Baldur's Gate 3 has 17 different "narration styles", according to actor Amelia Tyler. As part of her role as the narrator of Baldur's Gate, Tyler says that she and the team created all of these different tones and variations on the lines spoken in the narration to reflect all of the playable characters, better suiting the internal monologue that tells their particular story.
This reveal comes from the Baldur's Gate 3 panel at EGX London this week, bringing much of the cast together to walk us through their performances in the game. Here, Tyler broke down how she approached narrating such a dialogue-heavy game, revealing that the workload was even larger than we thought, as lines had to be repeated in different tones, or reworded altogether to match the player character.
"A lot of people that are on their first playthroughs don't realise there are distinct narration styles, depending on who you're playing as," says Ameilia Tyler. "So we ended up with 17 completely different narration styles, depending on what's happening [and] which character you're playing.
"If you're playing a Shadowheart, it's much [more] higher pitch. It's much lighter, it's a little more emotionally tense. If you're playing as The Dark Urge, it's like full-on 'I want to tear you apart and ruin your life'."
Tyler also said she had a different sitting position for each narration, helping her get into character since she was the only one on the panel who wasn't required to stand around in a mocap suit. The rest of the actors were quite jealous of this, with only a few of them having experience with mocap before Baldur's Gate 3.
With this in mind, Baldur's Gate 3 truly has an ungodly amount of recorded dialogue. And better yet much of it actually went unused. As anyone who has been following the game for a while will know, Tyler wasn't always supposed to narrate Baldur's Gate 3. Initially, narration would have been handled by whoever you were playing as, with the custom character and all of the origins reading their own internal monologue in past tense. This was a very unpopular feature among the playerbase, even as the gameplay impressed.
As we now know, Larian didn't drop narration entirely and instead brought Tyler back from Divinity: Origins Sin 2 to voice the narrator for every player. This left a bunch of lines from characters like Shadowheart, Astarion, and even the various voices for custom characters completely unused. Yet it was much better received by fans than the first attempt, so it's safe to say that this paid off.
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