Astarion is a standout performance in Baldur's Gate 3 – his voice actor Neil Newbon received several awards for his outstanding work. That doesn't mean he outshined (The game is full of incredible performances), but in my opinion Astarion is special because of the sheer range of emotions he portrays, which is both a product of the game's writing and Neil Newbon's exceptional acting quality.
It turns out that Newbon also wore many other non-Astarion hats during the production of Baldur's Gate 3 – not as a voice actor, but as a mocap artist. This emerges from a talk by Greg Lidstone at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2024.
Lidstone was a Performance Director on Baldur's Gate 3, although his current role is as animation director at Larian Studios. It was Lidstone's job to work with the writers, actors and animators of Baldur's Gate 3 to help “create the representations of the companions, the villains and the people of Faerûn,” a task that, as he points out, was extreme could get messy.
“Because the schedule is so tight and there is a lot going on, we would use the stunt performers.” [mocap] …One of the stunt performers I use fairly regularly is actually the guy who plays Astarion.” This becomes less surprising when you look at Neil Newbon's professional career, which has its roots in mocap itself.
When I spoke to him last November about feeling like he had been “saved by games,” Newbon described mocap as “so incredibly liberating… It meant I could play anything.” His company, Performance Captured Academy, particularly mentors game developers, actors and directors to help them get a feel for the technology. Essentially, Newbon lives and breathes this stuff – within itself additive to his voiceover work, and he even directed that one bear sex scene.
“He was really good at conveying the movements of these characters,” Lidstone says. “We actually got to the point where we started discovering this every now and then [scenes] We had the voice recording, but for some reason the mocap was missing, so we had to re-record it.”
Lidstone describes a day when they got Newbon and had him motion capture a whole bunch of Sword Coast NPCs. “I just had this dog's breakfast with about 150 lines of dialogue that didn't have a quick synopsis… It was just a safe place for him. It was a really good and fun challenge.”
At the start of the talk, Lidstone also highlighted the flexible use of actors as one of the many advantages of mocap, saying that Newbon was also indispensable for characters like Gortash and Minsc – but only when the voice actors themselves were unavailable: “We had to.” Adjust. It's never perfect, but it's the best we can do at this time. For all other dialogue sequences, I record the body and the voice at the same time.”
