Baldur’s Gate 3is a pretty good-looking game. I wouldn’t say its some kind of graphical powerhouse or a game in need of a photo mode to capture those sweeping vistas, but there’s still plenty to feast your eyes on—whether it’s the Arcane Tower in the distant mists of the Underdark, or (I’d imagine, seeing as I’m not there yet) the city of Baldur’s Gate sprawling out in front of you as you look down from the upper city.
But due to the game’s weird camerawork, it’s sometimes hard to soak in those environments. Baldur’s Gate 3 runs on a new version of Larian’s Divinity engine, which was originally built for the Original Sin games, which had top-down isometric-like camera angles where you couldn’t really see into the distance or get those sweet, sweet views over the landscape.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a big evolution in this sense, as you canalmostget the camera to a third-person perspective, at which point you may see the lay of the land and things in the distance. I say ‘almost,’ because for some reason the camera stops short of giving you a straight-on Dark Souls-style third-person view, and restricts you to a perspective that’s still kind of pointing at the ground, greatly limiting how far into the distance you can look (and forget about looking up at all).
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Enter theNative Camera Tweaks mod, which basically unlocks the camera entirely, letting you play Baldur’s Gate 3 as a true, blue third-person game. I say this as someone using a controller, but with a mouse-and-keyboard you can still get a pretty seamless third-person experience by additionally downloading theWASD Character Movementmod, which means that you don’t have to awkwardly mouse-click around your character as they stand there in the middle of the screen.
The semi-third-person perspective is the main reason I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 with a controller. I just find it makes for awaymore immersive experience being right in there. Sure, I’m often zooming out to plot routes and figure out the best positions to start battles in, but when I’m hanging out in the camp or in friendly hub areas, I want the camera to beright in therein peoples’ faces. This camera mod basically gets rid of the last little barrier that was preventing me from doing that.
When I was wandering around in the Underdark camp with the mod on, for the first time ever I can see the undersides of the iridescent mushrooms looming over me, and the fact that the camera has full 360-degree movement (it’s inexplicably locked to a four-directional axis in the base game) lets me do this nice slow smooth pans as I walk around these areas.
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Check out this clip below I took when wandering around the Blighted Village. Nice, right?
Below, I’ve managed to take pretty much the same screenshot with the mod turn off then on. In the first shot, you may’t see the top of the arcane tower in the distance, which would be a total no-no in the world of photography. You can’t just cut buildings off like that—it ruins the whole shot!
Now check it out with the mod. You can see the tower in its entirety. What’s more, you can see that Larian has actually gone to the effort of texturing the ceiling of the underdark (rather than just assuming that people would never see it and leaving it a blank space).
Point being: Baldur’s Gate 3’s environments are worth looking at, and really are worthy of a fully flexible camera. It’s almost like Larian didn’t quite have the confidence to let players fully soak in the world, but they should have! I haven’t reached the above-hence-mentioned city itself yet, but when I do I’ll definitely be wanting to get that camera up-close—looking up at the buildings and getting clear views out over the harbour rather than just staring down at the cobbles.
My partner and I had a great moment in the Underdark where she didn’t know where I was (she’s not too hot at navigation, but don’t tell her I said that). So she climbed up to a high-point to get a good view and look in my general direction according to the map, and could actually see me and my impwayyyyoff in the distance thanks to that added camera tilt.
Remove the UI using the F10 key, and you’re able to end up with pretty staged pictures like the one you see at the top of this feature.
The Native Camera mod is easy enough to install. You’ll need theNative Mod Loader, which you extract to the game’s ‘bin’ folder, then you download Native Camera Tweaks (as well as other ‘Native’ mods’ like WASD Character Movement), create the folder ‘NativeMods’ in your ‘bin’ folder, then extract the mods in there. Note that you may need to manually update the mod.
One minor annoyance I found with the mod is that it can clip through the floor when you pan too low, but some smart soul on the Nexus Mods chat discovered that you can tweak this in the mod’sBG3NativeCameraTweaks.tomlfile. Open the file, then change the PitchMin value to 5.0 (PitchMin = 5.0), and you should be set to enjoy Faerun with a much-improved perspective.
