to voice the entire game.
Also, the fact that a lot of streamers dropped PoE 1 quickly precisely because reading dialogues aloud was tiring for them.

^To add to this, considering Larian added Discord and Twitch stream integration (letting stream viewers vote on things such as dialogue choices) then Larian is most definitely aware of what streams can do for their game.
Whether or not you like the idea of streamers, I don't think it should come as a surprise that Larian are conscious of how their design choices affect streamers playing their game.

*sigh* I believe you, as much as I don't want to... That's really disappointing about PoE. The dev thought process, I mean.

I don't mind streaming (I think the Twitch integration is neat), but I hate the idea of it meddling with creative processes behind games. Hamstringing certain game aspects because of streamers is just... unfortunate. Then again, it's the same with multiplayer, I suppose.

I mean, it made the sequel better, so...

I've been playing RPGs for the largest part of my 42 years of life, probably since the late '80s...And frankly I'm way past the point of thinking that acting super-elitist gives me a tone and pretending decent voice acting doesn't add to the game's overall feeling.
And these days it's not even a big limiting factor in terms of options... As long as the player is reasonable and doesn't expect to have full voice over for all the seventy-two possible permutations of his main character.
In fact if your title is any good I'd say it's basically a feature that most of the times repays itself with the additional audience it brings.

FWIW the video is interesting if you have the time to watch it. It's always interesting to see game devs look back at what they've made and talk about the processes that led to the game becoming whatever it ended up being.

Fun side note: the main reason they went for five characters rather than six was because REAL-TIME COMBAT made it messy.

I think that makes sense for the POE 2 combat system too, because every class (even basic fighters) have an abundance of active abilities to use (compared to their D&D counterparts) and requires quite a bit of micro-management.

They did implement a pretty decent AI to help, but not everyone's into setting all that up.

Like I said above, I don't hate cinematics, I don't think voice acting (if it's good) is detrimental to games on its own. It also depends on the type of the game. Fixed protagonist, like in TW3? By all means, full voice acting. It does add a lot. But games (mostly RPGs) with custom protagonists and lots of player freedom? It would be unrealistic to say full voice acting doesn't impact writing, both in quantity and quality, there's a massive gap in work between tweaking a text file and rerecording a line (and possibly a mocapped scene). Of course, there's the question of "would the dev really expand dialogue if the resources wouldn't be used on voice acting?".

Why are you saying it's not a big limiting factor in terms of options? (Not dismissing you, genuinely asking.)

Even if we assume voice acting only impacts "flavour" of what a character says and the pool of NPC reactions is the same, it imo still changes a lot. I'm not a heavy RPer, but I'm annoyed when games only give me a handful of options of which none sound like something that could be said by my character. At the same time, I greatly enjoyed some of the "weirder"/funnier/non-obvious dialogue choices in RPGs that give your character the guise of having personality. But those require there to be a lot of dialogue options, since distinct personality means it won't fit most characters.



Ah, thank you. I'll certainly watch it, though I'll save it for when I finish PoE2.

I know this is another thread but I want to underline this. The BG3 engine is better set up to use 6 party members than is PoE RtwP engine.

I hoping they will change but my suspicion at this point is that the resistance to 6 party members is based in:

* 6 exposes the weaknesses of the party control system
* 6 makes it clear that there are far few companions than BG2 had

Otherwise, I can't see a decent argument for 4 other than a desire to maintain the status quo.

I think one point you're overlooking is that Larian's two previous games also had a party size of four.
A sense of familiarity for the decision makers, developers and the demographic they deem to be their core user base also definitely plays a role.