We’re now more than a year removed from the launch of Baldur’s Gate III, and with Patch 7, it does feel like the book of the game is nearly closing. Still, there are plenty of secrets of the wizardry that went into the development of the game left to discover.
At a panel on PAX West (thanks, PCGamer), Larian studios talked about how the huge amounts of cinematics in the game came about. “During early access we weren’t sure if cinematics were going to happen at all,” art director Alena Dubrovina explained. “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. We decided that the camera is going to be quite far away from the character and we’re never gonna zoom in as close, and the next thing we know they’re zooming in on a goblin toe.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEcb2HbZlcM/
Larian CEO Swen Vincke said that first person cutscenes were an option for a while. “There was a moment when we were actually thinking of making the dialogues first-person,” he said. “So we tried that out. That quickly got shot down.”
According to Vincke, one of the biggest challenges of the game was getting all the cutscenes in. But, it seemed that the effort proved more than worthwhile.