Baldur's Gate 3 tool discovers there's around 1,888 characters with dialogue in the game—though 'justice for Karlach was actually the main reason' it was made
Baldur's Gate 3 has a lot of words—and even 'a lot of words' is a major understatement. In a Steam post before the game's release, it was revealed the game's total script is about 2 million words long. For context, all five books in the current Game of Thrones series add up to about 1.7 million words. Big. It's a big game.
Which is why I was pretty damn impressed to find this tool casually popping up on the game's subreddit, able to show which character had the most changes to their dialogue since launch. It's Wyll, which is interesting—but not a huge surprise, seeing as his story stands the most to gain from some added nattering (we still like him, though). Still, I wanted to know how the heck something like this was built, so I reached out to the tool's creator.
They go by the name of Ivunska on Reddit, GitHub, the Larian Forums and Discord, and they credit the BG3 Patch Dialogue Difference Tool's existence to a shared effort by other modders in the community. «The extractor (by Norbyte), multi-tool (ShinyHobo), dialog parser (roksik-dnd & anonymous collaborator), and the dialog difference tool (me)—all of the prior work is what made development of this tool (and many others) manageable.»
While Ivunska mentions that without the collaborative effort this thing could've been easily «twice the amount of work», they've also got some compliments for Larian Studios itself. «Each line contained 'character codes' for which line was associated with which character and was structured in a way that I could fairly easily pick it apart … a data scientist loves nothing more than already very well structured and clean data to work with.»
As for their own personal observations, Ivunska's only just finished their first playthrough,
Read more on pcgamer.com
