Baldur's Gate 3 - News Roundup

Last month Larian Studios finally pulled the curtain back on Baldur's Gate 3, revealing over an hour of detailed gameplay footage. Of course, Dungeons & Dragons fans are a pretty serious bunch, and so a lot of questions remain. Thankfully, Larian head honcho Swen Vincke, producer David Walgrave, BG3 lead writer Adam Smith, and more took to Reddit to participate in an AMA. They covered a wide range of topics, some of which will only be of interest to hardcore D&D nerds, but I collected up some of the more interesting revelations, below.

First up, Walgrave spoke briefly about the size and scope of the Baldur's Gate 3 world, implying it won't quite be an open world, but a series of large staging areas...

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GamesBeat: It's funny you're talking about that, because you look at the goblins, and they're full-fledged characters. They're not just little monsters shouting "Bree-yark!" you have to deal with.

Smith: And some people will never realize that. You can meet the goblins and become immediately hostile and kill them all. And you think -- the goblins are really close to my heart. I really like them. I'm genuinely fond of the goblins, and I get laughed at a lot for it. But we did so much research on goblin culture. The latest Volo's Guide actually is great on goblins. It gives you a story, and it's a story of people who are very close to the bottom of the food chain, who are bullied and enslaved. We take them and we say, what is it like to be a goblin? When we're writing a goblin, a gnoll, any character, I think of them all as characters. We say, what fundamentally can we find in here that makes them individuals? You'll meet goblins who are very aggressive and they're bullies, but we want to know why.

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What's with the brain-worm?

Illithids are hermaphroditic and reproduce through a horrific process called ceremorphosis. Each mind flayer spawns some larvae and leaves them to marinate in elder brain juice for a decade. Surviving larvae are then implanted in a host of roughly human size and shape. The larva then grows and consumes the host's brain and gradually transforms the host body into an adult illithid. Put two and two together, and it's likely that the announcement trailer depicts the fate that awaits our hero from the opening cinematic.

Swen Vincke showed us some Baldur's Gate 3 gameplay at PAX East, and it looks like the larva inside our player character's brain will be a big factor in the story. Obviously, a major plot point is to try and have it removed. But there will be gameplay effects too. The larva can grant special powers and acts as a mental influence on our hero. The protagonist can choose to embrace these powers and urges or resist them. Veteran players will recognize this as similar to the influence of the taint of Bhaal in the previous games. But you won't be the only one carrying this burden. And one of the other characters in the opening cinematic also carries very interesting story implications.

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Baldur's Gate 3's Combat Embraces D&D

Past the control that a turn-based system gives players, it also appeals to the spirit of D&D even more. Looking at it as simply as possible, D&Ds turns and phases directly translate to the gameplay of a turn-based RPG. However, players also gain total control over their party, meaning they can direct party members however they want. A big part of D&D is meticulously building your character and the options they have. There's an anticipation to each encounter in a game of D&D as you wait for dice-rolls to see how things play out.

Baldur's Gate 3 can capture that same sense of tension by being turn-based. Things don't play out immediately, and that makes battles tense affairs. While Baldur's Gate 3 is turn-based, the nature of it being a video game allows combat encounters to flow much faster and easier than they do in D&D. Larian also feels like a turn-based system simply fits with current D&D better, seeing as how the franchise and ruleset have changed since Baldur's Gate 2. In Screen Rant's interview with Combat Designer Matt Holland he stated,

"A lot has changed in the 20 years since Baldur's Gate II, just in terms of tech and the advancements of gaming, but also inside of the D&D ruleset itself. The original games ran on the Advanced D&D ruleset, and now we're all the way up to the fifth edition. We want to work with the fifth edition ruleset, so going turn-based made more sense on that front. And our last two games used turn-based combat as well, so it made sense for us to bring that into Baldur's Gate."

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Past the control that a turn-based system gives players, it also appeals to the spirit of D&D even more. Looking at it as simply as possible, D&Ds turns and phases directly translate to the gameplay of a turn-based RPG. However, players also gain total control over their party, meaning they can direct party members however they want. A big part of D&D is meticulously building your character and the options they have. There's an anticipation to each encounter in a game of D&D as you wait for dice-rolls to see how things play out.

Baldur's Gate 3 can capture that same sense of tension by being turn-based. Things don't play out immediately, and that makes battles tense affairs. While Baldur's Gate 3 is turn-based, the nature of it being a video game allows combat encounters to flow much faster and easier than they do in D&D.

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Saxon1974 said:

Dang not quite open world but staging areas…that sounds just like the DOS games and I hate that part. Not surprised.

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ChienAboyeur said:

The DnD pretext. Nothing to add to the story of tension, dice rolling, already been done.
This bit manages to squeeze in another story: building tension when controlling a party of heroes as when controlling one hero only.

In PnP DnD, players usually controls one hero only which makes building up tension mechanically different as players are bound to one hero only. When players are allowed to control more than one, the bound is loosened. Heroes might be sacrificed far easilier than when they control only one. Tension might happen, no longer on the same grounds as when one hero only though.

Again another statement showing that the MU side of things is taking over SP: groups of players who play BG3 might experience tension building as it happens in PnP whereas SP players wont.

All this story when mentioning that contrary to PnP, players will control the entire party.

Not that it matters, because tension in BG3 will be flat as a flat encephalogramm.




Like DnD. DnD is not open world, it is a collection of dungeons(that is why it is called DnD), closed areas, parties moving from one to another.

DnD is a pretext matching many claims.

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xSamhainx said:

what I've seen just doesnt even slightly give me BG-like vibes

It may be a good game nonetheless, but doesnt seem wise to launch the next installment of a near-mythical game series and have it bear no resemblance to it's predecessor

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wolfgrimdark said:

Eew I was afraid of that. Got zero interest in playing a character with a worm in my brain slowly eating it. Between that and TB this is even more off my list. But sounds like fun for the rest of you so hope it turns out well.

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