Baldur’s Gate 3 narrator Amelia Tyler found inspiration in unlikely places for some of BG3’s best moments, including her own background in animal psychology. Tyler explained her approach to the hundreds of narrator lines and over a dozen speaking styles she adopted for the game in a recent set of interviews with PC Gamer, where she explained how the process evolved from early access’ more judgmental tone to what we hear in the game now.
“I don’t think it was a conscious decision at the beginning, to give it those different voices,” Tyler said. “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 moment.”
Tyler said she and Larian envisioned her role as someone just over your shoulder, whispering in your ear and guiding you along. The Dark Urge presented a particular challenge for Tyler. For other Origin companion characters, Tyler said she used their speaking style as a guide – opting for a more boisterous tone with Karlach, for example. The Dark Urge rarely speaks, though, so Tyler got even more creative than usual.
“I did a lot of animal psychology study – behavior in the wild versus behavior in captivity,” Tyler said. “There was a lot of that which got mimicked in Dark Urge. That kind of caged animal, pacing, needing to be free, needing to kill and not even really knowing why. It’s just: that’s how you’re wired … It’s tapping into something more primal in that character, it’s not necessarily someone else’s voice. It’s the part of you you might not like.”
On the less murder-y side, Tyler told PC Gamer she thoroughly enjoyed the quirkier lines, the snarky epitaphs in graveyards and others that let her draw on her love of one of her favorite authors.
“I particularly enjoyed the [lines] where it goes full-on Terry Pratchett. Like: ‘Tongs! A wide variety of tongs’ [or] ‘The sheep stares at you with unsettling malice’ … I love those little twinges of comedy, ’cause I grew up on Terry Pratchett.”
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
