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Baldur’s Gate 3 – Official Opening Cinematic in 4K

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A tentacled nautiloid drags Baldur’s Gate into the sky, and Larian just showed exactly how it happens.

Larian Studios pulled back the curtain on the opening cinematic for Baldur’s Gate 3 during PAX East on February 27, 2020, pairing the CGI sequence with a live gameplay showcase for the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. Built in collaboration with animation studio Unit Image, the cinematic lays out the campaign’s inciting incident in full, high-definition detail. It’s a far cry from the vague, second-hand descriptions that had circulated before the reveal.

• Larian Studios unveiled the official 4K opening cinematic on February 27, 2020, at PAX East alongside a new gameplay showcase, produced with animation studio Unit Image.
• The sequence shows a Mind Flayer nautiloid abducting citizens of Baldur’s Gate and implanting parasitic tadpoles into captives’ eyes, a process that normally triggers ceremorphosis and turns victims into illithids.
• The nautiloid teleports into the fiery plane of Avernus, where Githyanki warriors riding red dragons ambush the ship in an aerial battle that cripples the vessel and sets up the player’s escape.

The PAX East Reveal

Larian used its PAX East slot to correct the record. Early chatter around Baldur’s Gate 3 had described the opening as a seafaring ambush involving a boat full of adventurers, but the actual cinematic has nothing to do with ships crossing open water. Instead, the studio revealed an organic, tentacled Mind Flayer nautiloid flying through the clouds — a living vessel, not a sailing one. Pairing the cinematic with a fresh gameplay demo gave attendees their first real sense of tone for Larian’s take on the Forgotten Realms, following the studio’s work on the Divinity: Original Sin series.

Inside the Nautiloid

Once inside the ship, the cinematic gets clinical about its horror. An illithid moves between fleshy pods holding captive humanoids and inserts parasitic tadpoles directly into their eyes — the standard method by which mind flayers begin ceremorphosis, the transformation that turns a victim into one of their own. It’s a grim, specific detail lifted straight from D&D lore rather than invented for the trailer, and it establishes exactly what’s at stake for the player characters trapped aboard.

Tadpoles go straight into the eyes — ceremorphosis doesn’t wait for the player to catch their breath.

Ambush Over Avernus

The nautiloid doesn’t stay in the material plane for long. After teleporting directly above the city of Baldur’s Gate and snatching citizens off the streets with massive tentacles, the ship jumps again — this time into the Nine Hells, specifically the plane of Avernus. There, Githyanki warriors mounted on red dragons intercept the vessel, and the resulting aerial battle tears into the ship as it shifts planes again. That damage is what sets up the player’s survival and eventual escape once the campaign proper begins.

It’s a dense four minutes of world-building packed into one cinematic, and it plays like a proper D&D adventure hook: capture, transformation, abduction, ambush, crash. Anyone following other anticipated RPGs on the 2020 slate — from the open-world scale of Cyberpunk 2077 to the wizarding-world ambitions behind the Hogwarts Legacy reveal — will recognize the same instinct here: hook players with spectacle before handing them the character sheet.

Larian didn’t just release a trailer at PAX East; it released the actual first scene players will experience, tadpoles and all. The gameplay showcase that accompanied it made clear the cinematic isn’t a bait-and-switch cutscene disconnected from the game — it’s the literal starting point, and everything from the ceremorphosis threat to the wrecked nautiloid carries directly into how the campaign begins.