marius

I am a fully blind person and I occasionally record playing video games with my friends.

We will be playing and streaming Larian's upcoming RPG, Baldur's Gate 3 when it gets released, and I wanted to invite you all to join us. The setup includes me (fully blind) and my friend Vincent (fully sighted), who will be controlling the game, and giving descriptions of visuals. This should make it possible to follow both the story of BG3 as well as the more mechanical parts by listening only.

I thought this might be interesting to some of you. I myself played Baldur's Gate 1 as a kid when I could still see, and I'm super excited to be able to experience it now roughly 20 years later and see where the saga is going.

We will go live when the steam version can be downloaded, which, as far as we know, is on August 3rd, 8 AM Pacific time (5PM for GMT+2).

The twitch channel can be found here:

https://www.twitch.tv/hemakesmeplay_live

Actual play might start a little later, as we will have to download and install the game first. It also remains to be seen how smooth the release goes, since BG3 is a highly anticipated game. So maybe we will just look at steam error reports together - who knows.

Videos of the streams will afterwards be posted to the youtube channel, probably after a brief delay for light editing.

https://www.youtube.com/@hemakesmeplay

Thanks, hope to see you there!

I'll start.

My favorite performance is Jaheira, voiced by Heidi Shannon. That unique, eastern-european accent saying "Yes, oh omnipresent authority figure" is unbelievably iconic and also perfectly captures BG's slightly irreverent tone. It's emblematic of the series as a whole, and probably influenced a lot of fantasy RPG voice acting that came after it. For example, I am convinced that Laura Bailey's character Jester in the second season of critical roll was based on Shannon's performance, though admittedly the personalities of Jester and Jaheira are quite different.

And you know what's surprising? Heidi Shannon didn't go on to do anything else. Nothing that I'm aware of anyway. And I have no idea why. Makes me wonder if the voice actors back then knew that they were working on a very influential title, or if they just recorded those 2 minutes or so of voicework for that weird little game company just to pay some bills.

Hey I thought you guys might enjoy watching me and my friend try to play Baldur's Gate 1 enhanced iron man style, i.e. without ever reloading, except when we take a break and resume. So if our main character dies in a fight, we will delete the savegame and that run will be over. Likewise, if Imoen gets shredded by an unlucky crit, well we're just going to have to live with that.

We chose mage for our first run. Playing the enhanced edition so many years later after vanilla BG feels different. It's very strange to summon a familiar in candlekeep.

Anyways we will surely die. If anyone has advice for no reload runs, we would be glad to hear it. We are aware of some basic tricks like evermemory at friendly arm, and alginon's cloak and so on, but we also have some glaring holes in our knowledge of the game. Especially the parts in cloakwood with the bandits and the mine. I have like no recollection of that part, but I remember it being hard. We also know nothing about the EE npc quests, like dorn etc. Tips for these things would be very much appreciated.