Larian considered having multiple narrators in Baldur's Gate 3 - including Matt Mercer
The voice actor would go on to voice MInsc in the released version, but that wasn't always the plan.
Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke has just hosted a bombshell Baldur's Gate 3 talk at GDC 2023, peeling back the curtain at the development process of the GDCA game of the year winner. One of the secrets he spilt was that at one point during early development, the team wanted there to be multiple dungeons masters narrating the game... Including Matt Mercer.
This revelation came during an anecdote about the early ambition of the game, including the desire to make cinematics a major part of the Baldur's Gate 3 experience.
"You'll notice that Divininty: Original Sin 2 had this narrator - this dungeon master. We said you know what, we should make that the thing for Baldur's Gate 3 also". Sven stated in front of a live GDC crowd. He'd go on to showcase a very early cinematic of Minsc, with a narrator providing the running commentary on his actions, even going as far as adding an 'he barks' following Minsc's line.
"What's more is we actually wanted to have multiple dungeon masters narrated by multiple people. So we had Matt Mercer on our minds already back then. But we said, you know, that's probably not going to work."
Mercer - known for his work as a voice actor across video game projects as well as his major role in the popular DND series Critical Role - would go on to play a major part of Baldur's Gate 3, taking the voice role of Minsc in the full release.
Vincke's talk covered the development challenges in depth, and touched on the sheer workload behind getting all the words written, voiced, mocaped, and added into the game. With the amount of narration already present in Baldur's Gate 3, one wonders just how hard it would have been to have included other voices. Even if they were saying the exact same words!