Wccftech recently interviewed Matt Holland, Combat Designer, and Adam Smith, Senior Writer for Baldur's Gate 3.
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Thanks Farflame!I'm just going to come right out swinging. As you guys probably already know, while most folks have enjoyed the reveal [of Baldur's Gate 3], there's been a rather vocal portion of Baldur's Gate fans who didn't feel like this looked like a true sequel. What can you say to assuage their fears that this is actually a Divinity: Original Sin game in disguise?
Matt Holland: Well, there's a few things to that. At Larian, for a very long time, we've been trying to emulate a pen and paper experience and bring it to video games. I think it's just that. If people think it looks like Divinity, it's because we're trying to make that tabletop experience that D&D, well, is.
Adam Smith: It's a continuation of what we have been doing which is to move toward a tabletop experience in a cRPG. For the people who think that it doesn't quite look like they wanted it to look or doesn't quite feel like they hoped it would, then honestly, I would just say to see more of it. I think they'll be convinced pretty quickly. The deeper we go into it, the more and more they'll feel the D&D [influence] and how it's truly the heart of it. The more they see the systems and rule set, they'll start to see we are really using that ruleset. Some of the stuff that they recognize stayed in there because it makes sense in the world. The surfaces and the environmental interactions, we've built on them but it didn't make sense to drop them just because [Baldur's Gate 3] looked like Divinity because Divinity is really good as well. It's a continuation of that but it's D&D to its core lore wise and systems wise.
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During the original Divinity: Original Sin crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, the very last stretch goal mentioned a day and night cycle, NPC schedules and weather systems. All of these could have impacted NPCs, monsters and magic. Do you still discuss the possibility of making a truly simulated game world at some point in the future?
Adam: I do in my own head constantly. I think it's a very different game. One of my favorite games of all time is Ultima Seven and it was the first game that I played that had proper NPC behaviors. You could wait for someone to go to the pub and then you could rob their shop. I love stuff like that, but a game that's built like that does very different things. We are very, very story focused as well and there's things that you lose. Also: multiplayer. We're a multiplayer game and day-night cycles in multiplayer becomes incredibly complicated. We're doing so many really complex things already that we know are going to be really good that, on top of that, it wouldn't fit this game.
I love simulated worlds and we have a lot of that stuff in there. We don't do the day-night cycle but we do the things where things in the world happen because you caused them to happen and they can happen off-screen. So, there are things happening off-screen. The world isn't just what you see on your screen. There are events that happen and things that will, because of the choices you've made, things will happen elsewhere. Those are real, those are systemic. Our systems are running in the background the whole time. There are incredibly deep systems. Some of them don't make sense for this game, but yeah, we think about it and we've talked about it.
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