The stunning immensity of choice in ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’

After spending several hours in the presence of Baldur’s Gate 3, I am in awe of the things that you can do in this game.

At a preview event in New York City, just days before the public gameplay reveal of Baldur’s Gate 3 at PAX, Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke showed off a few hours of gameplay of the role-playing game that has kept fans of the series eagerly waiting for a new numbered entry for nearly two decades. So much was revealed, and not just about how the Dungeons & Dragons-based game will look and play, but what it will be about.

I also had a chance to sit down and talk with Vincke and senior writer Adam Smith after the presentation to discuss how development is going, the kind of work that goes into creating a game like Baldur’s Gate 3, and the experience of translating every possible D&D rule into a video game.

But first, let’s talk about the game’s opening cinematic that shows the game’s big threat: mind flayers. The five-minute cinematic is gorgeous, disturbing, exhilarating, and so enticing. 

Warning: if you don’t like seeing toothy tadpoles entering people’s bodies through their eyes, there are a couple moments when you may want to look away.

What’s going on?

The cinematic sets up so much. We see that mind flayers, for some reason, feel comfortable enough to attack the major city of Baldur’s Gate, teleporting terrified people into a big, tentacle-covered nautaloid ship’s hull to likely have their brains consumed by the mind flayers or, maybe worse, be turned into a mind flayer. How do you get turned into a mind flayer? Via a tadpole inserted through the eyeball, similar to how Xenomorphs in Alien reproduce via Facehuggers.

Hot on the nautaloid’s wake is a small crew of dragon-riding githyanki, a race notorious for their hatred of the mind flayers and the fact that they live in the Astral Plane. They manage to chase the nautaloid down and put enough holes in it to take it out.

And that’s where Baldur’s Gate 3‘s gameplay picks up. The character that players create is one of the people captured on the nautaloid, all of whom have taken a tadpole straight to the dome. Now you have to figure out how to get said tadpole out of your head, or at least stop it from turning you into a mind flayer, a grotesque process seen in the game’s first teaser trailer.

The thing is, though, this tadpole isn’t all bad. It gives people certain powers and enhances their abilities. They can communicate with others who have been infected with tadpoles and can so things like jump a lot higher, and one vampire character named Astarion that we met is no longer negatively impacted by the sun. There’s upsides to this intrusion, and at the moment the downsides haven’t really presented themselves, but they’re surely there.

The setting

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game set in the Forgotten Realms, a very popular setting in Dungeons & Dragons with a well-established history. Baldur’s Gate is a major city on the western shore of the continent Faerûn where, in the words of writer Adam Smith, “Bad things happen pretty much all the time.”

The game takes place about 100 years after the events of Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2, wherein the god Bhaal, the Lord of Murder, was in the process of enacting his own resurrection through his children, known as Bhaalspawn, which wreaked havoc on the region.

There’s so much that can be unpacked in this world and learned about, especially if you’ve never stepped foot in it either through a D&D campaign or another video game set in the Forgotten Realms. For the team behind Baldur’s Gate 3, it was important to treat the world like it was real and had this rich history, because in a way it does.

“You think about who the people that exist in this world are”

“The Forgotten Realms has so many different things that we can draw on,” Smith said. “It’s got cosmologies, it’s got gods, it’s got devils, it’s got monsters, it’s got dragons, obviously. But the people who live in the Forgotten Realms are familiar with most of this stuff. They know the gods exist, they take it for granted. They know the hells exist, they take them for granted. They know the dragons exist.”

This means that the writers don’t have to do a lot of explaining, which can be kind of annoying to some players, Smith said.

“Even for people who don’t know D&D, you don’t need to do the setup because you treat the world as believable and real. You treat it as a historical place and you have people live in it as if it’s their world, and it’s a lot easier to do that when you have this core backdrop of decades of work to draw on.”

This D&D backdrop not only helps with drawing up characters and locations in the game, but it has also informed the entirety of the game’s mechanics and gameplay systems, which is one of the most impressive aspects of Baldur’s Gate 3.

Embracing the spirit of D&D

At the beginning of the gameplay demo, after a few minutes of prodding around, the chosen character, an aristocratic vampire named Astarion, came across a dark cleric named Shadowheart banging against a chapel door. Swen Vincke, who was controlling Astarion, had come across his first choices in the game. He could team up with Shadowheart, he could lunge at her and drink her blood, he could try to pick the lock on the door, and he could try to look for another way in.

Each choice had a waterfall of options that could follow it, completely changing the way a player could experience that particular scene.

“If I would’ve taken a left step and then I made two wrong choices, I was a mind flayer,” Vincke said matter-of-factly. “It can go that fast.”

Vincke said that if he made the first bad choice, it’s outcome would be determined by the roll of a 20-sided dice (A.K.A. a d20), which pops up on screen when players attempt to do certain things like persuade a character of something, intimidate someone, or sneakily feast on someone’s blood in the night, for example. A wrong choice and a bad roll means either game over if your character turns into a mind flayer, or it could mean you’ve got a really difficult situation on your hands if a companion does.

“We scanned everything in the ruleset”

“That’s the cool part, it’s just a dice throw away,” he said.

So many things in this game are decided by dice rolls, just like in a tabletop D&D campaign. Whether you perceive something, whether your attack lands, whether you can sweet talk your way out of a sticky situation. It really makes it seem like a traditional pen and paper RPG, especially when you add in all the different things that you can do, that you would normally ask your game master (GM) about but wouldn’t necessarily expect from a game.

Here’s a few things I saw during the gameplay presentation:

• A bunch of boxes that were laying around were arranged into a makeshift staircase so the character could climb on top and just up onto an otherwise unreachable area

• A character dipped their bow into fire and shot some alien goo to make it explode and open up a pathway

• Fire was thrown at grease, which a few people were standing on, and it caused them all to get burned

• A character threw a health potion at a party member in danger and, while the object did a small amount of damage when it hit, the potion itself doused the character and healed them

• When a character came upon a room littered with suspect skeletons, knowing they would be awakened he went around and removed the weapons from their hands to make them less dangerous

Those are just a few examples of how taking the D&D rulebook and translating as much as possible into the game opened up so many different avenues for players to go down and test out.

“We try to go for things that make sense and are logical when you’re playing them,” Vincke said. “If I put water on fire, the fire will be doused. This is an obvious thing. If I tell my GM, ‘I put water on fire, is the fire doused?’ They say, ‘Yes the fire is doused.’ We agree on this right? And so we approach all the systems like this. We scanned everything in the ruleset for ways to give players a sense of agency, letting them create advantages for themselves.”

Vincke describes all of these different things coming together as a “beautiful, interlocking mechanisms and systems.”

By giving players so much choice and so many options of what to do, it makes the experience of playing the game more personal, even when it’s referencing things like your character’s race, class, or choices that you’ve made, Smith said.

“I think for roleplaying games in particular and specifically the roleplaying game that we’re making, the storytelling is collaborative,” he said. “We have a story, but don’t want to sit there and tell you a story, we want you to tell us your story and then we meet in the middle.”

When the team first approached D&D publishers Wizards of the Coast with a build of Baldur’s Gate 3 to see what they thought so far, Wizards was surprised.

“There’s a great degree of trust that we got because [Wizards] understands we’re making a video game so when we showed it to them the first time, the first thing they said was ‘We didn’t expect you to put so much of the ruleset in it,'” Vincke said with a little hint of pride.

Building a believable world

Mind flayers are very obviously a huge focus for Baldur’s Gate 3, and at a glance they look like these pretty clear villains, but there’s a lot more depth to them.

Adam Smith pointed out that the first shot in the cinematic that open up the game is a relief seen inside the nautaloid depicting a part of mind flayer history.

“We very deliberately put that there because we do want to explore what they are and what they want as well,” he said. “They aren’t just tentacly monsters. There’s a lot more to them.”

The inspiration for choosing to go the route of mind flayers came from D&D itself, of course, Vincke explained. He was traveling to Larian Studio’s first pitch meeting with Wizards of the Coast and perusing the D&D accessory book Volo’s Guide to Monsters when he stumbled across a picture of a mind flayer tadpole about to enter somebody’s eyeball.

“One of the themes that we wanted to touch upon was survival,” Vincke said. “[Mind flayers] have a fantastic story about survival, about being at the top of their game to now literally hiding from Githyanki who have made it their rite of initiation to cut off a mind flayer’s head before they can return to the Astral Plane. That fit very well with the theme of survival and our other big theme, which was trust.”

Having tadpoles in people’s heads definitely can cause some trust issues.

But all of this falls apart if the world and the characters don’t feel like they’re worth your attention. To flesh out the world, Smith said that there are currently 13 writers working on the game, which has about 350 people working on it total including all the internal and external people. Smith said having a wide variety of voices is really key for the success of BG3‘s characters and the studio’s workflow.

“Things become more manageable, because you’re like, OK, let’s put Adam in the goblin camp because he’s like a goblin, so let’s have him write this stuff,” he said with a laugh. “And we need somebody to write this incredibly horrible torture scene, and I know the perfect lady for that.”

“If you just give every character a little bit of care, it makes everyone’s lives easier”

He referenced the care that went into even some of the more expendable characters, like the bandits seen at the very first chapel in the gameplay reveal.

“I made little backstories for them. I know where they were born, how they ended up in this damn chapel together,” Smith said. “One way I always think of it is, they could be their own party of adventurers having their own tabletop game… You think about who the people that exist in this world are and try to make them relatable in these small ways. That’s a real delight.”

He mentioned how he doesn’t want anyone to feel like they’re an expendable character, which is why he has a special affinity for the goblins we saw in the presentation.

“I think having these characters that are so often disposable piñatas that you hit to get experience and loot, and instead saying, no, who are they? Where are they from? What’s going on with them?” he said. “If you just give every character a little bit of care, it makes everyone’s lives easier as you build a believable world.”

Early access on the way

Baldur’s Gate 3 still has a ways to go. Yes, most of it looked fantastic and the characters that we saw seemed very fleshed out, but it’s a big, broad, challenging game.

In order to help make it as good of a game as possible, Larian Studios will be putting the game out in early access. That way, players who want to help can play through a sort-of-beta build of the game to determine what needs tweaking.

“Mistakes that we’ve made in the past were corrected in early access that way,” Swen Vincke said. “The general audience never got to see those mistake because those people helped us during early access.”

Adam Smith is particularly excited to see how people react to the player freedom and interactivity in the game.

“We’ll start seeing people posting on subreddits and saying, ‘I just found this specific thing,’ and people will be like, ‘How the hell did you find it?'” he said. “And I hope they don’t tell them, I really hope people leave that to discovery so they get the experience. That’s always the most exciting part. It makes you smile.”

When will it be coming? Who knows. Vincke said it shouldn’t be rushed.

“BG3 is such an important game that people have been waiting for for so long that it would be a sin not to give it that time and to give it the resources that it needs to complete itself.”