At this point, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game-changing RPG with countless developers looking at Larian’s phenomenal work as inspiration. With some devs saying the game has changed the industry already, BG3 has proven itself, and so have the game’s phenomenal voice actors.
Speaking to Checkpoint Gaming, BG3’s iconic narrator actor Amelia Tyler explained that it was incredibly difficult to bring the game to life when it was in its unfinished stages.
For those who are unaware, Tyler’s narration is immense and easily the bigger role in the game. There are not only thousands upon thousands of lines for every branching path, but also new lines depending on if you play as any of the game’s Origin characters.
“You don’t see what’s going on. You don’t get to hear other people’s lines a lot of the time. You’re just hoping to God you’ve understood the direction.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 narrator Amelia Tyler
“I would say just the sheer volume of text made it very different [from other roles],” the actor explained. “The fact that I had to be a lot of different versions of the same thing while still sounding cohesive. We didn’t record the entire script 17 times, but there were 17 different versions of the narrator, and sometimes it would go from, okay, this is a line specifically for Karlach’s narrator, but then it had to mechanically be able to flow into a generic line that could work for almost anyone.”
Tyler explained that recording of the game was a “wonderful technical challenge” and a fantastic fit for a voice performer that “can’t do a million different voices”, but it was made even more difficult by the fact that, oftentimes, game scenes weren’t finished when they were recording the narration for them.
“It was completely blind for the most part,” Tyler explained. “Occasionally, if I was like, ‘What the hell is a dry dirt?’ They would bring it up on screen, and I’m like, ‘Oh, they’re just smashing things together. Okay.’ But for the most part, no, you get the script in spreadsheet form.”
Tyler explained that, unlike shows, “for most video games, like there’s, it’s often not even formatted like a script.” While Tyler’s performance is expertly stitched to the finished visual and into conversations, she explains: “You don’t see what’s going on. You don’t get to hear other people’s lines a lot of the time. You’re just hoping to God you’ve understood the direction.”
The Baldur’s Gate 3 actor explained that recording for video games is wholly unique simply due to the fact that so much is changing all the time.
“They’re constantly trying to improve upon what they’ve done before. So it’s ever-changing,” they said. “They’re always learning from what they did last time to try and make it more efficient, to get better performances out of us, to help communication between directors and the actors, because that’s the majority of it, right? Because they live in these worlds for four or five years before we even get involved.”
At the end of the day, Amelia Tyler did a fantastic job as the narrator of Baldur’s Gate 3. While everything in Larian’s RPG is brilliant, it’s Tyler’s performance that ties everything together into the best Dungeons and Dragons RPG ever made. Hey, it’s not just us saying it, even the lead designer of Skyrim thinks so.
