Baldur's Gate 3 devs considered a first-person dialogue camera, weren't sure it would have cinematics: 'the next thing we know they're zooming in on a goblin toe'

Baldur's Gate 3 developers Larian hosted a panel at PAX West in celebration of the year since its release, and it's a well deserved hour-long victory lap of a retrospective. While the creation of Baldur's Gate 3 has been well-covered since launch, there are still interesting things to discuss. Like the fact it almost didn't have cinematics.

"During early access we weren't sure if cinematics were going to happen at all," said art director Alena Dubrovina. "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."

Dubrovina is referring to a scene where a goblin named Crusher attempts to intimidate you into kissing his foot. While the scene can play out in a variety of ways—the Dark Urge even has the option to bite his toe right off—it does demand the camera zoom right in on that goblin's gnarly feet. 

It's hard to imagine Baldur's Gate 3 without its glorious motion-captured conversations, but another option that was considered was a more Bethesda-like camera. "There was a moment when we were actually thinking of making the dialogues first-person," said creative director Swen Vincke. "So we tried that out. That quickly got shot down."

He went on to say that making Baldur's Gate 3 cinematic was probably the biggest challenge Larian faced. "And we had no idea what we were doing, because we were about 120 people and we ended up with 400, and a lot of that was driven by the sheer amount of cinematics that we had to put inside of the game. That was quite a jump for us, and dealing with that was really, really, really complicated."