The Lost(?) Narration of Baldur's Gate 3

Early Access love it or hate it it serves a purpose developers can release an early build of the game intentionally and players can enjoy it in return they get valuable feedback and valuable money giving a huge audience access to the game during development is a great way to gather Community feedback provided you're willing to sift through tens of thousands of opinions but what if I told you there was at least one major change made to build a skate 3 based on community feedback before Early Access had even launched my name's chablot but because we're friends you can call me chubblot and today I'd like to talk about the Lost narration of Baldur's Gate 3. my skull pounded in response to the prisoner's white hot stare her lips didn't move yet I heard her voice foreign [Music] this video contains Data Mining and companion spoilers the first gameplay reveal of Baldur's Gate 3 came in February 2020 the reveal stream gave us everything we've now come to expect from a larion stream minus the armor unlucky rolls threats of murder and a coup de gras delivered by Footwear good work good work I actually got banned from Wikipedia because I tried to add that to its list of shoe throwing incidents which is a real thing that actually exists but anybody who isn't aware larion's original plan for Baldur's Gate 3 was to have your chosen character deliver the narration lines just yesterday I had been seducing a young Noble luring him to my Master's Lair and this went hand in hand with the way dialogue options were presented they were all written in the same first person past tense style but if you've played Early Access you know that dialogue options are now presented completely differently oh easy easy does it lasts you really really don't want to do that very shortly after the gameplay reveal stream people began and sharing their opinions online and one thing that came up a fair amount was the narration and reviews weren't exactly glowing despite a handful of hiccups this early build of the game felt impressively complete so it made sense when larion initially decided to double down on this feature in March 2020 during an AMA on Reddit CEO director and professional cosplayer Sven vinker responded to a question about the narration Style by writing there's several reasons we're doing it this way of course there are story reasons but it also allows you to get closer to your character their thoughts their feelings and moments of introspection allowing you to truly understand their motivation we've experimented with several Styles when starting development but this was the one that at the end of the day stood out and were actually quite excited by what we can do with it it turned out to be an excellent way of allowing players to tell their own story and role play their character on a deeper level I think it's a wonderful tool for role-playing and storytelling and when you're playing it's like you're narrating Your Own Adventure but even that in-depth explanation couldn't placate the angry Reddit Bros and they weren't the only ones weighing in Eric Kane writing for Forbes even put out an article claiming that the past tense narration star was the one thing he disliked about what he'd seen of the game describing it as incredibly off-putting he compared it with the way tabletop games are normally played and came to the conclusion that past tense narration makes no sense in a similar vein Camden Jones writing for Screen Rant highlighted his issues with both the past tense and first-person aspects of the narration he said there is a lack of clarity between what's being said and what's being thought which he concluded causes issues with immersion so this kind of left larion in a bit of a pickle despite trialling various different narration Styles they'd landed on the first person past tense style as their favorite suddenly I saw what she saw felt what she felt anger confusion resolve however the internet disagreed with how effective it could be people wanted their video game to be more like their tabletop game and this created an inevitable clash between the developers daring dream and the preference of the prospective player pool and one would have to give in June of 2020 Sven again presented some live gameplay of a pre-release build of Baldur's Gate 3 and very early on it was clear that things had changed the lines had been Rewritten to now depict what your character was actually saying rather than their thoughts and there was an entirely new disembodied narrator played by Amelia Tyler she's testing you somehow about Raphael this means that in the just over three months between the AMA and this stream larion had completely swapped out their preferred narrative style for one that better fit with the community's preference the tadpoles squirms in your mind it seems sated but it can't be that big a deal considering the size of the game and how little turnaround there was between the AMA and the second stream they can't have had that much of the first person narration recorded right wow before we carry on I just need to give you some Basics about origin characters and the voices available to custom characters these these are the spoilers I mentioned at the start but if you've been following this channel anyway then none of this is going to be news to you there are currently five companions available in the game in addition to those five we believe we are getting at least three more kalak Helia and Minsk all of these characters will be part of the origin system meaning that like in Divinity original sin 2 you'll be able to select one of them as your protagonist or you can create a custom character with their own voice you can choose from four different voice profiles right now but there are an additional four profiles that are still locked as of patch 7. so a total of 16 possible voices for a protagonist meaning 16 possible narrators and as it turns out larion had started to work on most of them I don't want to talk too much about the origin companions in this video but here's a comparison of how many first-person narration lines I found for each of them don't put too much stock in their specific numbers because there are repeated lines for example Gail looks like he has the most but if you adjust for repetition Gail Lazelle and shadowheart all have pretty similar amounts Astorian has slightly less will has noticeably less and the voice I believe to be Helia has about 100 fewer than will karlak and Minsk tie for bottom place kalak doesn't seem to have any first person narration files and mince has no voice files in the game at all which isn't to say he doesn't have any lines they're just not said by him but a festering boil on faerun's Fair buttocks but would I note well but since he's an iconic video game character with a long history and a beloved voice actor I think we all know he's going to be voiced by the legendary Chris Pratt it's a weirdly similar situation when talking about the custom voices too I'll give you a little example of each as we go through to jog your memory on what they all sound like voice four let's hope the locals are friendly barely comes out on top followed closely by voice one let's hope the locals are friendly and voice seven let's hope the locals are friendly then we have voice five let's hope the locals are friendly voice eight let's hope the locals are friendly and voiced too let's hope the locals are friendly voice three let's hope the locals are friendly and voice six let's hope the locals are friendly have no first person narration that I found and that might be an indication that their Voice work and possibly Car LAX didn't get done until after larion had changed the narration style I just saw a chance and I took it as you can see quite a lot of work had been completed before Larry and changed their minds or rather had their minds changed over 7 000 individual voice files were suddenly rendered obsolete in terms of narration they were effectively back to square one but they committed to meeting the player base's expectations and Amelia Tyler has done and I'm sure will continue to do an excellent job it's just kind of sad we'll never get to experience the narrative the way the devs had initially intended did unless is it as twitch does he lowered his head inviting me to pet him I'd already done the work of cataloging the lines and I just thought well maybe I can find a way to use them to Frankenstein this feature back together and parade its corpse around on YouTube in the hopes of someday having more subscribers than that woman who lets her baby drink river water I was left with two options option one my preferred option is the one I used to put together the companion narration videos option two the Messier option is how I made the first person narration work during my recent live stream kind of slaps option one is very straightforward load up the game go into the settings mute the narrator record the scene open Premiere drop in the correct line and done magic mirror this gave me total control over everything from how loud the lines were to how long pauses lasted it was an incredibly tedious process but a couple hundred edits later and I had what I thought was a decent emulation of what once was the magic was old and wavering but it was essentially an expensive lock hiding some secret the face was crafted to be pleasing but the personality was just the reflection of the wizard that created it speak your name so you might be thinking if option one is so good then why does option two even exist well thanks for asking as of patch 5 larion removed the setting that allowed you to change the volume of the narrator independently and this was done because I don't know it makes no sense to me I thought it was a useful feature maybe there's some really technical reason it was removed but I used to use it all the time because to this day even with the narrator's lines being re-recorded I find the narration noticeably quieter than the rest of the voice works your mind twists you're looking out of unfamiliar eyes prowling dark busy streets you try to hold the memory but it fades to the worm the light the fear what was that what's going on it was nice being able to give it a bit of a boost without also boosting every other voice in the game but maybe that's just me so anything beyond patch 4 made option one a No-No meaning I had to bite the bullet and actually make a mod I put it off because I thought it'd be tough but actually it was super easy barely an inconvenience I'd already identified the lines and separated them by character so overriding the in-game narration was a relatively straightforward thing to do but option two isn't without its own problems did you know that every voiced line is given a set duration for how long it has to play so if you try to shove a 7 second file into a five second Gap the line gets cut off the creature cringed overwhelmed by the throngs and revealed its own it revealed its own home in reply a humid Cove filled with decaying mykinid corpses while the majority of lines were quite easy to replace some of the repeated ones did give me a lot of trouble I'll go into that later and obviously any narration lines added to the game after the launch of Early Access have no first person equivalence meaning there's a lot of this as the pain muddled my thoughts our minds became entangled familiar sensation she too carried a parasite Darkness seems to swallow the temple leaving you with a vision of the goblin Priestess receiving instruction from a handsome young man so it's far from perfect but I have now played through the game using the first person narration for every character it's available to that's 12 playthroughs and the question I'm left with is did it work in the way larion hoped it would the foul thing was of my mercy and I would have its head I felt compassion compassion I couldn't move couldn't think thinking was mercifully done for me it would be a joy to serve it dying an honor it was possessing my mind forcing me to love it but then the feeling slipped preacher's mind seem to focus elsewhere just to remind you the first person narration was intended to help players feel closer to their character to understand their thoughts and feelings it was quite literally supposed to be a way to give your custom character a voice Bear's heart leapt was that a look of recognition on the man's face no it was nothing the bear let out a disappointed Huff I also think this was one of the ways Larry was trying to address a common complaint about custom characters in DOS 2. lots of people felt that their created character was far less fleshed out than An Origin character which made it difficult to connect with them and while the first person narration wouldn't have totally prevented this problem in Baldur's Gate 3 I think it could have helped suddenly I was him I was hauled into a great storm with as its eye and orb beating with malevolence out that was uncalled for with the current system you select a voice during character creation and then only sometimes get to hear your character speak there are context-specific lines for when you interact with certain objects devil can point-and-click box that I almost always turn off everyone at the easy path and even the odd moment where your character pipes up during a cut scene true Soul absolute what were they raving on about which happened so infrequently that people have been consistently shocked by it for the last year or so this could spell trouble in fact cut scenes make up the bulk of interactions in the game and it's during these cinematic moments and conversations that other characters really start to develop What's it gonna take to shut you up horns you can see their emotions their gestures match their Voice work and it all works together to help establish their character and in that situation the sore thumb was always going to be the character whose voice is almost never part of the medley now obviously with the first person narration you hear your character constantly during those all-important cut scenes I noticed the armored man twitch he was about to erupt you hear their thoughts they express their feelings whether it's abject Terror or a flush of emotion during one of the game's few intimate moments she trailed off I read an invitation in her eyes it helps to establish them as an individual in the context of the world around them I feel more like my character is an entity of their own rather than just the skin I'm wearing to experience the game and while I prefer that not everyone does some people want to be able to play as a Fantastical version of themselves and for that they may prefer the current style which is completely valid because ultimately this is all subjective but there is one thing I hope they Salvage from the first person narration [Music] fungal Roots wove through my mind seeking my true intent then the Sovereign droned a new Melody cautious but welcoming earlier on I mentioned repeated lines in how replacing them gave me a bit of trouble by repeated lines I mean things like this the corpse regards you lifelessly lines you hear over and over but as part of different cutscenes the reason these lines were specifically a nightmare to work with is because they're actually not repeated they exist as different files even if the content of those files is almost always identical so why have multiple files for the same line why not just have everything point to the same file because originally the speak with deadlines were not repeated the spell elicited a gasp a weak echo of Life there was variety The Corpse became quiet it had nothing further to say and it goes even deeper sometimes the game acknowledges things about the person you're communing with whether that's a generic comment about their race the drows corpse twitched as the magic took hold mentioning characters by name draw ragslyn's body Lurch to life or even more specifically taking into account the condition of the corpse like the heavily decayed body you're told about in the Toll House the corpse was decomposing but intact its mouth fell open as it turned to look at me or the body of the man who failed at cliff jumping his neck was broken from the fall but his mouth opened as he looked at me I feel like this is objectively more interesting than hearing the same line over and over again and I really hope this is a planned feature for Emilia's narration because despite how much I like the first person narration I don't think it's coming back just imagine the time and the cost it was would add to the whole process we only have some of act one right now and the narrator already has over 2 000 voice lines with eight origin Companions and eight player voices that makes a minimum of 16 potential narrators meaning they'd be adding over 32 000 lines to the game just to cover act one to put that number in perspective dos 2 had over 74 000 voice lines for the entire game but that still isn't the most likely reason this feature isn't returning at one point this style was larion's plan meaning they weren't deterred by the huge cost and time investment involved if anything the current style is probably much easier from a development standpoint the reason we're probably never going to get this feature is because of the response to that first live stream based on like an hour of gameplay the internet decided this was a terrible feature and to larion's Eternal credit despite the director's own stated Preference they did what people wanted they changed it and that's something to be celebrated a company that actually listens to Their audience it's depressingly rare however I am not a game developer but in my opinion if you're adding a feature specifically to help players connect with the character they are playing as and you know you're going to be using Early Access as a way to gather feedback maybe the best feedback is going to come after people have had a chance to use said feature I'd argue the true test of the first person narration could never really have come as part of an hour-long stream because the chance of anyone in that audience making a tangible connection with an origin character being played by someone else was slim to none but that's just like my opinion and trust me I know I fall on the less popular side of this discussion but if you like me didn't even know this feature existed until well after it was cut I welcome you to discuss this in the comments I welcome the likes and even the dislikes don't worry I can still see them they'll still make me cry thank you for watching bye [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Chubblot

Views: 14,759

Keywords: chubblot, baldur's gate 3, bg3, baldursgate, cut content, roleplaying

Id: oPKUpseKRGI

Length: 20min 2sec (1202 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 07 2022