Developer Larian Studios has gone to some absurd lengths to make sure that your murder sprees won't totally break Baldur's Gate 3, including a series of fully voiced NPCs almost nobody will ever meet.
06.09.2023 - 16:57 / gamesradar.com / Swen Vincke / Will See / Best / Will
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.
Speaking with the official Dungeons & Dragons YouTube channel, Vincke discussed Larian's philosophy on role-playing and his approach to player data. "I actually don't look at it," he says of the data. "I look at the dashboard from time to time. We have people who look at it, but I try to not do it because otherwise it can influence the creative decisions, and I want to make sure that we keep on investing heavily in things that maybe 0.001% of the audience will see.
"It is important that any journey that you take in your game is going to be equally rewarding," he continues. "And if you would say 'oh, 80% of the players go there and they see that', then what's going to happen is you're going to put all of your effort on the 80% experience, and you're going to do less on the 20%. And that's not what you should do when you make a game like this, at least in my opinion. So I try not to be guided too much by it, but obviously I pick things up like 'this class is more popular than that, people are making that choice more than that.' But we don't let it guide the game development."
Later in the interview, Vincke explains that the team was actually worried "we weren't putting in enough" detail, in part because "we were so focused on making sure that the identity you created at the beginning of the game was going to be reflected inside of the game." Larian is essentially the DM of every Baldur's Gate 3 player's campaign, and to me this sounds like the equivalent of a D&D DM who has contingencies and subplots prepared for every possible route the party may take.
"It was very important to us that if you picked [a specific subclass], you were going to feel that you were that [specific subclass]," he says. "That meant quite a lot of work, but it was never about not doing it. What I meant earlier is that 0.01% needs to have their proper experience because they picked that subclass - we offered it to you."
"Our first games were very ambitious but we didn't really manage to fulfill the ambition within the game because we didn't really fully support the features. From the criticisms on those games, I learned that if you put a feature in there, you have to go 'Full Monty.' That means if you can Speak with Animals, you can speak with every animal. If you can Speak with Dead, well, the trick that we use is 'any dead that still has their head.' You'll see all the decapitated people in the game and that's how we solved that. That's my
Developer Larian Studios has gone to some absurd lengths to make sure that your murder sprees won't totally break Baldur's Gate 3, including a series of fully voiced NPCs almost nobody will ever meet.
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.
The core cast of Baldur's Gate 3 are back together, causing raucous speculation among players.
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 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.
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 the definition of a universally acclaimed game. Even if there is the odd outlier, the vast majority of reviews both from critics and players are highly positive. And yet, before the review embargo lifted, Larian Studios worried the game would get middling reviews from critics due to bugs.
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.
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.