Baldur's Gate 3 Patch 3 is set to launch in eight days, and while the devs haven't confirmed the content of the update, there's reason to hope some performance gains might be on the way.
30.08.2023 - 19:43 / ign.com / Swen Vincke
Datamining can provide an interesting window into a developer's intentions for a game. However, such info can be lead to inaccurate conclusions, as seems to be the case with Baldur's Gate 3.
Speaking with IGN, director Swen Vincke talked about the various content that has been unearthed by fans, including the removal of certain epilogues and cuts to the city of Baldur's Gate, saying that information found through datamining can be "misleading." He also dispelled rumors that content had been removed in order to make the earlier launch date.
"We had actually been locked in for quite some time on what was going to be in the game because these games are too large to make big decisions like that and cut things two weeks before release," Vincke says. "So you wouldn't do that. But I mean it's normal. And I guess it's also kind of a compliment, people wanting more content."
Vincke termed some of the cuts "editorial decisions" rather than "cut decisions" owing to their length. That includes Baldur's Gate's much-discussed Upper City, which seemingly had much more content than what was included in the final game.
"So when it comes to the city... we made a big city actually. When you hit that, you'll see there's really a lot to do," Vincke says. "But we noticed, and that was something that took us by surprise, there are people that are exploring the full city, which is what we intended. That's quite a lot of content. So we didn't want to repeat that ad nauseum so that it became too much because by then you already played for over a hundred hours."
The development team's main fear, Vincke says, is that cities "can actually become boring" due to being overwhelming. He says Larian also wanted to set up the grand finale in Baldur's Gate 3's climax.
"So it's not true that we cut large swaths of it. That's been our intention all along. There were certain small things that we did cut, but that's just part of re-scoping as you finish a game," Vincke says.
If anything has surprised Larian Studios, it's just how hungry fans have been for more content. According to HowLongtoBeat, a completionist run in Baldur's Gate 3 averages around 124 hours, and many players have been playing for much longer. But it seems fans want more.
In a separate blog entry, Larian wrote that the team is "confident" that there's enough content in Baldur's Gate 3, but that the team is "committed to tying up loose ends, fixing the remaining bugs, and improving things where we see they could — and should — be improved." Vincke says that includes continuing to optimize its performance so as many fans as possible can play it, even ones on lower-end PCs.
Looking ahead, Larian says it plans to keep monitoring what bugs players encounters while also continuing to
Baldur's Gate 3 Patch 3 is set to launch in eight days, and while the devs haven't confirmed the content of the update, there's reason to hope some performance gains might be on the way.
Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3 was released last week for PlayStation 5 but made an even bigger splash last month when it exited Steam Early Access for PC. Somewhat belatedly, the developer has released a new animated short, which sees the party going from early access to the city of Baldur’s Gate in the final game.
Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke has revealed that, while it is certainly a challenge coming up with ideas for DLC for the game, the studio isn’t completely ruling out the possibility. In an interview on the official Dungeons & Dragons YouTube channel, Vincke states that DLC was “not undoable”, while still being “very hard”.
Baldur's Gate 3 game director Swen Vincke has said that in order to create the game's Dungeons & Dragons experience, it had to account for the chaos of every sort of player.
Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke hasn't completely ruled out adding even more content to the hugely successful RPG by way of Baldur's Gate 3 DLC.
Larian Studios basically had to be the DM for Baldur's Gate 3's take on Dungeons & Dragons, which means that the developer had to account for all the chaos that normally ensues at the tabletop.
Baldur's Gate 3 is now on PS5, and while the processing power of Sony's console is able to handily present most of the game in line with the heartiest PCs out there, it's still no match for the game's notorious Act 3.
Baldur's Gate 3's director, Swen Vincke, has revealed that Larian Studios wanted to include Dispel Magic, but that it would have doubled the size of the game.
Baldur's Gate 3 has only been out of Early Access for around a month, and has been on PlayStation for just a few days, but it looks like developer Larian Studios is already primed and ready to start work on its next game. That might sounds surprising considering the developer is pumping out patches and hotfixes at an alarming rate, but Larian co-founder Swen Vincke has claimed that he's already moving onto something new and that he's "closing the chapter" of his career that was Baldur's Gate 3.
PC and PlayStation gamers have had some time with the critically-acclaimed Baldur’s Gate 3. Soon enough, Xbox gamers will join the party. In an exclusive interview through IGN with the Larian Studios director, the Baldur’s Gate 3 release on Xbox was confirmed to be between September and October 2023. Now the developers are in the final stages of optimization, and the release date for the Xbox version is imminent.
Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian had a whole team dedicated to the RPG's personalized choices and reactions, and director Swen Vincke says this kind of tailored content is essential to games like this even if – or perhaps especially because – only "0.001% of the audience will see" it.
Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, the tabletop ruleset which forms the bones of Baldur's Gate 3, is mostly straightforward. Gone are the days of adding double-digit bonuses to every roll—you roll one die, you add an attribute to it, you sometimes add proficiency bonus, and in rare cases you add that proficiency bonus twice.