Last Thursday at GDC 2024, Larian Studios boss Swen Vincke gave a talk titled "The Secrets of Baldur's Gate 3." The biggest news of the day was that Vincke let everyone know that Larian will be closing Baldur's Gate 3 and moving on to new things in the future.

"We're going to move away from D&D and start building something new," he said.

But he also shared some what-ifs and insights about the early design of Baldur's Gate 3. Baldur's Gate 3 has multiple narrators - multiple dungeon masters narrating adventures and misadventures in the Forgotton Realm It also included a particularly strange alternate reality in which After creating a mock-up of the cinematic in which the dungeon masters narrate with voice-over narration in the background, we realized that this approach would not work. [because] we would have to edit every scene to mix the dungeon master with the voice actors. So we thought about using Matt Mercer at the time. But I thought it probably wouldn't work.

"So I was looking for something easier. And what I found was full-body performance capture." The idea was to capture the actors. Everything, including their faces. Performance capture worked well, but we had actually been considering facial capture for a long time.

As a result, Larian began to focus on procedural motion capture of movements and handcrafted motion of faces.

Vincke also discussed how the Russian invasion of Ukraine damaged the timeline of Baldur's Gate 3, requiring the studio to move developers from St. Petersburg.

Another shock to those deeply familiar with "Baldur's Gate 3" is, of course, that Asterion was originally a tiefling.

"Yes, he was originally a tiefling," Finke said, and the audience laughed under its breath.

Anyway, here's a shot of Tiefling Astarion that PC Gamer's Lauren Morton snuck out of GDC. I think the grainy, low-resolution image quality makes the part where I'm not sure I believe he was once a tiefling stand out even more, as if Tiefling Astarion is some sort of strange cryptid.

For more on Baldur's Gate 3 surrounding this year's GDC, check out PC Gamer's article on why Larian put the brakes on Baldur's Gate 3 DLC and details on Baldur's Gate 3 mod tools.