Players enjoy varied dialogue, but delivering it is a complex task.
Baldur’s Gate 3’s creators didn’t only build an abundance of gameplay systems — the title also places you in conversation with a wide and varied cast.
The writers produced a vast network of branching conversations with many possible outcomes, which meant the voice cast had to record an enormous number of lines.
In a recent interview with TheGamer, Maggie Robertson — who voices Orin — described her reaction to the game’s dialogue map: she said seeing it gave her a literal “headache”:
Games have far more room to probe character and personality — especially in projects like Baldur’s Gate 3, where the conversation branches feel endless. I literally got a headache when I saw the branching diagram they used to track every option. It made my eyes go a bit funny.
Each line in Baldur’s Gate 3’s conversations was carefully thought out:
Everything was digitized — they had an immense dialogue tree. It looked like a bubble with a line, then a branch, then another branch, and on and on: another line, more branching, and more again. You could zoom out to take in the whole structure or zoom in to study a specific segment under development. From a distance the map resembled a brain, complete with nerve-like filaments and flashes of synapses. An utterly striking sight.
Source: iXBT.games