Baldur's Gate 3's opening Cinematic City is not actually Baldur's Gate

Summary

The city of Baldur's Gate 3's Epic Opening Cinematic is not Baldur's Gate, but yartar.
Yartar is a strange choice considering how little the city is mentioned in Baldur's Gate 3.
Yartar has never been a cornerstone in forgotten areas.

Baldur's Gate 3 has an epic, sweeping opening screen reminiscent of Triple-A games from the past where a massive stage setting film was almost mandatory. During the cinematic, we witness a nautiloid fly through a city, using its loops to capture and imprison its inhabitants. The ship is then attacked by Dragon riding Githyanki, which forces the Illithid pilot to teleport to various places to try to avoid the attackers. Eventually, Nautiloid ends up in avers, where the game begins.

It is a cool opening and sets the stage for the rest of the story; The party is involved in various Illithid and Gith conflicts. Interestingly, several comments on a new Reddit thread by Dragonheart_97 said that they always thought the city from the opening was Baldur's Port itself. Given that you are playing a game called Baldur's Gate, you would be forgiven to think you see the titular city in the opening. But what you actually see is the city of Yartar, a thriving city north of Baldur's Gate in Dessarin Valley.

In the middle of the wild limit

There are actually plenty of tips on why the depicted city is not Baldur's Gate. The guards in Yartar do not have the same Sigil as the flaming fist, Yartar is quite small compared to the huge scale from Baldur's Gate and the People in Baldur's Gate does not mention an illite attack when you finally arrive in the city under Team 3.

This was confirmed by Swen Vincke in a presentation at Pax East 2020, where he said: “The city you saw was not Baldur's gate, it was Yartar. Goodbye Yartar.” It is a kind of strange choice considering that Yartar is not mentioned in the game, and you do not meet any characters from Nautiloid who claim to be from Yartar. There is really a chance that the cinematic was created before the story was put in stone, and Yartar would have a more prominent role than it ended up having.

Baldur's Gate 3 Nautiloid flying above yartar — Hi Jartar

Yartar is not exactly a prominent city in forgotten areas Lore either. The city was the attitude of a couple of early 90s video games, gateway to Savage Frontier and taxes in Savage Frontier, and has since appeared in some adventure modules, such as Storm King's Thunder. However, it is not exactly Waterdeep or Baldur's Gate.

The comments in the aforementioned thread expect the icy landscape that the Nautiloid briefly passes through is the world's backbone, where the Icewind Dale series is canceled. If so, it is a nice call to another Dungeons & Dragon's video game series.