Baldur's Gate 3 is a phenomenal game—noteworthy not just for being a very good RPG, but also several brilliant performances and a heck of a lot of mocapping. Having spoken to some of its cast myself in the past, I can speak to the thought and weight they've put behind their work.
As can Alix Wilton Regan, voice of the female inquisitor in Dragon Age: Inquisition, who recently spoke with GamesRadar+ at the BAFTA game awards: "Video game acting is, at times, hard, demanding, and also challenging, and it's also joyous, and it's filled with, literally, blood and sweat and tears, especially if you're on the [performance capture] stage."
That can be hard for certain videogame companies (cough cough, Amazon Games) to remember, especially during the industry's current obsession with AI, which could cut out all sorts of creative "middlemen" such as writers, actors, artists, and QA testers. Heck, let's get rid of developers while we're at it—you get the picture.
"Video game actors, they deserve their flowers, because we help pull the audience in to elevate the writing, the animation, the direction, the tone," Regan continues. "I give a massive shout-out here to the Baldur's Gate 3 crew, because they were the ones who made all the other video game actors sit up and take note and realize, 'Yeah, actually, we are loved, our work does have value, and we too deserve to stand up and be counted.'
"I've literally said this to, like, Jennifer English's face, or Neil Newbon. I've been up to Ben Starr, and I'm like, 'You changed the game.'"
The unwarranted disrespect towards videogame actors isn't anything new, mind. Take this quote—fittingly, from BG3 star Neil Newbon himself—speaking to Entertainment Weekly last year: "I had conversations about, 'That's going to look really good when we get the real actors in.' I was like, 'What do you mean real actors?' I'm a real actor. I went to the f*cking Edinburgh Festival, man!"
And while I don't think actors aren't appreciated by people who are into videogames—if you've played enough, you almost certainly have favourites—I will admit, it's nice to see Baldur's Gate 3 doing well enough for Neil Newbon to snap up an award while competing in the same category as movie star Idris Elba.
