IGN talked to Senior Writer Adam Smith about Baldur's Gate III.
More information.For Smith, it seems to boil down to a trusty few factors - the first one being tone. Baldur's Gate always managed to blend a bunch of different styles together, rather than placing all its chips on one fantasy subgenre or another. "I see people talk about the darkness of Baldur's Gate," he says. "And it's absolutely something that we want to bring out. But Baldur's Gate was very, very lighthearted and strange and silly and bizarre in places, as well. And that's really a quality that I think separates it from a lot of other RPGs. It is tonally all over the place and it hits its beats so, so well.
"Occasionally it wants to be romantic, and it's very good at being romantic. Occasionally it wants to be darkly romantic, occasionally it wants to have fun. There are characters that are so cartoonish and strange, and they coexist alongside torture and horror... and getting all those things to sit well together, I think, is part of what Baldur's Gate is."
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It is a relatively traditional fantasy setting, after all. Elves, for example, regularly live well into their 700s, so it's entirely possible that characters - even our own, given the options available during creation - would remember the Bhaalspawn crises, or that we'll see characters like Kivan or Coran or make a return in Larian's take on the Sword Coast. "One of the interesting things," Smith says, "is for some people that's ancient history, for some people, it's recent history... We're 100 years later, but that's not a long time for a deity."