The Voices of Baldur’s Gate 3

It's hard to find something new to say about Baldur's Gate 3. It won so many awards and received such critical acclaim since its release in 2023, that anything else sounds redundant. The work that Larian Studios did with their Divinity series shows here, adapted to D&D 5thE and honed to a fine, fine point.
I almost didn't play it. I clocked nearly 100 hours, being an almost-completionist when it comes to games I enjoy. There's a lot I want to write and read…but I was such a fan of the original games, and good friends had good things to say. Some parts of your past self, you're happy to leave in the past. Other things, you want to give back to your past self as a kind of a gift. Why, my younger self might reasonably ask, did you work so hard if it means you can't find time for one of the best video games, maybe ever?

There's a lot that could be said for the game itself, the fantastic writing and encounter-building. It's the kind of creativity that makes you excited to design your own stories and game adventures, which is about the best praise I think you can give art – that it inspires more. 

But I think part of what strikes me most is the talent behind the game. The voice-acting is second to none, and it features performances that inspire cult-like following. Neil Newbon's flippant, flirty, secretly-super-complex vampire Astarion is a standout. Jennifer English's tortured, amnesiac half-elf Shadowheart is another. My main character (a drow fighter named Histle, thank you for asking) romanced Lae'zel, the overzealous githyanki warrior, given wonderful life by Devora Wilde. It wouldn't be some high-level 5E D&D without a warlock stuck in a bad deal a sexy bad devil–that's Wyll, played by Dave Jones. 

I list these here because I was compelled to look up who did the voice acting, so now you have to know, too. But both Larian and Wizards of the Coast–and the broader gaming community, as much as there is such a thing–are aware that the cast is full of all-stars. As soon as I began looking up information about the game, my social media feed got flooded with footage of the voice actors at events, signing autographs, staging photos in-character, even playing tabletop D&D on stage. The performances really are that good, it makes you want to see the people behind the pixels (so to speak). 

It's funny, I never thought I'd be nostalgic for celebrity culture. When I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, there was a kind of anti-celebrity wave, even among musicians. I adored The White Stripes and Jack White in particular, and part of his appeal was that he seemed so uninterested in the sort of worship other rock stars sought. He crafted instead a kind of mask; famously, the band introduced themselves as siblings, when in fact Meg and Jack had been briefly married. White's obsession with stripped-down instrumentation and consistent, limited color schemes seemed to promise a constructed persona that was more authentic, in a way, than the sort of VH1 "Behind the Music" stuff that ruled the day. His blog, sometimes-intimate as it was, mostly featured screeds about the quotidian. His most memorable blog was about the difference between a frappe and a malt. 

Who could have anticipated the rise of "parasocial relationships." The promise of artist-audience connection seems so quaint. I don't think anybody believes the guy hucking offbrand workout supplements on his vlog is giving you a real look into his life, nor the positivity-grindset interior designer posting pictures of her new living room and oh by the way this post is sponsored by… And it's not just that artists are "tricking us" (aren't we always tricking ourselves?), but also that audiences–some other audiences, never us, no sir–have unreasonable, sometimes dangerous expectations about celebrity availability. In a recent mini-documentary about the making of The Last of Us: Part 2, voice actor Laura Bailey received death threats against both her and her then-infant son. If social media made it so that anybody (thinks they) can be a celebrity, it also made it so most sane folks wouldn't want to. Or, at the least, they'd want some strict guardrails. Maybe a really good security detail. Etc. 

And there's been so many disappointments. I consider myself pretty good at separating the art from the artist…provided the artist has the decency to be dead. For the still-living? I'm not telling you what to do, but when the recent revelations came out about Neil Gaiman's sexual abuses (and possible human trafficking, as those charges make their way through the courts in New Zealand), I found I couldn't stand to see some of my formerly favorite books on my shelf anymore. It made me sick. I dropped them off, in one big stack, at the local used bookstore. In the video game scene, it was also revealed that famous composer Jeremy Soule is likewise a sex offender. His name used to be synonymous with the wildly popular Elder Scrolls series; he hasn't really been heard from since, and frankly I hope he's not heard from again. Given the sad preponderance of such things, it seems common sense not to get overinvested in the people behind the art you love. 

Yet BD3 does stand out for having an absolutely, absurdly good cast, and it invites curiosity about the folks who made it happen, at least for me. Their performances just exude charisma. And there's really no character I would do without; this is a far cry from Baldur's Gate 1, which had a massive number of possible party members, some of whom were forgettable. Or even take Obsidian's excellent Pillars of Eternity series. Fan consensus is that the cleric Durance…yeah, most folks could do without him. 

And both companies at the helm–Larian Studies and Wizards of the Coast–know they struck gold. The cast of Critical Role, all voice actors (the aforementioned Bailey among them), have been featured in The Atlantic, and have enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame. The DM for their shows, Matt Mercer, took over voice duties from (72 year-old, also alleged rapist) Jim Cummings for returning Baldur's Gate character and longtime fan-favorite Minsc, a "mad" ranger who talks to his sidekick, Boo, a "miniature giant space hamster," while rushing into endless madcap shenanigans in the pursuit of justice. In the run-up to BD3, Minsc got his own trailer–and Mercer was heavily featured. He is probably one, if not the, most famous voice actors alive today, and Larian made a point of letting folks know he would be voicing one of the most beloved characters in the franchise. 

And, damn it, it worked. Mercer does a great job. Knowing the man behind Minsc (not to mention having consumed, at a rough estimate, a couple month's worth of his DMing Critical Role) didn't take away from the performance, but heightened it. That's my guy! That's two of my guys! 

It's hard not to talk about so-called "AI," and frankly I'm tired of thinking about it. I don't use it; its use supports slavery, to me, and lots of others have made the argument better than I can. 

But it also strikes me that it robs us of this part of art–looking up the people behind it, their interviews, etc. Sure, there's risk involved. Who can say which media darling won't turn out to be monster, given enough time?

Never meet your heroes? It seems the cowards' way out, to avoid investment in people, real people, just because they might disappoint you. Sure, hero-worship is a bad idea. Frank Herbert wrote a whole big SF series about that rather basic concept. Maybe you've heard of it. 

And yet… Baldur's Gate 3 brought me back in more ways than I expected. Yes, it returned me to the middle-school excitement of D&D on the computer, the Forgotten Realms I so loved from R.A. Salvatore's novels given life on the screen. But it also brought me back to the years I'd spent on Wikipedia looking up who played bass on some particular album, what exactly did Chris Metzen do before writing for Blizzard, did Van Gogh really cut off his own ear (sure did), and so on. I think it's a mistake not to give ourselves over to the pains of disappointment. It's an armor that restricts our movement–the movement of our souls. We need to proceed with some degree of risk, even pain. The pain of a blank page, for example, that requires us to fill it, by and with nothing more than our whole selves. Just because we fail, just because the people we love might fail us, that's not a reason to avoid affection for the people who make our art. It's also not a reason for creators to take short cuts that leave people out if it entirely. 

Companies should pay real, live voice actors, is what I'm trying to say here. Investing in people and then losing them—whether it’s time or misdeeds or the Big One that waits for all of us—is part of life.

I think I'll end with this, from fan-favorite returning-companion Jaheira:

"You twine your life around the people you love. And when they are gone, you grow around their absence instead."