The Baldur's gate 3 developers considered a first person dialogue camera but weren't sure if it would include cinematics: "the next thing we knew, they're zooming into a goblin's toe"

Larian, the developers of Baldur's Gate 3, hosted a panel during PAX West to celebrate one year since the game's release. It's a well-deserved hour long retrospective. There are still some interesting things to talk about, even though the creation of Baldur’s Gate 3 was well-covered ever since its launch. It almost didn't even have cinematics.

"During early access, we weren't certain if cinematics would happen at all," said Alena Dubrovina, art director. "We had a few proofs of concept and we were still asking, OK, are we doing it?" Are we doing it? Then we decided to make it. We decided to keep the camera a good distance away from the character, and never zoom in so close. Then we did it.

Dubrovina's reference is to a scene in which a goblin called Crusher tries to intimidate you to kiss his foot. The scene can be played out in many different ways, the Dark Urge has the option of biting his toe off. But it does require the camera to zoom in on the goblin's gnarly foot.

Baldur's Gate 3 would be impossible to imagine without the motion-captured conversation. However, a camera more akin to Bethesda was also considered. Swen Vincke, creative director of Baldur's Gate 3, said that there was a time when they considered making the dialogues in first-person. "So, we tried it out. That quickly got shot down."

Larian said that creating the cinematic for Baldur's Gate 3 was probably his biggest challenge. "We had no idea what to do, because we started with 120 people, and ended up with 400. A lot of this was driven by the sheer number of cinematics we had to include in the game. This was a big jump for us and it was very, very, complicated to deal with.