Baldur’s Gate 3 does a lot to let you get up close and personal with some, er, bizarre stuff. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about, you DnDeviant. As it turns out, one of those encounters ended up how it is due Larian electing to violate its own camera distance guidelines, after going for the cinematic conversations we know and love over more Bethesda-style first person dialogue exchanges.
This change in thinking came up during a panel at PAX West Larian put on to commemorate the game having been a fully released thing for a year (congrats). It features Swen Vincke in full armour and a teddy bear named Felix sat at the desk with the devs, because of course it does.
In a section of the discussion that ended up morphing into chat about the challenges writing and putting together game with cinematics posed for the studio, art director Alena Dubrovina said: “During early access we weren’t sure if cinematics were going to happen at all. We had a couple of proof of concepts and we were still like, ok are we doing it? Are we not doing it? Then we decided to do it.