Highlights
- The voice actor for male player character in Baldur's Gate 3 recorded "well into four digits" worth of lines, indicating several thousand voiced lines.
- These lines are mainly for moments of reflection and party interaction rather than every possible dialogue option in the game.
- The large number of recorded lines for a mostly silent character raises questions about how talkative the other characters in the game will be.
Despite the main character of Baldur's Gate 3 remaining mostly silent during conversations with NPCs, the voice actor behind the masculine version of that character has revealed that he recorded "well into four digits" worth of lines for the project.
The information regarding the number of lines recorded for the game's protagonist (whom many players refer to as Tav, as it is the character's default name if the player decides not to change it) is based on a generally undiscovered string of online comments that is already five months old, made by the character's voice actor, Josh Wichard. The comments from the actor were dug up Saturday by Reddit user hellodarknessu.
Of course, that's still a pretty broad number, as four digits worth of lines could equate to anywhere between 1,000 and 9,999 voiced lines, but the fact that Wichard said the number was "well into" that amount seems to indicate that the final number of recorded lines for the player character will amount into several thousand. That's also particularly interesting, as in the early access build of Baldur's Gate 3—which released in 2020 on PC and contains the first of the game's five acts—the main character tends to remain silent during actual conversations with non-player characters outside of their own party. And it seems like those conversations are going to remain unvoiced after the release of the full game. When asked by one fan (during the original string of comments) if the voiced lines he recorded were for "moments of reflection and party interaction instead of every possible piece of dialogue," the voice actor simply responded, "yep!"
Responses to the revelation of the number of lines for the main character seems to have generated a very positive response from those eager to play the game's full version. "Indeed. But 4k variations of 'on my way', 'I've found something', 'ouch', 'urgh' or 'what's that?' is a positive. Seems we could be getting a line for almost every possible out-in-the-world situation, with bespoke lines for any notable weirdness," commented Reddit user EnMaccy. "That's a very impressive number considering Tav is silent during dialogue!" added Rundas-Slash. "Man, every tiny piece of info dropped shows that the scope of this game is crazy."
Modern roleplaying games are highly dependent on interaction between characters to immerse players in the game world. There's already been a lot of posturing online between fans of Baldur's Gate 3 and the upcoming Bethesda space RPG Starfield, and Starfield's game director, Todd Howard, had revealed last October that his game already contained more than 250,000 lines of dialogue.
Still, just because voiced lines have been recorded doesn't necessarily be used in game, but the bulky number of lines recorded for a character who has often stayed unvoiced during conversations begs the question of just how talkative the rest of the characters in Baldur's Gate 3 will be. We'll have to wait and see just how much more talkative the cast of characters gets when the full version releases on PC this coming Thursday, August 3, and on PlayStation 5 on September 6.