Amelia Tyler, Baldur's Gate 3's narrator, talks putting a voice to the Dark Urge's 'feral, visceral, animalistic, want to tear the world apart with [its] teeth'
Baldur's Gate 3 has voiced narration—a lot of it, as I've personally confirmed by playing the dang thing while having the sound turned on. I recently had the pleasure of speaking to the voice behind the game's reams and reams of narration, Amelia Tyler, earlier this week.
While Tyler's dulcet tones do stay largely consistent, there are noticeable differences if you play the game's different origin characters. She's on record as having done over a dozen different narration styles for the game, each representing a different character's inner voice.
Not for every single line of narration, as Tyler assures me, but for key moments? Absolutely. «When we started off recording the narration for the early access version, it was very much a one-note narration style … but with much more of an attitude. The brief I was given was 'Scar from the Lion King'.»
Granted, that's something we knew already from her past interviews. However, she explains why they shifted away from smarmy judgement to inner monologue, namely, that it would get exhausting to be judged all the time. Instead, «we wanted [the narration] to echo the choices the player was making, so it was very much your narrator, whether you're choosing to play a Paladin, or Dark Urge, or anything in between.»
Tyler says that philosophy happened almost by accident, during those early access days of experimentation. «I don't think it was a conscious decision at the beginning, to give it those different voices, it just sort of evolved naturally. We'd get to a more Dark Urgey line or a Shadowheart line or an Astarion line or a Wyll line, and [I'd say] them in a way that allowed me to convey emotion … you never wanna tell a player how to feel, but I can echo the emotion of a
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