Screenrant interviewed Devora Wilde about Baldur's Gate 3:
Devora Wilde Wants Players To "Give Lae'zel A Chance" In Baldur's Gate 3
Devora Wilde discusses playing githyanki companion Lae'zel, the complexity of Baldur's Gate 3's narrative and githyanki culture clashes.
Baldur's Gate 3 has surpassed expectations and become one of the biggest hits of 2023 so far. The much-anticipated sequel to the beloved Dungeons & Dragons-based RPG continues the adventure on the Sword Coast of Faerûn in and around the titular city. With interweaving stories, complex characters, and the fate of the world hanging in the balance, there's plenty to keep even the most discerning player busy for hours.
Baldur's Gate 3 boasts an impressive voice cast including Harry Potter's Jason Isaacs, Maggie Robertson of Resident Evil Village fame, and Red Solstice 2's Devora Wilde, the latter of whom lends her voice to the fierce githyanki warrior Lae’zel. Lae'zel stands out among the Baldur's Gate 3 companions due to not only her race but also her approach to problem-solving. However, beneath Lae'zel's prickly exterior, it's possible to discover one of the more nuanced characters in the game, leading to a touching romance for some.
Screen Rant spoke with Devora Wilde about githyanki culture, the complexity of Baldur’s Gate 3, and the positive fan reaction to her “little green lizard”.
From the beginning, Baldur’s Gate III hands you control of your destiny and then makes you question whether your choices were ever your own or if you were under someone else’s control the whole time. By the end, even with all the choices behind me, I clearly couldn’t save everyone. Possibly not anyone. Maybe not even myself. Those choices definitely mattered, but the complexities of life dictate that you can never control every aspect of it. I was a savior, but at an incredible cost. Anyway, does my pontificating matter, or is it time to roll up a new character and see if I can affect change?
From this unique start, you set out on a strange journey with a parasite hitchhiking a ride inside your head, threatening to turn you into a mind flayer. Your character used to be an Adventurer until they took a worm to the brain. For a game promising freedom of choice, this could have presented a problem by forcing you into a narrow narrative tunnel and narrowing the possibilities for role-playing. Thankfully, this is just the start of the game. You’re in an odd position, as you’re not so much a hero but merely a person desperately searching for a cure to a disease that may have none. As surprising as waking up with a tadpole in your noggin would be, Baldur’s Gate III spins off in even stranger directions and unfurls into a wild adventure, letting you dictate the direction, and oh, what directions you can dictate.
[...]
There are good games and great games, and then there are games that change the game entirely. Baldur’s Gate III is that rare case that charts its own route, building on the best of what came before it and breaking new ground. With how responsive the game is to the specifics of your created character, it could be explored virtually forever with endless new stuff to discover tucked into millions of little corners. The world is intricate and wonderous enough to want to live in it, and the characters are so intriguing that you cherish every conversation and want to save them all from themselves (and good luck doing that!). It’s an explosion of the imagination so powerful that it’s unthinkable that Larian was able to fit it all into one game, but they did. So, gather your party and venture forth!
Pros Feels like playing D&D, complex and beautiful characters, unique and enthralling narrative and story structure, beautiful lived-in world, excellent soundtrack.
Cons Some serious bugs.
Bottom Line It's like a D&D campaign with a DM who has a funky imagination and still manages to make you think, laugh and cry all at the same time, and it's utterly unforgettable in all the best ways.
Every so often, an RPG comes along that amazes you. That is so close to perfection that any bugs or glitches are forgivable. That captivates you in the story and everything else you can do; that, by the time a couple of hundred hours have passed, you remember you’re supposed to write a review about it. Welcome, then, to Baldur’s Gate 3. Baldur’s Gate 3 builds on classic RPGs of yesteryear while still offering the depth, mechanics, and gameplay that you expect from a modern game. It also does this so incredibly seamlessly. When I say this is a game-of-the-year contender, it’s not hyperbole.
A Whole World to Explore Like any good D&D campaign, no two people will have the same experience. You can choose whether to be good or bad or operate in that grey middle ground. Not to mention, you can pick a named character and see how their story plays out if you don’t want to forge your own path with a self-made one.
The world feels vast and alive. With monsters, dungeons, towns, and places to go and explore, you will always want to go off the beaten path to see what adventures or misadventures you can have. The world map is huge, and in places, it can be overwhelming. As it’s mostly open world, there is plenty to see, and thankfully, it doesn’t all look the same. These visual differences make the world exciting and more realistic (well, as realistic as a fantasy world can be!). Obviously, there are areas that won’t be accessible; this can be because of insufficient skills or plot-related reasons.
[...]
SUMMARY + Vast world to explore + Engaging, well written and acted story + So many side-quests and other things to do + Deeply rich in lore and character development + Excellent implementation of tabletop RPG elements + Fantastic combat + There are a Ridiculous number of options to build and develop your character + Beautiful sound and visuals
- Throws you in at the deep end with a steep learning curve - The occasional graphical glitch
Baldur's Gate 3 is a fantastic fantasy RPG that will be sure to take hundreds of hours of your time as you explore the world, delve deep into the plot, and enjoy countless other side activities. It looks fantastic, plays fantastic and is just all-round fantastic.
Baldur's Gate 3 - Should we compare it with Starfield?
by Hiddenx, 09:21
Gamesradar asks the question if we should compare Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield:
Should we compare Starfield and Baldur's Gate 3? "I think we are doing very different things," says Larian
Interview | There's plenty that Bethesda and Larian can learn from one another
Is there value in pitting Starfield and Baldur's Gate 3 against one another? We are undoubtedly living through a new golden age of role-playing games, and there is little doubt in my mind that 2023 will be remembered as the year the RPG became a resurgent force to be reckoned with. Between Sea of Stars and Final Fantasy 16, Octopath Traveler 2 and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Hogwarts Legacy and Diablo 4, and yes, Starfield and Baldur's Gate 3 (among countless others), there truly has been something in this genre for everybody to play. But perhaps it was only inevitable that the latest works from Bethesda Game Studios and Larian Studios would be compared so aggressively.
The biggest Xbox Series X and PS5 console exclusives of the summer, releasing within 24 hours of one another; anticipation skyhigh thanks in no small part to their lengthy development cycles – it's been five since Bethesda launched the widely derided Fallout 76, and six since Larian released the critically acclaimed Divinity: Original Sin 2. One studio attempting to recapture the magic some fear had been lost to time, and the other trying to make lightning strike twice. The result of all of this is two of the best RPGs in recent memory, with each fulfilling wildly different fantasies.
Starfield, a chance to chart your own destiny across a wide-open galaxy. Baldur's Gate 3, an enduring attempt to break the invisible hand of a devious dungeon master. Some might say that BG3 has a stronger sense of adventure, owing to its malleable narrative design and the fantastic characterisation of its companions. Whereas Starfield has a degree of flexibility and fluidity that you might not find throughout the Forgotten Realms. It's difficult to say if one is better than the other, as each experience is underpinned by a different conceptual approach to what it means to give a player freedom in a crafted world.
Patch #2 for Baldur’s Gate 3 is now live, bringing bug fixes, substantial performance improvements and much more! If you missed our latest Community Update, we highly recommend you give it a read here for a glimpse at the future of Baldur’s Gate 3, and the role your feedback is playing in that.
Still here? Great! Withers has heard tales of Tavs, having requested the presence of their friends for an afternoon of adventuring, wanting to return to the lifestyle of a solo adventurer without their friends in tow. Therefore, he has come up with a solution. Introducing Withers’ Wardrobe of Wayward Friends! With this woodworked wonder, you can now dismiss co-op party members and bring your companions back into the fold. Withers’ solution only extends to custom Tavs, however - so no throwing Gale into a cupboard (although we’re sure it’s comfy in there).
As well as plenty of performance improvements and UI tweaks, we've added a new epilogue scene for Karlach, and are working on additional endgame scenes featuring other characters. Additional Karlach moments have also been added in Acts 1 and 2, allowing her to better reflect on her infernal engine and the options available to her.
We’ve prepared the highlights of Patch 2 below, followed by the main meat of the update. Thank you for sharing your feedback with us, and for your continued support If you have any issues with Baldur’s Gate 3, don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team.
Since launching last month, a lot of tweaks and updates can already be seen in Baldur's Gate 3. Over the past few weeks we've chased down bugs, polished up some cinematics, and used your feedback to help organize our thoughts and inform our plans going forward. The first major patch just launched, solving over 1000 bugs to hopefully make Baldur’s Gate 3 an even better experience. But it was still a patch designed primarily to squash bugs.
We want to go further than that. We now find ourselves at a time where we’re able to properly sit down and consider how to parse feedback beyond bug fixing and UX tweaks. Patch 2 is just around the corner, and while it does include bug fixes, it also includes substantial performance improvements for the first time since launch. Perhaps more notably, we’re adding better closure to the story’s final act in the form of a more fleshed-out ending for Karlach - something many of you have been asking for.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s take a moment to focus on a conversation some of you have been having in the background. Many of the points that come out of this conversation are being funneled into the umbrella term of ‘cut content’, so we thought it would be helpful to give you some clarity about that as we think about the future of Baldur’s Gate 3.
We went through many different threads and reviews with our community teams, and we think we’ve managed to truncate the discussion about cut content and Act 3 into three topics: Performance, Bugs, and User Experience.
Performance. The city of Baldur’s Gate itself is ambitious. Technically, narratively, and in scope. One of the biggest issues with creating games is that technology is always trying to keep up with your ambition, and here we’ve been hit pretty hard by some setbacks. We know that Act 3’s performance isn’t as good as the first two acts, but the good news is that Patch 2 is bringing major performance improvements to the entire game, but more specifically to Act 3 where you’ll feel it the most. We’ll also be working throughout September to improve performance in Act 3 further with new technology that’s been taking a bit longer to release than we expected.
Bugs. We’ve seen your reports about Act 3, and we are as frustrated as you are by bugs spoiling the experience. So we’re dedicated to solving these quickly. And as you’ve noticed by our Hotfix and Patch rollout, we’re getting pretty fast.
Our approach is that whenever blockers pop up, we either release a hotfix if a patch is not imminent or include the fix as part of a patch if the patch is imminent. With Patch 1, your experience should already be a lot better, with most big issues solved by at least a workaround.
Patch 2 looks to further eliminate some of the more major issues, including those found in Act 3. Some things that are currently being associated with ‘cut content’ are actually things like companion reactions to events in the world that didn’t trigger. These are being solved. Where there seem to be loose ends, we’re tying them up.
User Experience. UX covers a lot of things: from how it feels to play the game, to how you feel when you’re playing it. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game 3 years in Early Access and 6 years in the making. Many of the ‘building blocks’ or ideas, tests, or however you want to refer to the junk data that falls outside of what we shipped with, can and is being datamined.That’s okay, but it’s important to understand that not every building block in the giant box of Lego is needed to create the experience we ultimately envisioned and intended over years of iteration.
We’ve seen three types of complaints that are being referred to as cut content:
The first references content that actually doesn’t properly trigger because of a bug, for instance some of Minthara’s reactivity. We’ve located what’s causing that and are working on it - expect a fix for this soon.
The second is about the epilogue. What’s been datamined is not really cut content but content that we didn’t want to release because we didn’t think it worked. We’re pretty strict with ourselves and our ideas. If it isn’t good - if it isn’t fun to play - it doesn’t make it into the game. One of the reasons why we trimmed the epilogue is because we were afraid the ending cinematics were becoming too long and would detract from the epicness of the experience. But clearly, not everyone agrees with us! So we’re going to do something about it.
We’ve started expanding the epilogues and you’ll see the first results of that in Patch 2 with the addition of a new optional ending with Karlach. It’s fiery, poignant, and gives her the ending she deserves.
The third is about the things we actually didn’t plan for, and those we once considered but ultimately didn’t do.
It was always our intention for the Upper City to be an epic, cinematic epilogue bringing the story of Baldur’s Gate 3 to a close. But we didn’t talk about that in advance because it would have been a major spoiler.
We feel confident that there’s enough content in Baldur’s Gate 3, and the city itself, clocking in weeks-long playthroughs at a time. But that’s not to say Baldur’s Gate 3 didn’t see cuts just as every game. It’s just important to know that what ultimately shipped was planned long ago, in function primarily of making Baldur’s Gate 3 fun to play, not for us to close development quickly.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game with many release dates, and despite us moving its launch up by around a month, it’s still a couple years late. It was late because we grew teams, ambition, and ideas in function of it being the best game it could possibly be. Thankfully, not every idea makes it into the final launch. It wouldn’t be the game you enjoy if they did.
We’re happy that Baldur’s Gate 3 has resonated with a great many of you, but we’ll never take that for granted. We’re committed to tying up loose ends, fixing the remaining bugs, and improving things where we see they could - and should - be improved.
So, what can you expect from us in the future?
First: we’ll keep on monitoring what bugs you encounter and we’ll make sure to patch them as fast as we can.
Second: We’ll start making improvements based on the feedback you’re giving us. Baldur’s Gate 3 means so much to a great deal of you, and in turn that means the world to us. We love this game and we’re not done with it yet. We welcome your feedback, your threads, and also your words of encouragement.
Withers’ Wardrobe of Wayward Friends - which we hope to launch very soon - is an example of us integrating your feedback. This feature allows you to get rid of co-op party members who join your campaign, so you can continue on without them. We’re also working on the ability to change your characters’ look once you’ve started a campaign, though we don’t have a release date for that yet. There will be more and you can expect us to come with modding support at some point too.
Once again, thank you for giving us so much feedback. It’s incredibly motivating for us and drives us to do better and better.
Baldur's Gate 3 Review - Bringing the Tabletop to our Monitors
I could easily keep talking about this game, from the romance scenes that honestly had a lot of heart put into them or about various small encounters that I had just roaming around the map. Baldur’s Gate 3 may not be a one-to-one recreation of a system that many of us know, but that doesn’t hold it back in any form. Instead, the spirit of Dungeons & Dragons is inside the very fiber of Baldur’s Gate 3; it can sometimes be silly and outlandish. However, there is a lot to love here, and there aren’t many words that could really convey how much I love this game and glad that while the battle system may not be what I expected, once I adjusted myself to it, it gave me almost everything else I could want out of a game.
Larian Studios have released patch #1 for Baldur's Gate 3. It's a big, 4.37-GB download:
Patch #1 Now Live!
Version Number: 4.1.1.3669438
Hello everyone,
Today we’re releasing our first major patch for Baldur’s Gate 3, addressing over 1000 bugs, balancing, flow issues and much, much more. Patch 1 is too big for our usual patch notes due to Steam’s character limit, so for the full notes head to this link:
So what can you expect from this update? Well, we’ve eliminated issues like NPCs who sometimes spot you when they really shouldn’t be able to, floating items like mugs and newspapers that should abide the laws of gravity, and the conclusion to Shadowheart’s romance scene not triggering for some players, among others. With expansive systems come many unknowns, so our support team continues to work with you to relay any issues to us. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with further reports.
Patch 1 also tackles a few visual bugs, and sprinkles on more post-launch polish. We’re bringing back Short King Summer with better kissing contact for short races!
The Rules Lawyer talks about why Baldur's Gate 3 might undermine WOTC's plans for D&D.
The runaway success of Baldur's Gate 3, based on D&D 5e, is enriching WOTC and popularizing D&D even more, but it might RUIN their entire plan for D&D.
0:00 Intro 1:08 WOTC's banking on the D&D VTT 3:05 Roll for Combat stream on BG3 and the VTT 7:32 Potential for modding in BG3 11:00 Prospects for WOTC 12:58 āŖ I've got a theory āŖ 17:05 Closing thoughts
'A triumph': Brian Fargo, Mike Laidlaw, and other RPG architects weigh in on Baldur's Gate 3
Creative forces behind series like Fallout, Dragon Age, The Elder Scrolls, and Pillars of Eternity react to Baldur's Gate 3.
We've just given Baldur's Gate 3 one of the highest review scores ever awarded in PC Gamer's 30-year history, putting Larian's RPG the company of just a handful of other games, including Half-Life 2 and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. It's an extraordinary RPG and already an all-time favorite for many on the team—although I doubt any of us except Fraser, who wrote our Baldur's Gate 3 review, have finished it yet.
As the sequel to a 23-year-old RPG that was made by BioWare and published by Interplay and Black Isle—creators of Wasteland, Fallout, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, and more—Baldur's Gate 3 carries on the "computer roleplaying game" tradition that has produced, or at least preceded and heavily influenced, many of PC Gamer's other favorite RPGs. Having given our verdict, we asked around for Baldur's Gate 3 launch reactions from Larian's contemporaries and predecessors, and heard back from some of the most influential directors, designers, and writers of PC RPGs from the past 30-plus years:
Brian Fargo, founder of Interplay and InXile (where he's revived the Wasteland and Bard's Tale RPGs), who hasn't had a chance to play Baldur's Gate 3 yet, but is jealous that Larian landed the license and "made it an even bigger success than imagined".
Former Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw, who's been making liberal use of improvised weapons and talks to every animal.
Former Bethesda lead producer Jeff Gardiner, who says that Baldur's Gate 3 is a "masterpiece," despite his character being humbled by goblins.
Obsidian studio design director Josh Sawyer, who's having fun getting into and out of trouble, and puts his critical eye to the interface.
Former Obsidian narrative designer Lis Moberly, who contemplates the meaning and potency of Baldur's Gate 3's plague narrative.
Spiderweb Software founder Jeff Vogel, who takes Baldur's Gate 3 as good news for all RPG developers, because "successful RPGs make more RPG fans".
I don't want to say every CRPG going forward should aspire to be like Baldur's Gate 3. Not everything needs to be nearly this big and ambitious, or even this dense. But it is a landmark moment in the genre, and if I had to point to one paragon that I would like everyone else making these to take inspiration from, this is absolutely it. I waited 14 years for the stars to align again so that we could get the ideal mix of crunchy, tactical, old-school RPG combat, an epic and well-written story with complex characters and lots of meaningful choices, and a level of polish and cinematic presentation that let me see the sweat and the sorrow on characters' faces in their darkest hours. Plenty of other games have partially completed that list, but the last time they all came together was Dragon Age: Origins in 2009. And I can finally say that game, and its Infinity Engine predecessors, have a worthy successor that’s not just matched their RPG greatness, but surpassed it. Baldur’s Gate 3 is just about everything I could have asked for.
PC Games reviewed Baldur's Gate 3 in German - please use autotranslate to English in Youtube:
Baldur's Gate 3 | REVIEW | Ein Kunst- und Meisterwerk
"It's a video game in its purest form that holds up a mirror to the industry! It shows us how video games once were and should be, which is now far too often forgotten by the industry. It is a work of art born from the passion and love of a studio that has not been corrupted by the rampant greed of the industry. You can tell in every fiber of Baldur's Gate 3 that it wasn't created to generate maximum revenue, instead it's a product of the love for video games that sets Creative Director Swen Vincke and his team apart."
After spending 160 hours unravelling conspiracies, setting fire to monsters and finding increasingly fancy hats for my Bard, I can now confidently say that Baldur's Gate 3 is the greatest RPG I've ever played. If I wasn't writing this review, I'd be rolling a brand new character and jumping in for another hundred hours. I've got it bad.
It's my dream game: the best parts of Ultima, Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura and Divinity: Original Sin. But it also does so much more than tap into the RPG Greatest Hits, finding a way to unite disparate philosophies like cinematic storytelling, unhinged sandbox mayhem and tabletop-style roleplaying. Yes, it says, you can have your cake and eat it too.
And boy is it absolutely massive, as deep as it is wide. Each of the three acts could be their own epic RPG, jam-packed with elaborate dungeons, strikingly memorable quests and unique stakes, supported by systems that offer a truly intimidating amount of player freedom. It is a game overflowing with crossroads, with every step conjuring up yet more paths trying to seduce you off the beaten track.
[...]
After reviewing a game this ridiculously large, there's usually a sense of relief when I'm done. But not here. To be honest, I could have easily reached the game's climax days earlier, but I just couldn't bring myself to call it. I felt compelled to see as much as humanly possible in one playthrough because it's all just so bloody incredible. Whenever I found a new quest to distract me, I was overjoyed. Another reason to keep playing! More of the best-in-class writing, more of these gripping fights that have seen me duking it out well into the small hours of the morning, more magical artefacts to cram into my beautiful mess of an inventory. I'm genuinely gutted that it's over. So I guess there's only one solution: start all over again. I'm buzzing with excitement.
Score: 97/100 - Baldur's Gate 3 is an unrivalled RPG that will swallow your life whole.
PC Gamer interviewed Neil Newbon about Baldur's Gate 3:
The voice of Baldur's Gate 3's Astarion talks TTRPGs, storytelling, and the glamourous 'fury and the wrath' of playing vampires
Neil Newbon has plenty of well-wishes for the community, as Astarion takes his post-launch bow on the digital stage.
Neil Newbon, the voice behind my favourite trash-fire vampire from Baldur's Gate 3 - a character I've gone to great lengths to defend in the past—sat down with me last week to talk about his experience playing Astarion.
We chatted about Astarion's appearance on the front of PC Gamer, his long-standing love of tabletop, and vampires. And while he has a deep affection of those creatures of the night, he also holds a preference that took me off-guard.
That's a minor footnote, though—what mainly stood out to me was his boundless appreciation for gaming, the tabletop hobby, and the people who helped him get here—here's a few choice moments from our talk on all things vampire.
PC Gamer, Baldur's Gate 3, and the industry While Newbon's known as the voice of everyone's favourite flamboyant vampire spawn, he also played Karl Heisenberg in Resident Evil: Village, and he's brought his vocal talents to games such as Star Wars: The Old Republic and Detroit: Become Human. It's more than just work for Newbon though—he's a huge fan of games himself, and even us too.
[...]
Regardless, for Newbon, playing Astarion has been a personal highlight. "It's definitely been one of the best moments of my career … this character, working with Larian, working with the 300-strong cast, being a mocap consultant on it—it's been extraordinary.
"Obviously I have worked my ass off to get here. But at the same time, I wouldn't have been here without the support of so many people throughout all of my career in the games industry … starting with Audiomotion and Brian Mitchell, who gave me my first gig, up until [Baldur's Gate 3] with Josh Weeden and Jason Latino signing off on me to play Astarion. I wouldn't be here without so many people … so yeah, it's been a real trip."
Larian is back with another top-down role-player, but this time it's got the keys to all of Dungeons and Dragons.
Larian had been cranking out solid games in the Divinity series for a good few years before its reputation skyrocketed with the release of Divinity 2: Original Sin. It struck gold with its combination of role-playing fun and devilishly organic combat.
Now the developer has been given the keys to the castle so pined-after by developers around the world - an official Dungeons and Dragons license and the long-awaited third entry in the Baldur's Gate franchise. Thankfully, it's rolled another critical hit.
The first two Baldur's Gate games are straightforwardly seminal in the canon of interactive roleplaying; enormous adventures that were different for each player that played them, with a large cast of memorable characters and storylines to sink into.
Baldur's Gate 2 might have come out all of 20 years ago, but gamers have been awaiting a third entry the whole time since, in hope rather than expectation. Giving the rights to Larian, after the screaming success of Divinity 2, was a decision that seemed so sensible that it was almost too good to be true.
The world of Dungeons and Dragons, the Forbidden Realms in which Baldur's Gate is in fact just one of many major cities, is one that Larian has been able to slip into pretty seamlessly.
Story-wise, things get off to a lively start with an absolutely bombastic opening cinematic that sets the scene aboard the tentacled ship of a Mindflayer, an unambiguously evil squid-face who's infected the player with a little brain tadpole.
[...]
Score 5/5:
Baldur's Gate 3 is an immediate pick as one of the best RPGs ever made, a ridiculously reactive and freeing narrative adventure. Version tested: PC
Pros - Engaging stories and characters - Lovely presentation - Incredibly reactive systems - Unbelievable replay value
Such is the nature of Baldur’s Gate 3 that a part of me wanted to begin writing about it within moments of my time with the game. Larian Studios’ epic CRPG has been in Early Access for years, but I’ve avoided all urges to check it out until now. I wanted my first taste of this long-awaited sequel to pertain to the full package. So much self-restraint, and yet even before Baldur’s Gate 3’s opening sequence had ended, I had mental notes aplenty. This is a game that comes out swinging.
Just after a truly creepy CG cutscene leaves its mark on you, Baldur’s Gate 3 sets you to the difficult yet highly rewarding task of creating your avatar, who shall serve as protagonist within the seemingly limitless confines of Larian’s adventure. Being only somewhat familiar with the myriad mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons, I elected to start with one of the premade origins - characters who will otherwise join your party as main companions. I chose Astarion, the suave, gray-haired vampire with a silky, sassy voice.
Baldur’s Gate 3 thrusts you straight into the action with what amounts to a three-pronged battle between the soldiers of a hellish realm, your nefarious mindflayer captors, and your own perilous escape efforts. The mindflayers’ ship - your former prison - will soon crash. Basic controls, the simplest of battle tactics, and a handful of dialogue options all kick in rather seamlessly despite the state of emergency.
[...]
It’s almost ridiculous, then, what’s been achieved here. Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t without its technical wrinkles, but it’s a full-fledged, fully fleshed-out, absolutely massive title with lofty production values across the board. That Larian Studios has intentionally willed something like this into the world at a time when AAA projects in this vein are so scarce only helps it shine, and serves as a fine reminder that the genre doesn’t need to transform, no matter what some publishers may believe - it just needs to adapt, to evolve, and to boldly present a compelling and cohesive vision all its own. And be thought-provoking. And have witty banter. And look really pretty. And let us get told off by territorial squirrels.
Larian posted a new community update on Baldur's Gate 3, showing some statistics:
Community Update #23: Here's To You
Hello, everyone!
During the launch weekend, you played a combined 1225 years of Baldur’s Gate 3 – almost as long as it took to make it. And 368 of you managed to finish it within that 3-day weekend. We salute you.
We’re about to enter the second weekend of launch, and thanks to you, it’s looking like it might be a big one. Last Thursday, we released Baldur’s Gate 3 in its final form (give or take a few hotfixes), and since, you’ve taken it into the top 10 all-time most concurrent players on Steam, and according to this Tweet, accounted for 28% of all player time on Steam last Sunday.
As we continue to look forward, releasing hotfixes and working toward our first serious patch, we also decided to look backwards this week. We’ve cooked up some statistics highlighting data from the opening weekend following launch and prepared a handy infographic outlining player choices, actions, deaths, and the like. Some inspiration as we head into our second weekend, if you will.
93% of you decided that your first journey through Baldur’s Gate 3 will be with a custom character, which included the Dark Urge. You spent a combined 88 years in Character Creation to craft your Tavs. Perfection!
For those of you who decided to play as one of our Origin characters, Gale was the number one choice, which is funny because he’s also the seventh highest cause of death out of any other cause of death. Speaking of death, one NPC was shoved into a chasm for every player at our peak concurrent player count – roughly 815,000.
We know you’re dying to know race and class split. The majority of you rolled half-elves, with the least popular (somewhat surprisingly) being the githyanki. Kaincha!
Redglyph spotted a new hotfix for Baldur's Gate 3:
Hotfix #2 Now Live!
Version Number: 4.1.1.3630146
Hello everyone,
Over the weekend, Baldur’s Gate 3 hit over 800,000 concurrent players on Steam – a number that surpassed our wildest expectations. Thank you for getting BG3 in the 10 most popular games of all time on Steam! It means the world to us, and we’ll continue to read and watch everything over the coming weeks.
That said, there’s work to be done on the road to the PlayStation 5 launch on September 6, and we’re busy working away on squashing some of the remaining bugs and issues that have come up since launch. We’ve got a new hotfix for you this week, addressing almost 300 crashes, blockers, and bugs. We saw a video floating around on the internet this week of… an unintentional gnome sorcerer wardrobe malfunction, and have kindly asked them to cover up while descending into the Underdark.
As ever, thank you to everyone who has taken the time to report these issues to us. Please reach out to our support team if you run into trouble.
CRASHES AND BLOCKERS
Fixed an issue causing you to get stuck in dialogue.
Fixed a potential crash when reloading a savegame made mid-dialogue.
Fixed being unable to enter the Shadowfell if you saved while the prompt was on screen.
Fixed a crash caused by the UI.
Fixed a potential crash when saving while standing on a surface during combat or in Turn-Based Mode.
Fixed a rare blocker when loading a savegame made in camp that would cause a party member to spawn outside of camp.
Fixed a potential crash when choosing to stop listening in on a dialogue.
Fixed a potential crash when applying dye to an item outside of the inventory or through non-conventional means, such as the Reward panel.
Fixed a potential multiplayer crash when the client touches the transponder on the nautiloid and leaves the party, and then the host tries to open Party View.
Fixed a potential crash caused by the game trying to load the Character Creation UI when you are no longer in Character Creation.
Fixed a potential crash related to the tooltips of items that grant skill advantages but don't have an owner.
Baldur's Gate 3 - "We Haven't Started on an Expansion"
by Silver, 05:14
PC Gamer interviewed Swen Vincke and asked him about an expansion to Baldur's Gate 3. Perhaps unsurprisingly its not looking likely.
"Honestly, we haven't started on an expansion," Vincke said in an interview with PC Gamer on Monday.
Vincke said that he would find it "very hard" to make an adventure that takes players from level 12 to level 20, because in D&D, those levels start awarding players with godlike powers. For example, some of D&D's highest level spells include things like:
Astral projection, letting you mosey around the astral plane
Foresight, letting you literally see into the future and gain advantage on rolls while enemies gain disadvantage (because you know what they're going to do)
Power Word Kill, a spell that just makes any creature with less than 100 HP immediately die
Wish, which is just as powerful and open-ended as it sounds
"[Level 12-20] adventures require a different way of doing things, in terms of antagonists you're going to have to deal with, which require a lot of development to do them properly," Vincke said. "Which would make this much more than an expansion in terms of development effort. A lot of D&D adventures are sub-level 12 for precisely that reason. So it sounds like neat, easy expansion material until you start thinking about it and it's not as easy as one would imagine."
Role-playing games come and go, and there's no shortage of incredible releases in the genre (even this year alone). However, Baldur's Gate 3 from Larian Studios is so much more. It offers complex yet creative combat and excellent characters. From the dialogue and pacing to the customization and quest design, every aspect of Baldur's Gate 3 is honed to near perfection. The visuals are gorgeous and the soundtrack stellar, while the sheer length and breadth of the experience offer extensive replay value. Baldur's Gate 3 is a must-play RPG, even with minor bugs and technical issues.
Learn more about the Baldur’s Gate 3 characters Lae’zel and Shadowheart on NME:
‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ actors discuss Lae’zel, Shadowheart, and advice for new players
Devora Wilde and Jennifer English told NME about their performances four years in the making
Jennifer English and Devora Wilde, the actors behind two of Baldur’s Gate 3‘s main characters, recently sat down with NME to discuss their roles in Larian Studios‘ upcoming fantasy game.
While English stars as Shadowheart, a mysterious Cleric, Wilde plays a Githyanki Fighter named Lae’zel. Shadowheart and Lae’zel are two of Baldur’s Gate 3‘s origin characters, meaning fans can either play as them directly or recruit them to their party while playing as someone else.
For Wilde, the role of Lae’zel felt special for several reasons: the amount of time she’s spent with the character, Lae’zel’s depth, and the sheer size of the Dungeons & Dragons universe that Baldur’s Gate 3 is set in.
“This isn’t a little vignette,” agreed English. “This is huge, and it’s not just in a linear way. It’s huge in a ‘we’ve got a bazillion different endings’ kind of way!”
Over the years, Wilde and English have watched their characters grow through the developer’s narrative team. English revealed that Shadowheart became “a lot more three-dimensional and subtle” as fan feedback informed Larian’s writing, while Wilde was reluctantly tight-lipped about twists in Lae’zel’s journey.
While Lae’zel can be standoffish and blunt, Shadowheart has a habit of keeping secrets from her party — and although they’re forced to cooperate to escape their Mind Flayer captors at the start of the game, the pair are often at odds with each other.
Review: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ stands as a testament to incredible game design, even if it has a few bugs
You don't need a wisdom check to know that 'Baldur's Gate III' is a formidable front runner for game of the year.
If you’ve been keeping up with news about Baldur’s Gate III, I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors of jealous devs begging players not to use it as a benchmark for future games. As hilarious as that sounds, after logging close to two dozen hours over the past few days, I can understand why. Baldur’s Gate III sets the new gold standard for RPGs. That’s not to say that it’s pristinely polished, has no bugs, and will never leave you frustrated by quirks that have come to define a generation of gaming, but it does everything else so well that you have no recourse but to let them slide.
From the very first moments, Baldur’s Gate III cinematics leave nothing to be desired. They are crisp and clean, dripping with realism, and were clearly lovingly crafted by some incredibly talented animators. Some fantasy nay-sayers may be unimpressed by the heavy reliance on classic fantasy tropes, but developer Larian Studios has crafted them in a way that hasn’t been seen before. Seriously, the premise for the game is like a love child between high fantasy, Lovecraftian lore, and The X-Files. In spite of its reliance on well-worn fantasy tropes, Baldur’s Gate III weaves them into a picture we haven’t seen before and does so with more pizzazz than an inspired bard.
[...]
Baldur’s Gate III is stunning in every way. It’s exactly the threat that its devs thought it would be. Its storytelling is vivid and morally grey (for the most part), with each decision negatively impacting someone, whether it be you, your companions, a neighboring town, or a passel of refugees — any way you split it, someone is going to die. And when they do, there’s a good chance they had a name, a story you never got to hear, and a close friend who’ll shout their name. If you love turn-based games, this one is for you. If you love fantasy, it’s for you. If you are even remotely curious about either of these genres, Baldur’s Gate III is for you. Hell, even if you aren’t interested in those things, do yourself a favor and pick it up. It’ll be worth it just to see a masterpiece in action.
Score: 4.5/5 - FANTASTIC
An excellent follow-up to its decades-old predecessor, 'Baldur's Gate III' sets a new gold standard for RPGs in the modern age. Though it has its fair share of buggy problems, the vibrant world, intriguing storytelling, and captivating gameplay more than make up for its shortcomings.
Six years in the making and more than twenty years in the waiting, we can finally say this:
Baldur’s Gate 3 is out now on PC!
It's time to gather your party and venture forth. Make sure you're sufficiently prepared with our tips for ensuring a smooth transition from Early Access to release. If you have questions or run into issues, check the FAQ below or contact our support team.
Look for more updates from us in the coming days, but for now, here's a message from our founder & creative director, Swen Vincke.
It’s hard to express how much love went into creating Baldur’s Gate 3. For over six years, more than 400 of us poured our hearts and souls into making this, helped by over 2.5 million Early Access players who spent countless hours giving us feedback.
The result is a beautiful, rich universe where you can escape from your daily worries, experience adventure and wonder, and have many many cool and exciting encounters. It’s a place where your identity and choices matter, where surprise lies around every corner, and where your agency is truly rewarded.
I’m super proud of what our team accomplished and I hope you will have an incredible amount of fun exploring what we prepared for you.
Baldur's Gate 3 will be released today - be prepared:
Baldur’s Gate 3: Preparing for Launch
Hey everyone!
We are ONE DAY away from the release of Baldur’s Gate 3, so we hope your hearts are ready for adventure and your eyeballs are primed for tadpoling.
Many of you have been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 since the start of Early Access, all the way back in 2020. You may have accumulated a backlog of old save games, or even a few mods along the way. Even if you’re a first-time player, there’s information here that will be useful to you.
To make sure you’re prepared for the journey ahead, we strongly recommend you take the following steps before venturing forth.
1. Delete your in-game Early Access Saves We’ve taken measures to ensure a smooth transition into the launch version of BG3, but we still recommend deleting your in-game Early Access save files if you still have access to an Early Access version of the game.
Your Early Access saves and player profiles aren’t compatible with the release version of Baldur’s Gate 3, and leaving them in your save folders may in some fringe cases cause issues. Note: simply deleting the game’s save folder may create conflicts when either Steam Cloud or Larian Cloud re-downloads the save files.
Open Baldur’s Gate 3.
On the main menu, click Load Game.
Click through old campaigns and select Delete Campaign.
This method will ensure your saves are deleted from your computer as well as from the cloud.
We know it can be hard to say goodbye: if you want to back up your saves before removing them from the cloud, you can move them from %LocalAppData%\Larian Studios to another location for safekeeping, before removing them.
2. Uninstall the Early Access version Having the Early Access version of Baldur’s Gate 3 installed will not speed up your download of the full game, and could affect your installation of the full game. Due to the game being in Early Access, we’re unable to offer pre-loads, as this would break existing Early Access saves. To uninstall:
In the Steam client, open your Steam Library.
Right click Baldur’s Gate 3.
From the menu that appears, select Manage -> Uninstall.
3. Delete your Mods Existing mods will not be compatible with the release version of Baldur’s Gate 3, and will cause issues or break the game in unpredictable ways.
After uninstalling the game, check your Baldur’s Gate 3 installation folder and your AppData folder for Baldur’s Gate 3 to ensure there are no remaining folders for mods.
If you use a mod installer like the Vortex Mod Manager from Nexus, make sure you also uninstall the mods in the mod manager to ensure they aren’t automatically re-downloaded.
For mod-related troubleshooting, check out our Mod Information support page.
4. Install BG3 on an SSD A solid-state drive (SSD) is highly recommended to play Baldur’s Gate 3, and we recommend you install the game on yours. It’s good practice to make sure you have more space on the drive than is needed.
5. Update your graphics card drivers Updating to the latest graphics card drivers will help with compatibility and performance of the game.
6. Refer to the launch FAQ If you have any problems launching BG3 when we switch to the final version of the game on August 3rd, we’ll have an FAQ accessible from the launcher that will detail some of what we believe may be the most likely problems, with solutions.
Outside of the above, our support teams will be happy to assist you with any problems, but we sincerely hope you have fun with the final version of Baldur’s Gate 3!
Baldur’s Gate 3 Final Q&A – Larian on Origin vs Custom Characters, Rule Changes, Crossplay and More
If this article were a meme, it would begin with the notorious Titanic-based animated image to lament that fans have been waiting an incredibly long time for Baldur's Gate 3. The expansion to the second installment, Throne of Bhaal, landed on June 22nd, 2001. In the ensuing twenty-two years, gamers only received more or less middling spin-offs.
[...]
You once said you planned to make custom characters as interesting as Origin characters in Baldur's Gate 3, unlike Divinity: Original Sin 2. How did you go about doing that in the final version of the game?
As a custom character in Baldur’s Gate 3, there’s a lot more reactivity based on the identity you’ve built than there was in Divinity: Original Sin 2.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game of perspectives, so you can look at the story through the lens of a character you’ve created yourself with an identity and appearance of your choosing, but we also give you some preset characters who come with identities and appearances (which we call Origin characters). With the Dark Urge, we’ve provided an Origin character who you can also customize the identity of. It’s really down to how you’d prefer to play and interact with the characters and the world around you.
It was recently confirmed that it is possible to respec a companion's class. How will that affect their personal storylines, though? For example, I imagine Wyll won't have to deal with Mizora anymore if he's not a Warlock.
The set narrative of the Origin’s story will be the same, even if you respec. Using Wyll as an example, if you make him into a wizard or even a paladin, in his background he’ll always be a Warlock who made a pact with a demon.
The difference narratively is that Wyll would gain the reactivity of the class he’s respecced into – so if he’s a wizard now and you get into a conversation as Wyll, he’ll have dialogue options that reflect that he’s a wizard.
The interview with Multiplayer.it raised some questions with regard to the changes you're making compared to the core ruleset. For example, can you clarify the tweaks applied to multiclassing caster classes? Some fans are worried they might lead to overpowered characters unless martial classes are also allowed to stack extra attacks when multiclassing.
When multiclassing, the levels of your classes and subclasses that normally have access to spell slots are added together in a weighted formula, and then the overall spellcasting level is used to determine how many and which levels of spell slots you will receive.
Warlocks are an exception here in that they only get their fixed-level spell slots.
Friends Per Second interviewed Swen Vincke about Baldur's Gate 3:
Baldur’s Gate 3 boss on Xbox Series S and “Redefining The RPG” I Friends Per Second Episode #26
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro 08:36 Lucy and Jirard’s experience at SDCC 25:05 Swen Vincke from Larian for Baldur’s Gate 3! 01:03:25 News and Updates O1:29:09 New Releases 01:56:12 User Question 02:06:46 This Week in The Way Back 02:13:44 Wrap Up
Kotaku and Fextralife present the Baldur's Gate 3 character creator:
Baldur's Gate 3 Aims For RPG Fans' Ultimate Character Creator
In an exclusive interview with Kotaku, Larian runs through how Baldur’s Gate 3’s expansive character creator came to be
Baldur’s Gate 3’s character creator is incredibly expansive. Larian Studios has described it as a tool for players to build their ideal fantasy protagonist, but before it could be that, the Belgian studio needed it to serve a different purpose: filling the RPG’s world with unique, believable civilians.
In an interview with Kotaku, lead character artist Alena Dubrovina walked us through nearly every aspect of Baldur’s Gate 3’s suite of character customization options, and despite its impressive breadth, each variation of the RPG’s hero I saw still looked like a deliberately crafted individual on which every scar, piece of jewelry, or hairstyle looked tailor-made for their face, whether they were a human, a reptilian Dragonborn, or any of the game’s numerous other races. According to Dubrovina, a lot of that precision comes from Larian making these options for its team more so than for the players who will inhabit these characters when the game launches on August 3.
[...]
BG3 Character Creation GUIDE - Races, Classes... Genitals... and MORE!
WolfheartFPS talks about the Illithid skill tree in Baldur's Gate 3. There are some skippable spoilers, but if you'd rather not know about this (illicit?) feature until the release, you should skip the video entirely:
Baldur's Gate 3 Has a NEW SKILL TREE? (Potential Spoiler)
Eurogamer interviewed Swen Vincke on Baldur's Gate 3, and Larian's past, present and future:
Larian on signing Baldur's Gate 3, approaching a new era, and games you've never heard about
Past, present and future.
I saw sides to Baldur's Gate 3 last week - at an event for the launch version of the game (due 3rd August on PC) - I didn't realise were there. I saw the game transform into a horror not far removed from Silent Hill, in an eerie Victorian-style hospital where nurses with rotten faces cooed around a grotesque surgeon who had scalpels for fingers and torture on his mind. I saw the game revel in gore through a headline-grabbing Dark Urge origin players can choose to play with, although it's not recommended for first-timers because, at certain points, The Dark Urge will take over your character and make you do horrendous things that will change your playthrough irrevocably. Seriously; I offed a major companion at the beginning of the game and that's it for me now - they're dead forever. I loved it.
I loved it for many reasons but primarily because it reminded me there's still so much we don't know about Baldur's Gate 3, despite it having been available in early access for nearly three years now. We've only ever seen one act, and there are two more. There's the darker second act I mentioned above, and the climactic third act in the eponymous city of Baldur's Gate - a place so dense with systems it's got its own newspaper that reacts to you. Its headlines will depend on your actions there, and in some cases, even the interviews you give.
Baldur's Gate 3 always seems to have a surprise ready. It's a box of chocolates that never seems to run out. And this speaks to the colossal project it's been. I'm always surprised when I'm reminded how many people have worked on it - around 400 people. To put that into perspective, Divinity: Original Sin, released in 2014, was made with fewer than 50 people. It's been nearly a decade of extraordinary success and growth for Belgian company Larian, which now has studios all around the world.
Larian is on the cusp of a new era, I believe. Baldur's Gate 3 will, if all things go to plan, make it one of the most well-known role-playing game studios on the planet. It will stand alongside the BioWares and the CD Projekt Reds and the Bethesda Game Studios of the world.
It's with the studio on the precipice that I sat down with Larian founder Swen Vincke at the event, for a long and candid conversation about the studio's history and the origins of the Baldur's Gate 3. And, of course, where it goes from here.
Eurogamer: How are you feeling in the build up to launch, and do you always feel this way or does it feel different this time?
Swen Vincke: Um, nervous, excited.
What are you nervous about?
It's a very big game so it keeps on surprising us. It has its own quirks and eccentricities, at both a development level and at a gameplay level. We'll be very surprised what players are going to do with it, and I'm just hoping everything's going to work, so this is probably my biggest worry.
But also very proud because what the team's accomplished is insane. When you look at it, how everything interweaves with one another, it's a thing of beauty.
I can see how proud you are of it when you're demoing it. Is there something in particular you're most proud of?
That it works.
We wanted to marry a cinematic, triple-A RPG with systemic freedom, which is basically the two things that we've always been trying to do, but never at this scale, never at this level. The fact that we managed to do this is really an achievement.
You can see that the team is at the peak of its craft, and they've been training for a long time, building up to this. They're a very, very talented team, and together they've done something - it's a big leap for us and it shows.
Something the industry talks more openly about now is crunch, and we see it particularly in the lead up to a game's release. Are you crunching?
We're certainly doing overtime as we're getting close to release.
Is that just another word for crunch?
Well no, because it's not as if people are sitting in the office on the weekends. There's a couple of us now, but that's not been the story of the last months for us.
Now, definitely, in this last month towards release, things are tenser because it's just a lot of stuff that has to come together, and it's very hard to do that nine-to-five. But until a couple of months ago, I think the average [overtime] was ten or twenty minutes, or something like that.
It's typically always the same teams. It's going to be code because there's stuff that just pops up. Content is done, it's not that we're still creating - well, there's some things, there's touch-ups and stuff like that. But this is not the same [situation] we had in the past. For previous games, we crunched definitely much more than we did now.
Do you actively guard against crunch - are you on the lookout for it?
I think the team as a whole guards against it, but necessity sometimes happens. It's the unforeseens, it's the things that you don't expect. When you have this much content, things go awry at places where you don't expect them, and at certain moments, you don't have any choice any more, where you have to say, 'OK well we need to do this otherwise we're not going to manage - we don't have any other options on this.'
So there is certainly that happening, but not to the levels... My parents had a restaurant and in the summer, you work longer, and then in winter, you don't. We have some accidents and then we have to work to fix them, but it's very limited.
A malevolent new Origin character. A disembowelled video game producer. A night of passion with a bear.
What a way to go out!
Thank you so much for joining us last week at Panel From Hell: Release Showcase, our final big show before launch.
As you saw for yourself, Baldur’s Gate 3 is going to be a truly deep, systemic RPG with a story and world that is yours to mould. No two playthroughs will be the same, and that even goes for those of you who have clocked a few hundred hours in Early Access.
Act 1 makes up less than a quarter of the total content that will be available at launch. And compared to the start of Early Access, even Act 1 has roughly 33% more content in it. Much has changed, a lot has been added, and we’re finally at a place where we’re happy with the fidelity and performance of the game.
Today’s update will explore those new features: fresh Character Creation options, Multiclassing, a malevolent new playable Origin character, crowds who gossip and react to your deeds, the introduction of Alchemy, and much more. If you’re here, we’re assuming you’ve played Early Access. If you’re new to the game and you’re looking for a broader overview of what Baldur’s Gate 3 will be at launch, we’re working on a separate video. Stay tuned for that later in the month.
Your Character Creation Toolbox Is Getting Bigger
Our Character Creator has evolved in many ways since we first launched in Early Access, but our philosophy behind it has always remained the same.
To forge a legacy, you need an identity. Character identity is at the centre of Baldur’s Gate 3, and making a character is about more than aesthetic choices. You are defining your identity, making decisions about your protagonist that will impact your experience in the game.
Whether your protagonist be hero, villain, or Ed Sharran, a simple bard travelling the roads of Faerûn with his trusty lute and a barely-concealed inner darkness that gnaws and festers, demanding release – the Character Creator provides a lot of room for expression.
Our Character Creator has been updated over the course of development to include a robust selection of hairstyles, highlights, skin tones, and faces. But at launch, you’ll have the chance to experiment with even more ways to create diverse, personalised characters.
New skin options like freckles and vitiligo will soon be available, alongside new tattoo designs, scars, lip makeup customisation, accessories like piercings, and horn colour customisation for Tieflings. In 1.0, we’re also introducing heterochromia, letting you create David Bowie – uh, characters with different-coloured eyes.
And at long last, we are very happy to announce we are introducing an age slider and – for those wanting to know if they can have a Halsin-sized buff Barbarian – strong body types, allowing for larger body sizes across all genders.
Craft Your Destiny: Forge A Bespoke Class With Multiclassing
Whether you are an experimenter at heart who forges class hybrids through careful consideration or you just can't decide between a warrior and a mage, we’re excited to finally announce that Multiclassing will be coming to Baldur's Gate 3.
PC Gamer reports that character resetting is possible in Baldur's Gate 3:
Baldur's Gate 3 will let you respec your characters: 'We want the players to really experiment with what is possible'
Larian confirmed that respec is on during today’s BG3 livestream.
Baldur's Gate 3 has a lot going on, and that applies to character classes and subclasses as much as anything else. That kind of choice can be intimidating, especially when the unknowable consequences of a poor decision has the potential to leave you unhappy (or straight-up screwed) 40 hours in. The good news for anyone worried about being hung up by a bad call is that developer Larian Studios has confirmed that players will be able to respec their characters if they want to.
"We wanted to avoid players having to restart the whole game, because it's a very heavy narrative experience," Larian's Nick Pechenin said during today's livestream. "There's a character you might meet—you will most likely meet—that will allow you reset your class, and reinvest all of the levels."
And it's not just about recovering from mistakes in character creation. Support for multiclassing in Baldur's Gate 3 will enable players to mix up classes pretty much as they like—if you've ever wanted to be a berserker-bard, here's your chance. Multiclass characters can be extremely powerful, but they can also be, well, the opposite of that. Pechenin said support for respeccing gives players an opportunity to be really creative with their builds, because if their cool idea turns out to be not so cool after all (like, say, a berserker-bard), they've got an escape hatch.
Baldur's Gate 3 preview: the closest we've ever come to a full simulation of D&D
You'll never see everything that Baldur's Gate 3 has to offer – just as it should be
This heist has gone very wrong, very quickly, much to the embarrassment of Baldur's Gate 3 game director Sven Vincke. Two guards have remained stalwart at their posts, so the plan to create a distraction with one character and stroll through the bank's open doors with another has resolutely failed. Now, a chaotic battle is unfolding on multiple fronts. In the end, it's a combination of a poisonous cloud, a resilient panther, and a couple of sly teleportation spells that get the party into the vault.
The initial plan was genius, albeit heavily rehearsed. Splitting his Wizard from the party, Vincke multi-classed to take advantage of a Sorcerer ability; Metamagic lets you augment the range of spells, and now his Wizard can fly three times as far as he could before – far enough to reach the roof of the bank he's targeting. From there, a Scroll of Gaseous Form lets him travel through the building's pipes and into the bank's offices.
After that, the aim was to lead every guard in the building on a merry dance, leaving the vaults undefended. If it had been a success, it would have been a perfect realization of the strengths that D&D systems have brought to Baldur's Gate 3. As it is, it's still a pitch-perfect encapsulation of the chaos that unfurls when even a single dice roll doesn't go your way.
Larian has posted a community update on Baldur's Gate 3. The next events are: Panel from Hell on 7 July, PC game release on 3 August, and PS5 release on 6 September:
Community Update #20: A Dragonborn, a Half-Orc & a Monk Walk Into a Tavern
Where to begin.
This week has seen you take to the streets of the Lower City as amateur sleuths in Blood in Baldur’s Gate, a community murder mystery to uncover the hidden darkness that lurks just beneath the city's surface. Where will the investigation lead? Keep digging, detectives, you’re leading us all to the Panel From Hell, where untold surprises await you: July 7th.
In the meantime, it’s time to talk about Baldur’s Gate 3. But not as you know it. We’re going to go in depth about some of our most-anticipated details: races & classes (we see you Ctrl+F Dragonborn), new Origins and Companion characters, the official level cap, new Difficulty Settings, and much, much more.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has been a game nearly 6 years in development. When Divinity: Original Sin 2 launched, we were 120 people, across a 3 year development. Now we’re 400. Since releasing in Early Access, we’ve been joined by nearly 2 million of you. Together, with your invaluable support, we’ve created a game that eclipses the depth & breadth of our previous RPGs.
We’ve over doubled DOS2’s five races, bringing 11 to life in BG3 with 31 subraces.
DOS2’s 10 ‘schools of spells’ is eclipsed by the 12 classes & 46 subclasses in BG3.
You caused chaos with the 225 player spells & actions in DOS2, so just imagine the havoc you’re about to unleash upon Faerûn with the over 600 spells & actions, excluding upcasts, in BG3.
Characters in DOS2 enjoyed 45 talents, against BG3’s 308 passive features, which are comparable to talents.
There’s a lot more where that came from, but this is already going to be a long one. We’ve been busy. We’ve grown, and so too has Baldur’s Gate 3. Let’s get into a little detail about what you can expect to see in the Panel From Hell: Release Showcase, just in time for the release of the game on August 3rd for PC, and September 6th for PS5.
YOU READ THAT RIGHT
We will be releasing the game in order of platform readiness. Baldur’s Gate 3 will first come to PC on August 3rd, before launching on PlayStation 5 a few weeks later on September 6th.
Return to Baldur's Gate for the first time in 20 years as the city prepares for war Our goggles are on, our posture is aerodynamic; like a gnome hurled through the air by a barbarian with a mean overhead throw, Baldur’s Gate 3 is rapidly hurtling toward launch.
This weekend, we unveiled the city of Baldur's Gate for the very first time, with a glimpse behind its walls and around its familiar labyrinthine streets. It's been about 20 years since we last had a pint in the Elfsong Tavern or crawled through the sewers beneath the city streets and, as you might have spotted during the PC Gaming Show, many of these locations are back, and many news ones are waiting to be discovered for the first time - giving you a chance to explore the menacing roads of the Outer City, the opulent estates of the Upper City, and the dark alleys and pubs of the Lower City.
But the Baldur's Gate that we've built is a lot more than faithful geography. As a modern adaptation of an iconic fantasy setting, this city couldn’t be a mere backdrop. It needed to feel more like a complex organism: alive, changeable, and interconnected. Your journey, and your story, has been heading in this direction since the start of the game. You’ve finally arrived.
Welcome To Baldur's Gate
Though your journey hasn’t been easy, you arrive at a city preparing for war. As the Steel Watch patrols Baldur’s Gate’s labyrinthian streets, the printing press prepares the daily news cycle. There are factions within the city vying for control, all disagreeing on what to make of outside threats, and new faces within the city walls. Opportunity in times of struggle is rife. What you make of it, and what it makes of you, will be determined by your choices up to the city walls, and beyond their shadow.
We’ve built a truly next-gen fantasy city, and upped the stakes. Our latest trailer gives you a sense of that scale, showing rolling vistas of grand buildings that recede into the horizon, boisterous docks with harbours thick with ships, and lively town centres populated with over a thousand individual characters. You can explore all of it.
On cobbled streets, bustling crowds go about their day, each one with a story to unravel, a secret to uncover, or a personal reaction to be stirred. Peer further down those steep hills and you might spot a distant bell tower that you can climb for a panoramic view of the city. Make a wrong turn to the visiting circus and explore your deep-seated clown phobia. Or you could case the local inn, where sinister rumours lurk in secret back rooms. In short, Baldur's Gate is your oyster. It is its own vast, complex organism inside of a game already filled with opportunities for exploration. What your role is within it is entirely up to you.
[...]
Baldur’s Gate 3 - Official Behind-The-Scenes Trailer
@Wccftech The Summer Games Fest has brought news from Larian about Baldur's Gate 3.
At Summer Game Fest 2023, Larian Studios revealed that award-winning actor Jason Isaacs (known primarily as Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies, although he was also featured in many other high-profile films and TV shows like Mass and Star Trek: Discovery) will play one of the main antagonists in Baldur's Gate 3.
Larian have announced that Baldur's Gate 3 will be releasing August 31st.
What’s it called when the long-awaited third installment in a beloved RPG series finally gets a proper release day announcement? That’s Baldur’s Date. š
Earlier today we unveiled a brand new gameplay and story trailer during Sony’s State of Play livestream. Fret not, our PC-focused friends, as you will still want to see this trailer:
'Twas the night of the update, and the snow drifted freely As we printed out liability waivers ahead of killing Geoff Keighley Dunked a Druid in gravy, added flour to thicken Now we'll finally find out if roast Wildshapes taste like chicken'
Yes, dear readers, that magical time of year is upon us once again. Chestnuts are roasting over open fires, hearts are brimming with good tidings, and Geoff Keighley is combusting on our set from the violent heat of a Level 5 Fireball spell. It can only mean one thing: it’s Patch Day!
Patch #9: Holy Knight is now live!
Patch #9 is our final major update before our August 2023 launch as we put the finishing touches on BG3. This community-inspired update is a direct response to your feedback, and brings some of your most requested features and changes to Baldur’s Gate 3. We’ve boosted the level cap, revamped our Reactions System, unlocked Flying and unveiled a long-awaited playable class: Paladins, along with many other new additions, tweaks and fixes. Streaming live from the jolliest place on Earth – Belgium – today’s Panel From Hell gives you a first look at all this new content in action.
Coming hot off the heels of our trailer reveal at last week’s TGAs, Larian’s Christmas From Hell revealed Matt Mercer as the voice of Minsc, peeled the wrapping off the new Baldur’s Gate 3 Collector’s Edition – available for pre-order now! – and saw the return of Geoff Keighley as host, followed by his death and swift resurrection; a Christmas miracle.
The Game Awards trailer announced the launch month for Baldur's Gate 3 and showed some familiar faces.
Check out a brand-new trailer for Baldur’s Gate 3 that aired during The Game Awards giving us a look at some familiar faces, some legendary faces including Minsc's reveal, as well as the game’s namesake city of Baldur’s Gate. Baldur’s Gate III officially launches in August 2023.
Like a team of infernal reindeer, the next major update for Baldur’s Gate 3 is coming in for a smooth yuletide landing — yes, new features will be live before the year is out, accompanied by a festive Panel From Hell that will give you a peek at what’s to come in 2023!
In the Community Update accompanying that Panel From Hell, we’ll go into detail about some of the most discussed topics in the community. The good news is that we’re on track for release in 2023 – and we’ll have more on that in December. Acts 2 and 3 of the story are being actively playtested to ensure they’re up to the same level of polish and you’ll soon discover that there’s much more in the works (or already complete) than what you’ll encounter in an Early Access playthrough. Our goal is for even the players who have repeated Act 1 over and over again for hundreds of hours to feel like there’s a whole new experience in store for them at launch.
We're still paying close attention to all your feedback, bug reports, comments, your fan art and jokes – they sustain us, so please keep them coming or we will grow desperate and you’ll discover us consuming pigs’ blood in the middle of a Belgian motorway like a certain vampire spawn. Whatever it takes to get the game out, you know?
In all seriousness though, it takes time to tell a great story, implement feedback, and iterate on such a large game, so we want to thank you for your patience as we get closer to Patch 9.
We’ll see you in December – the dress code is “Christmas from Hell”. šš
Behind the Scenes: Motion Capture
We’ve just opened up a new, dedicated motion capture space in Guildford, so while we have you here and we’re telling you things, we thought we’d give you a little peek behind the betentacled curtain into one of the most important tools in our storytelling arsenal: our motion capture tech.
A typical day at work at Larian Quebec
We have been working with motion capture for years, with mocap-ready studio spaces constructed at our offices in Ghent, Kuala Lumpur, Quebec and Dublin.
Having multiple locations has meant that each team could be empowered to try out new ideas, experimenting upon and refining animations without having to wait for another studio to come online. Having spaces across the globe also meant we could capture data anytime over the 24 hour period, allowing for continuous development.
The full release of Baldur's Gate 3 is planned for 2023:
Baldur's Gate 3 - The Journey So Far | D&D Direct
loading...
A look back at the journey so far in Baldur's Gate 3 Early Access. Join the Baldur’s Gate 3 today. The game continues to get better and better, with a planned full release in 2023.
PC Gamer have interviewed Swen Vincke about Baldur's Gate 3.
Larian Studios always goes all-in. After nearly bankrupting itself to make Divinity: Original Sin, Larian tripled in size to pull off an ambitious sequel, growing to around 150 developers. With one of the best RPGs of the decade under its belt, Larian then set out to make Baldur's Gate 3. A year in pre-production let them build out estimates of how much work this even more ambitious game would take, hiring developers to work on fancy cinematics Divinity didn't have. "We thought we had it all figured out. We even estimated how big we'd have to become," said Larian founder Swen Vincke.
They were wrong.
"I never expected us to be 400 people to make BG3," Vincke told me. "Nobody expected it. But it's literally what we needed to do it. We had a choice. There was a moment where we started understanding what we needed to do to make this game. We thought we understood. Then we actually really understood. And so we had two choices: we could scale it down, or we could scale ourselves up. And so we chose to scale ourselves up."
[...]
Larian's currently working on Baldur's gate itself, building out the city, and also filling out D&D's spell library and implementing its remaining classes. Then there's time-consuming polish, which is why he announced that Baldur's Gate 3 won't be fully finished until 2023.
"This is a very specific niche of game where you have a lot of narrative with a lot of systems coming together," he said. "If your agency is [limited], you're guided down the routes, you're not gonna be happy when you're playing it. It breaks the entire thing. The problem is the only alternative is just, fuuuuck, you need to cover it all. But we figured it out, and we're doing it.
Patch 7 for Baldur's Gate 3 is now available which introduces UI changes and the Barbarian class most notably.
What do you get when you combine live goblins, a robust throwing-arm, and the laws of gravity? A sternly-worded letter to Larian about goblin cruelty. But you also get a description of how best to use the new Improvised weapon mechanic coming to Baldur’s Gate 3.
Look on my eight-pack, ye mighty and despair.
Yes, we’re happy to announce the first major update of the year is right around the corner, and we’re going big on melee combat. Patch #7 brings with it an influx of new ways to play - from fresh melee combat mechanics, to new weapons, to a rowdy new melee class!
But that’s just a taste of what’s to come in Baldur’s Gate 3 this month. This update also brings a slew of upgrades and improvements, with our patch notes totalling 12-full pages - each page lovingly typed by tireless fingers for your viewing pleasure. We’ve improved stealth gameplay with better lighting detection, overhauled the HUD UI with a more streamlined design, polished nearly 700 cinematics, mocapped new spell-casting animations, and sorted out Shadowheart’s weird ponytail - just to name a few.
Today let’s take a closer look at what’s to come. So slip into your finest loincloth, crack those knuckles, and we’ll dig right in.
Unleash your fury: A new Barbarian class comes to Baldur’s Gate
Merciless in the heat of battle, fueled by nature’s fury, and boasting chaos energy louder than a thousand reality TV stars combined: Barbarians are the latest class to join Baldur's Gate 3.
These brutal warriors hail from the wilds of Faerûn, but they feel most at home at the center of combat where they can channel their inner Rage to unlock devastating actions. When a Barbarian is enraged, they gain extra buffs, bonuses, and attacks - boosting the damage they lay down and halving the physical damage they take. But in order to reach this state, they must first spend a Rage Charge.
Barbarians have three charges at their disposal by the time they reach Level 3. Once enraged, they need to do damage or receive damage in order to keep their Rage going for another turn. Lose this Rage, however, and the perks that it generates disappear. Mastery of Barbarian combat is therefore all about maintaining your Rage and sustaining it for as long as possible by hitting or being hit every turn.
So what does a Barbarian do when they want to feed their rage but their friends are hogging all the combat on the other side of the battlefield? They simply jumpstart that Barbarian temper. One way to do this is through your Tadpole power Endless Rage. This ability deals 1d4 Psychic Damage to the Barbarian for 10 consecutive turns, ensuring Rage stays activated for the duration. In turn, Barbarians will also inflict an additional 1d4 Damage to enemies when using their melee weapons - making them even more ferocious in combat.
And remember, Barbarians: When in need, you can always recruit a friendly companion for a strategic thwacking. It's as easy as ABC (Allies can Bash you Continuously).
Larian has posted a pre-patch announcement (patch 7) for Baldur's Gate 3 which hints at a new class reveal.
Pre-Patch Announcement
Hello, everyone! We hope you’re all keeping well.
It has been a whole festive period since we’ve spoken. We’ve not been resting on our yule logs, though. Patch 7 is almost here, and we’re so excited for you to play it we could explode. That isn’t necessarily a hint, we’re just very excited. We’ve got a Panel from Hell coming up to properly reveal it, but let’s just say it’s going to be….pretty cool.
Ok, that might have been a hint as to what will be in the show itself - just keep yourself calm and all will be revealed soon.
Now, on to the meat of the day: Patch 7 is on the horizon, weighing in at approximately 32GB (so clear some space from the digital platter!), so we have to remind you that any saves made on Patch 6 or prior will no longer be compatible when updated. With Patch 7 installed, the total install size for Baldur’s Gate 3 will be approximately 100GB, so make sure you have plenty free.
So, let’s talk branching! (If that is what you desire!) There are options for you if you want to continue saves from previous patches, or if you want to make sure you’re staying current. Check out the below instructions for whichever method suits you best
1. How to Update Your Game to Patch 7: If you want to play the most up to date version of the game and have never opted into any beta branches in the past, then good news: You don’t need to do anything! When the patch releases, you will receive the most updated version of the game as long as you have automatic updates enabled. To enable automatic updates, please follow the steps below:
WolfheartFPS, who is closely following the game's development, gives a summary of the features we can expect in the final release, whenever that may be.
Baldur's Gate 3 - What To Reasonably Expect On Official Release..
WolfheartFPS is discussing about good companions. Contains some spoilers at the end but there is a big warning to announce them.
Baldur's Gate 3 - Do we need nicer companions?
In today's video I am going to talk about the companions, their personalities and their alignments. I will also talk about the possible future companions, and what we are missing. [...]
WolfheartFPS shares his thoughts on the latest update of Baldur's Gate 3.
Baldur's Gate 3 - My Thoughts On Patch 6
loading...
In this video I am going to go over and give my thoughts on the recent Baldur's Gate 3 early access patch 6 update. This was a pretty big update so there is a lot to go over! [...]
Larian was interviewed by Eurogamer about patch 6 for Baldur's Gate 3.
I saw you talk earlier this year about Baldur's Gate 3 now "aiming" for release in 2022. Oh Swen! I was convinced it would spend a year in Early Access like Divinity: Original Sin 2 did, but no! And it doesn't even sound like you're fully set on 2022 either.
Swen Vincke: Ha ha. So, what do we do - what is our job when making this game? It's really trying to create moment-to-moment gameplay that's really good for you and that's rewarding at every single step. It takes an insane amount of time to do this in a game with so much freedom. And we're trying to really reward you if you're going to go on your evil playthrough, or your good playthrough, or your chaotic playthrough. We're trying to give you something at every single step. And just the creation of that is an exponential effort, unfortunately, and so it takes much more time than we expected, I can tell you that!
There's no way back for us. I mean, we've committed to doing it this way so we're going to do it this way. And, yeah, we just discovered it takes much more time. Doing it cinematically on top of it, with the graphical polish that we're putting on it: it's really - it's tough. It's a lot. It's really a lot. But it's cool - when it pays off then it's cool, so it's worth it, but yeah, it just takes more time. The company also had to grow tremendously to be able to make it, much more than we expected. So that's the price of making this type of gameplay, I guess, so it's not as if we're doing it on purpose, being slower.
I was looking at the game's page on Steam and it's quite astonishing how much support you already seem to have with the game. There are something like 40,000 reviews, and "very positive" ones at that, which is a figure only the biggest games on Steam get. How many people have bought the game?
Swen Vincke: I don't think we announced it, but a lot.
It’s that time again! For months, strange chanting could be overheard from the offices of the Larian Studios dev team, their mysterious incantations pausing only when one would leave to go accept a food delivery. But today, our team emerged from their darkened tomb. “It is finished,” they said in unison, holding up to the sky a large stone tablet into which they had carved the patch notes for our latest update. Looking for those patch notes? You can find them here!
Patch 6: Forging the Arcane is now live and it is our biggest Baldur’s Gate 3 patch to date. This new update introduces a playable Sorcerer class, a mysterious new region called Grymforge, lethal new weapon actions, a huge graphical overhaul, newly-added orchestral music to delight your ears, and hours of fresh content to explore – and that’s merely a bite-size taste of the 10 pages-worth of improvements and changes made to the game this time around.
You can also expect to find new cinematics throughout the Underdark and Druid Grove, completely updated animations for Githyanki characters, Turkish language support, as well as something for those of you misbehaving sorts who tend to get sent to jail. [...]
Larian announced on Twitter that their event would take place on October 14th, 9am PT / 6pm CEST.
Join us October 14th for a live deep-dive into the depths of Patch 6. We'll be exploring Baldur's Gate 3's first new location, in the Panel From Hell: Grymforge.
Larian will release patch 6 for Baldur's Gate 3 soon, which will make saved games incompatible as usual. They posted an update to show how to freeze the version for Steam users. The content of the patch will be revealed in details in the customary Panel From Hell stream.
Pre-Patch Announcement
Hello everyone! We hope you’re doing well, and adventuring boldly.
Once again we find ourselves in a familiar situation. We’re out of lockdown and eager to see you all again, but that doesn’t mean we’re slowing down at all. Patch 6 is almost here, and we’re excited for you to get your hands on it! It’s our biggest ever patch for Baldur’s Gate 3. If you’re attending EGX this week in London, you’ll get an exclusive preview...featuring a new playable class. Who’s ready to make some magic?
We also have something special in Patch 6 for those of you who watched Twitch Plays: A Most Noble Sacrifice. If you like the sound of meat hitting meat (stop giggling), then you’ll love the latest addition to your arsenal - the equippable Salami. Yes, they can be dual wielded. But that’s enough of the spoilers. There’s a lot more in Patch 6, and we’ll be exploring that really soon.
We’re busy planning a Panel From Hell right around the corner that’ll serve as a deep dive into the new content for Patch 6.
Anyhoo, the business of the day: with Patch 6 on the horizon, weighing in at approximately 60GB (so make sure you have plenty of space free!), we want to remind you that any saves made Patch 5 or prior will no longer be compatible when updated.
In last week’s Community Update we introduced some of the major new features and improvements coming to Baldur's Gate 3 in Patch 5. During Thursday’s Panel From Hell 3 we recreated some of these updates during our first ever #LarPG (in addition to giving open-mouth kisses to human skulls and wielding sausages at dubious suits of armour).
Is the sausage mightier than the sword? Depending on the meat content, yes.
Today you get to try it out for yourself. Patch 5 is now live!
WolfHeartFPS goes over three major events that effect the events of Baldur's Gate 3.
loading...
In this video I am going to talk about 3 major events that occurred in the forgotten realms before the events in baldurs gate 3 took place. Understanding the history of Faerun, will help you understand what is unfolding around you in early access.
A pre-patch announcement for Baldur's Gate 3's next patch talks about the next panel from Hell. Also it explains how to keep your playthrough for Patch 4 if thats your thing.
Hello everyone! How are you doing?
It’s been a few months since we last spoke. Our lockdown hair is a little longer, our quarantine gut is a little rounder, and with every cubic inch that Adam Smith’s beard grows in volume we get ever closer to releasing our next patch. After calculating its weight and circumference, we can safely say that day is right around the corner.
Patch 5 is heading to you next week, and we’ve got an epic Panel From Hell planned to showcase all the updates coming your way. Make sure you join us July 8th at 11am PT on Twitch where our team of Baldurian devs and magic wielders will introduce all the new the contents of Patch 5, then vote on what happens next as they scour a wizard’s tower in search of an ancient artifact in:Panel From Hell 3 - Twitch Plays: A Most Noble Sacrifice.
Of course, with Patch 5 imminent, we want to remind you that any saves made Patch 4 or prior will no longer be compatible when updated.
So we’re once again branching out with the same solution as before. There are options for you if you want to continue your Patch 3 or Patch 4 saves, or if you instead want to make sure you’ve got the most up-to-date content. Have a gander below and follow the directions for whichever solution suits you best.
Baldur's Gate 3 - Adam Smith Interview @CGMagonline
by Silver, 12:10
Adam Smith, senior writer for Baldur's Gate 3, was interviewed by CGMagonline.
CGMagazine: I wanted to just touch on this into lore and the canon of Dungeons & Dragons up to this point. How much flexibility did you have as a writer for this installment of the series?
Adam Smith: There was a module that worked as a precursor to where we are, even if it’s not a prequel story. We spoke to Wizard of the Coast, while they were working on that we made sure that things matched up. It is very collaborative in that sense, but in terms of the lore we would come up with concepts only to find out it already does exist. Because it has been decades with so many writers and so many designers, if you can think it, Dungeons & Dragons most likely has it in some way.
It’s already been thought of so what we tried to do is say, let’s find these really cool weird, interesting parts of the Forgotten Realms and outside them sometimes. What we tend to do is we find the really cool, weird stuff, then we just see how far we can push it and how it overlaps with the other stuff we want to do. Obviously, we’re going to end up in Baldur’s Gate and when you get there, a lot of different things are going to be converging on you, including a lot of different concepts and themes. It is exciting to see that happen.
[...]
CGMagazine: How did you balance fresh material while still keeping true to past instalments?
Adam Smith: Baldur’s Gate 3 needed to not feel like it’s just a throwback or a nostalgia trip. It has to feel new, because that’s part of what Baldur’s Gate always was. It was the thing that was pushing things forward. We want to be there as well. Narrative wise, canonically, we are set 100 years later, so that means that we’re not going backwards. But the stuff that happened in Baldur’s Gate, theBhaalspawn Saga, is not the kind of stuff that gets forgotten. So, it is part of our world. And we have characters who remember it. We have characters who have strong memories of it. 100 years is a long time if you are human, but it is not a long time if you are an elf. So, some people are still around who know what it was like to live through those events.
But it is that sense of both the history of the games, but also the history within the world of the events of the game, that is powerful. The story within the game, within the Forgotten Realms, has a legendary status so there was no way we could ignore it. You don’t need to know what happened 100 years ago to have your own story now. I don’t need to know the history of New York City to be able to be in New York City and experience it. Our objective was always to tell a new story that takes place in a world that recognizes the same world and all history that came before.
Swen Vincke of Larian was asked by Gamespot - whats next for Baldur's Gate 3.
loading...
Our resident CRPG nerd Dave Jewitt sits down with Larian's Swen Vincke to catch up on Baldur's Gate 3's development, what the future holds for BG3, and we are made to roll a D20 to find out if it's coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X...It wasn't a nat 20...
Destructoid talked to Swen Vincke about Baldur's Gate 3 and how development is going.
A modern method
What's helping Vincke and the team at Larian track everything is not just vocal player feedback, but the data it's collecting from playtime. An upside of Early Access is that you have a lot of players engaging with your content, and while that can help for ferreting out bugs, there are deeper problems you can root out with enough data.
It might sound strange, but story has been one area where the data has been a boon. At one point during our talk, Vincke pulls up an image to show me what's essentially a graph of the paths players have taken through a specific story dialogue, and what outcomes they received. Vincke estimated it covered about 30,000 dialogues' worth of data, with some results being clear majority and others, ones that might require use of certain mechanics or knowledge, having fewer players reach that conclusion.
Vincke describes these analytics tools, which the studio built up after the success of Divinity: Original Sin 2, as a "gold mine." It helps the studio identify what players are doing and make inferences, and potentially adapt if they're seeing a choice being taken too often or not often enough; or even, if the choice is one they want to feel special and earned, keep it that way.
"I call it a very modern way of doing game development, because you finally have the data processing to be able to do these kinds of things," Vincke says. "And it's, it improves it, literally, I mean, there's nothing to be done about it. It makes the games better. They just need time, they need to cook."
It’s been a busy few weeks here at Larian HQ. In between finalizing our transmogrification spells, sourcing cows for experimentation, and training them to sign extensive liability waivers with their hooves, we’ve been hard at work putting the finishing touches on Patch 4.
After much anticipation, today we awoke to the holy noise of bells chiming. It was our QA team in the hallowed Larian belfry, each of them clutching a bell rope in their face-tentacles to ring in the good news: Patch 4 ready to go live!
Before we get into it, a quick shoutout to everyone who helped Divinity: Original Sin 2 reach 100,000 reviews on Steam, where it sits with a 95% positive rating. What better way to celebrate that, than with a hefty patch for Baldur’s Gate 3!
If you watched the Panel From Hell 2 last week, you’ll know that this is our biggest Baldur’s Gate 3 patch yet. Thank you to everyone who tuned in. It was a big success, and that means we can think about doing more. (Alternatively, if you missed the livestream, or just fancy seeing Swen in armour again, you can watch it in full just below):
Coming in at a whopping eight pages, Patch 4: Nature’s Power contains a juicy number of fixes, updates, and one particularly major addition: Druids are now a playable class.
You may have spotted us subtly teasing the Druid class in the lead-up to PFH2 with one or two strategically placed references to…cows, as well as vines!. “Will cows be coming to Baldur’s Gate 3?” wondered many a bewildered reader. Well, no. Instead, we would hire a Professional Cow Actor (Stephanie) to appear live on the stream, and through the power of Movie Magic have her use the Wild Shape ability to transform from bovine beauty into an actual Druid.
With Patch 4: Nature’s Power, Druid characters will be able to use the Wild Shape ability to transform into a variety of different animals, each of which has their own unique abilities. Dire Wolf, Deep Rothe, Aberrant Shape, and Polar Bear forms offer new heavy attack options in combat, while Cat, Raven, Spider, and Badger provide additional strategic and defensive maneuvers – through stealth, flight, web-spinning, and burrowing, respectively.
Like their D&D equivalents, Druids in Baldur's Gate 3 will be able to choose one of two Druid Circle subclasses which impacts interactions in the game: Circle of the Land or Circle of the Moon. The former offers Druids additional perks as a caster, allowing you to pick a specific biome for which you are connected and then grants you additional spells. The latter allows players to boost the combative power of their Wild Shapes and gives you access to the mighty Polar Bear shape.
Druids can speak with their animal kin while in their Wild Shape forms, which provides an alternative to combat encounters via diplomacy. You saw a bit of this in action during the livestream, where we showed a Druid use their Wild Shape ability to transform into a bear and convince a fellow bear to quit blocking a previously impassable entryway. Previously this encounter would have kicked off a combat scenario. Now with the Druid class, players have the option to trigger an adorably non-lethal tête-à-tête.
Loaded dice: toggle for sanity, or disable for purity
Another new feature in this patch is Loaded Dice. The aim here is to smooth out the extremes of the dice-rolling bell curve that might otherwise see players roll a series of unlucky Natural 1s or all-too-lucky D20s in a row. We’ve been considering this for some time, but it’s really a matter of taste and therefore is an optional feature. If you prefer the purity of RNG rolls, those are still available to you. But if you are easily prone to dice-related headaches or if you have angered the algorithm and are now cursed with randomly-generated bad luck, then it's worth a toggle.
Cinematic speak with dead - spooky AND immersive
The Speak with the Dead ability now includes many new corpses to hunker down with for a chat. This means lots of new dialogue and, naturally, new accompanying cinematics. And yes, there is method to our gothic madness. To quote from Swen during the livestream: "If you killed everybody like an idiot and you didn't pay attention to the story and don't know what to do anymore, you can just go talk to their bodies!" Speaking of cinematics, Patch 4 comes with vastly improved lighting and animation and with over 25,000 cinematic nodes throughout Act 1, the game is looking better than ever. Not that we’re done yet. There’s still loads of improvements coming.
Quality of life and user experience tweaks and changes a happier player maketh
A number of quality-of-life changes are included in this patch as well. Targeting allies and enemies will now be easier, and you can do so just by clicking on their portraits - A nice little UI upgrade that means no more blindly clicking your way between characters within the world to find them. Additionally, for those who enjoy playing BG3 with other human beings, you'll now be able to see other players' full Equipment, Spells, Inventory, and Character Sheets. Darker areas of the game have also been improved with a newly dedicated torch button, while a long awaited flee button is now available in the game for easier escapes from combat. Annoy your friends by leaving them to fend for themselves with a tactical retreat!
Sharp-Eye now pees from the “correct approximate bodily area”, which is an example of a quality of life improvement for specifically one NPC, and whoever may be responsible for their laundry.
You can also expect to find stability fixes galore in this update. Here are a few favourites, hot off the patch notes: - Baelan’s wig was removed and he is now correctly bald, as stated in Derryth’s dialogue. - Sharp-Eye now pees from the correct bodily area (previously too high up). - Fixed not being able to shove characters off the skiffs in the Underdark. Happy shoving!
Learn more about the upcoming Baldur's Gate 3 patch:
The Panel From Hell 2!
loading...
We're getting ready to go back to hell! Join us as we explore Larian's heftiest patch yet. The Panel from Hell is making its chaotic return! Featuring Principal Rules Designer of Dungeons & Dragons Jeremy Crawford, Creative Director Swen Vincke and guests Nick Pechenin, David Walgrave and more, this livestream promises to reveal a heaving assembly of news and updates for Baldur’s Gate 3 – including the biggest patch note ever forged in the fiery pits of Larian. Panel from Hell 2 will also unveil the ways we're meeting the challenge of BG3, along with a peek at newly improved cinematics, Tieflings, spells and cows, oh my! And wrapping up the show, we'll be live streaming the latest content from Baldur's Gate 3's biggest update yet.
It sounds crazy, but we haven’t spoken since last year! My, how you’ve grown. Let’s hope this year will bring brighter cheer. You might have noticed the Larian Twitter handle mentions Patch 4 brewing, and it’s been that way since the launch of Patch 3. It’s taken a while, but we’re finally ready to talk about it… soon.
Patch 4 is right around the corner. We can’t be more specific than that at the moment, but look, today we announced the Panel From Hell 2! Mark your calendars, on February 17th at 10am PT we’re going back to Hell.
Following the success of last year’s live streamed event, the Panel from Hell is making its chaotic return. Featuring Principal Rules Designer of Dungeons & Dragons Jeremy Crawford, Creative Director Swen Vincke and guests Nick Pechenin, David Walgrave and more, next week’s stream promises to reveal a heaving assembly of news and updates for Baldur’s Gate 3 – including the biggest patch note ever forged in the fiery pits of Larian.
Panel from Hell 2 will also unveil the ways Larian is meeting the challenge of BG3, along with a peek at newly improved cinematics, Tieflings, spells and cows, oh my! And wrapping up the show, we'll be live streaming the latest content from Baldur's Gate 3's biggest update yet.
We look forward to having you join us next week!
As for the patch itself, this amount of changes is invariably going to invalidate previous saves. That means saves prior to Patch 4’s release will not be compatible with Patch 4.
That said, we’re again branching out with the same solution as before. If you’re already accustomed to this as a hardened Patch 3 veteran, then simply follow the same steps as before and skip the text at the bottom of this post, because it’s not new text and it’s quite long.
Hopefully, once you’ve tuned into the Panel From Hell 2 you’ll have better clarity on what’s inside, but also a new yearning to re-roll. Hmmmmmmm!
How to keep playing on Patch 3:
The secondary branch will be the previous version, but the primary branch (default download) will be the latest version. To access the secondary branch, do the following:
Right click on the game in your Steam library
Select properties
Click the BETAS tab
In the list under "Select the beta you would like to opt in to", select patch3
GamingBolt thinks Baldur's Gate 3 could be the biggest RPG of 2021:
Baldur's Gate 3 - 15 Reasons Why It May Be One of the Biggest RPGs of 2021
loading...
There's been a lot of talk about role-playing games as of late – which ones will be the biggest, most epic and feature-packed. With the launch of Baldur's Gate 3 into early access last year and its progress ever since, it's becoming more and more obvious that Larian Studios has something unique to offer. But how might it be one of the biggest RPGs of the year? Let's take a look at 15 main reasons.
Patch 3 for Baldur's Gate 3 is available - Swen explains the changes:
Community Update 11 - Inspiration, Freedom & Pacifism
loading...
Since the launch of Baldur's Gate 3 we've been very busy reading your feedback, and implementing some pretty major tweaks & changes to the game. Inspired by your feedback and discussion, today we release Patch #3 - Inspiration, Freedom & Pacifism.
Larian is about to push an update that changes the story, and makes previous saves incompatible. This link (unlike Steam's), shows the correct procedure for all platforms, for those who want to ignore the patch and continue playing with their saved games -> link.
Baldur's Gate 3 - Early Access Interview with Swen Vincke
by Silver, 20:15
IGN interviewed Swen Vincke about Baldur's Gate III's Early Access feedback.
Thanks to those successful forays into early access, Larian launched Baldur’s Gate 3 fully prepared with a suite of quantitative data tools. This software allows Vincke and his team to see practically everything players do, from who they romance to where they save their progress. That latter information helps show where players are ‘save scumming’; the act of creating a save file before a major moment or decision, and reloading it if the situation doesn’t provide the result a player would like.
Vincke notes that one moment in particular, where players must navigate a tricky dialogue encounter to save some children, is one that has experienced heavy save scumming. “It's an emotionally laden moment, and people want the dice to go in a certain direction,” Vincke says. He recognises that the amount of players reloading to try to get a better outcome is something Larian can learn from. “We made [the dice rolls] hard, but maybe we can add extra role-playing options for players to get the same effect. It's one of those things that we can pick up from seeing those behaviors of players.”
It’s not just in this situation that players are becoming frustrated with Baldur’s Gate 3’s dice rolls. The system - based on tabletop Dungeons & Dragons’ use of D20-based skill checks - has proven divisive in the BG3 player base. Many players are not used to a dice roll governing their successes or failures; random number generation (RNG) disrupting a sneaky attempt to deceive someone or foiling a heroic deed can feel at odds with roleplay. “There are people who have had difficulties with that,” says Vincke. “They want to be able to manipulate it.”
Baldur's Gate 3 - Early Access Review @ Game Freaks 365
by Hiddenx, 19:51
Game Freaks 365 has reviewed the Early Access version of Baldur's Gate 3:
Baldur’s Gate 3 Early Access Review
Baldur’s Gate 3 in its current state can be a technical mess, but its sandbox creativity makes it almost unparalleled in the genre.
I was a little tentative going into Baldur’s Gate 3's early access period. After finding out that saves wouldn’t transfer over to the full game once it launched, I thought “why wouldn’t I wait then?” This early access launch is a bit of a tease. There is a wealth of content here spanning the first act of the game, with two more acts coming over the next year before the full release sometime in 2021.
The first act spans about 25 hours of gameplay. Granted, Baldur’s Gate 3 absolutely encourages experimentation and multiple playthroughs. However, no matter how much content there is here, it’s hard to encourage playing through it more than once when none of your saves will carry over to the full game once it releases. I couldn’t find an answer as to whether or not it will carry over to future early access acts. Considering how much change Baldur’s Gate 3 is expected to go through, I would be surprised if it did.
BG3 is definitely early access
To be sure, this is very much an early access title. Immediately upon booting for the first time I dealt with consistent crashes. Early on in my playthrough, I couldn’t access my save state. Occasionally, Baldur’s Gate 3 would just crash entirely. The rest of the experience was still a bit of a buggy mess, but the actual content on display here makes up for it, especially with how much is still to come.
Baldur’s Gate 3 Early Access Preview :: Playing it Safe
I started my career here at Gameffine with a review of Divinity: Original Sin 2 nearly 3 years ago — it still remains the only game I’ve given a perfect score to. The Original Sin series helped place Larian as my go-to RPG studio, dethroning Obsidian which sat on the throne since KOTOR II. It elevated the CRPG formula to a new level by combining traditional adventuring tropes with excellent environmental manipulation and absolute freedom of exploration. At the same time, I also consider myself a CRPG purist and the original Baldur’s Gate will always have a special place in my heart and that of a million others as a game that defined a generation.
I cried when the story broke that Black Isle Studios’ Baldur’s Gate sequel titled The Black Hound had been canceled, leaving the future of the franchise in uncertainty. While I appreciate Beamdog’s Enhanced Edition of the first two games as well as their interest to make a sequel, Siege of Dragonspear proved that they were not ready to stand on the shoulders of golden age Bioware. Then came the surprising news that Larian was working on Baldur’s Gate 3. While I was certain that they were capable of delivering on the gameplay department, I felt that Larian’s writing team typically leaves much to be desired. Still, I was hopeful and glad that this legendary IP would get a second chance at life like many of its brethren in recent years.
'Baldur’s Gate III' Review: Can Larian Studios Save ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ From Itself?
Baldur’s Gate III, the unexpected sequel to Bioware’s CRPG classic Baldur’s Gate II, was released in Early Access two weeks ago. The game is, understandably, rough around the edges. It crashes often and is pretty buggy in its current state. I’m certainly not going to knock the game for that, or even go into further detail—these are the kinds of things Larian Studios, the game’s developer, is well aware of.
I’m a big fan of RPGs. They’re my favorite type of video game by far. I love getting caught in winding dialogue, evolving my character across a lengthy journey, and, on subsequent replays, exploring previously unexplored venues and finding secrets I may have missed. The promise of an exclusive, unique adventure that you craft yourself is enticing. Baldur’s Gate III promises a lot coming on the heels of Divinity Original Sin II, Larian’s crowning achievement and arguably the best CRPG made to date.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve played through what the game has to offer in its current state once and am working my way through a second run to see how it stacks up.
So how is Baldur’s Gate III? Well, it’s hard to appraise entirely the way it is now. There are things that are noticeably missing that I expect to be filled in as time goes on. Larian has already stated the full game won’t be released until it’s been in Early Access for at least a year, and after that, you won’t even be able to import your save from the Early Access version into the final game. That seems to indicate some major changes coming over the coming months.
[...]
Baldur’s Gate III is understandably rough around the edges, but it’s hard to ignore some of the issues with the game’s foundation. Still, it’s chock full of content even in its early phases and can be tackled with a myriad of playstyles.
Baldur's Gate 3 may be in early access, but there's plenty to be excited about even in the first iteration of this DnD-based RPG sequel.
After twenty years, the sequel that Baldur's Gate fans have been waiting for has finally launched, if only in its partial early access version. Baldur's Gate 3 is ready for players, and the game deserves the huge numbers that it has already drawn in. The question of whether fans should "buy" it, however, depends entirely on how many glitches they can tolerate.
The Dungeons & Dragons-based game isn't complete. Only about the first 20 hours of Baldur's Gate 3 are available to play, leaving a good chunk of it a mystery still, and those 20 hours are riddled with bugs and other issues. However, those 20 hours will also leave players wanting more, packed with fun, intriguing, and promising content that stands to blow away both new fans and old when complete.
Baldur's Gate 3 initial review: A sprawling RPG epic
Larian had been cranking out solid games in the Divinity series for good few years before its reputation skyrocketed with the release of Divinity 2: Original Sin - it struck gold with its combination of role-playing fun and devilishly organic combat.
Now the developer has been given the keys to the castle so pined-after by developers around the world - an official Dungeons and Dragons license and the long-awaited third entry in the Baldur's Gate franchise. Each bringing enormous new pressure.
But from the early access build of Baldur's Gate 3 that we've been playing, it's looking like something special once again.
A new, old start
The first two Baldur's Gate games are straightforwardly seminal in the canon of interactive roleplaying; enormous adventures that were different for each player that played them through, with a large cast of memorable characters and storylines to sink into.
[...]
First Impressions
Until then, though, Baldur's Gate 3 is looking like a delightful treat for PC gamers before the glut of next-gen console launches arrives. It's got a deep adventure to offer with a range of companions that are impressivesly nuanced and fun to engage with, and combat that'll keep you thinking.
Early access versions are a minefield, so you can't really afford to come into Baldur's Gate expecting a totally smooth time - that simply won't happen. For now, though, there's still a whole lot of adventurous fun to be had, and Larian's world design has never looked so luminous and gorgeous.
Wccftech likes the Early Access version of Baldur's Gate 3:
Baldur’s Gate 3 Early Access Preview – Much More of This Please
When you normally go into an early access title, you expect a few issues here and there. You also expect the game to be unfinished, either lacking content, whole game modes, polish, or anything in between. Baldur's Gate 3 is early access if you capitalised it, made it bold and cranked the sizing up to about one hundred.
Bugs. Crashes. Areas of what's in the game unfinished. You'll find it all here, but even with the sort of issues that would make you turn away from a game, there's something just so addictive here. There's something that makes you keep coming back for more and something that makes you want more.
When you think about Baldur's Gate 3, it's going to be impossible to not make comparisons to Larian's Divinity: Original Sin titles. However, you have the Baldur's Gate fans who naturally want the game to be more like the originals, plus the fans of Dungeons & Dragons, which want the games to be as close to the tabletop RPG's as humanly possible. I'm going to say that this manages it in a close way while making it a fun, very engaging, RPG.
Baldur’s Gate III early access review: a rewarding RPG that reflects the creative potential of 'Dungeons & Dragons'
Larian Studios teases an exciting future with a superb, imaginative opening act
RPGs are ultimately about creative freedom, and so far, Baldur's Gate III has proven itself to be a fascinating sandbox of imagination. After spending the bones of an hour in character creation crafting a gorgeous Tiefling Rogue, I caused a critical failure within my first 30 seconds of playtime that left him writhing on the floor, ultimately succumbing to a gnarly death. Sounds frustrating, but this is exactly what I was hoping for.
If you've got a set of polyhedral dice, you’ll know that there’s something very intimate and special about sitting around a table with your friends and breathing life into a character that doesn’t exist outside of that room. Magic happens in Dungeons & Dragons when you flavour these avatars with your own experiences, and use them as a vessel to explore new personas, embarking on impossible adventures with your intrepid troupe of pals. It’s also equally exciting when you’re put on the spot by your Dungeon Master and have to make up absurd anecdotes to get yourself out of (or into) ridiculous capers, that may or may not result in your doom.
Someone said we need more Baldur's Gate news threads - here's one :)
Hotfix #1 - The Journey Begins!
Hello everyone,
We are so thrilled with how many of you are playing Baldur’s Gate 3, and we’re glad Steam was eventually able to accommodate you all. Our servers are keeping up, but just about! We never imagined such a huge influx of players in what we had envisioned being a relatively modest party of Early Access players. But we’re up to the challenge, and we’ve been listening!
We’re still working on the multiplayer issues that some of you are experiencing (and we’re very close to solving several of them), but Hotfix 1 already fixes a number of issues and covers other things you reported.
As a general message, if you’re having difficulty getting the game running, or are experiencing crashes, switch the game to DX11 mode (in the launcher, click the gear), and make sure you have the most up to date graphics drivers.
We also recommend in some cases disabling the Steam / Discord overlays, if you experience slowdowns while activated.
Patch Notes BG3 Hotfix #1 (version BG3 EA 4.1.83.3931)
Fixed a crash related to using rush-type actions
Fixed a crash related to the target camera
Fixed a crash in character creation
Fixed a crash during dialogs
Fixed overlapping items inside the inventory views
Fixed "Pickup" and "Pickup And Add To Wares" inside containers
Fixed a player assignment issue when someone would leave from a full multiplayer party. The leftover character can now be assigned correctly.
Fixed an issue with summons showing up as regular companions
Fixed an issue where players could not ready up when other players joined the lobby
No, my word of warning goes instead to those who simply want to enjoy the story. By dint of being a first act it threatens to be all dilemma and no consequence. There are immediate consequences – big, messy, reach-for-the-quick-load consequences – but know that the meat of your mulling won’t be answered for some time. If it were not for this job, and having the self-control of four year old at a birthday party (or games journalist presented with a plate of miniburgers at a press event), I would would want to see this enticing story play out in full. Don’t feel pressured to gather your party and venture forth, but based on what I’ve seen, I think that party is in for one hell of a ride when they do.
Even though it’s in early access, there’s so much content to dig into with Baldur’s Gate III’s debut that I’d be shocked if anyone experiences everything before the next expansion of meaningful content drops. It’s an ambitiously built, well-written tale of adventure framed by lovable companions and stunning fidelity. If you’ve got a busy imagination and consider yourself to be a fan of RPGs tabletop or digital, this game should be an instant purchase. I’ve never played a Baldur’s Gate game in my life, but this feels like a hell of a good place to start.
Pros
Dynamic, creative D&D gameplay
Lovable characters and fantastic set pieces
Gorgeous graphics and inspired environments
Cons
A decent dose of bugs as part of the early access release
If you're looking for the prettiest, flashiest RPG ever to grace a computer screen, Baldur's Gate 3 is almost certainly what you're looking for. There are few or no pre-rendered cutscenes, since the real-time engine itself is capable of producing nearly photorealistic scenery and faces.
For the most part, the game's engine also avoids the uncanny valley of humanoid faces that are almost, but not quite, perfect—it's very easy to watch your characters interact with others and feel like you're watching a movie, with fully rendered faces, bodies, movement, and expressions.
Unfortunately, this greatly magnifies the flaws in the scripting of both language and action. Your character feels real—but he or she also feels like someone who has only attended a couple of improv classes and has been given vague but very firm instructions on how to react to things.
Beyond the good looks of the graphics, I haven't found much in Baldur's Gate 3 to recommend it. Your character and party feel like insignificant gnats and are forced by circumstance to do and see awful things that they're not powerful enough to change. This is not a case of "tough moral choices" as seen in Wasteland 3, or in Obsidian's excellent 2016 RPG Tyranny—in Baldur's Gate 3, it feels like you have no agency at all.
The good
The graphics in this game are incredible—this is easily the best-looking RPG I've ever seen
Great artwork on top of the excellent engine—moody crypts, savage wildernesses, magical groves all "pop"
Large worlds, with little or no "zone time" for fast travel
The bad
Awkward, unsatisfying combat
Punishing dialog with frequent feat rolls practically demands save-scumming
All of this is really just scratching the surface of what Baldur’s Gate 3 has to offer. I could go on and on about the brilliant voice acting and writing, the improved character animations, the wide variety of spells that let you conjure familiars, charm enemies, have telekinetic conversations with animals and dead people…this is a staggeringly deep RPG, even in Early Access.
Most of the drawbacks have to do with performance and presentation. I encountered several visual glitches throughout my playthroughs, and it’s clear that this is an unfinished product, but Larian was working to patch the game even as press were going hands-on. Hopefully, players will be able to jump into a much smoother experience at launch. Overall, I can’t wait to play (and replay) the game some more and delve deeper into the rich world Larian has created.
PC Gamer has reported on when you can expect Baldur's Gate 3 to unlock.
Larian has confirmed on Twitter that Baldur's Gate 3 Early Access will go live on Tuesday, October 6 at 10 AM PDT on Steam, GOG, and Google Stadia. As a last-minute surprise, Larian also confirmed that the Steam Mac version will be dropping at the same time. Here's that time converted to a few other regions:
Baldur's Gate 3 - Reveals Races and Classes for EA Day 1
by Hiddenx, 18:28
Gameffine has some info about the Baldur's Gate 3 launch:
Baldur’s Gate 3 reveals Races and Classes for Early Access day 1
Larian Studios today announce the races, variations, and classes of Baldur's Gate 3's Early Access. Players will be able to select from 16 races/subraces, as well as 6 classes from day one of Early Access, October 6th.
On launch, players will be able to create humans, githyanki, elves, drow, half-elf, dwarves, halflings, and tieflings, including subraces of each race. Early Access of Baldur’s Gate 3 provides around 25 hours of content, designed for multiple playthroughs. On October 6th, players will be able to create their own characters and play in either single-player, or as a party of up to four players in multiplayer, each with their own character.
Races more alien to the Sword coast – like the Drow and Githyanki – are so rare to the average NPC that you’ll find their interactions to be unique as well. The world of BG3 is a highly reactive one, so this single choice will have huge ramifications across your play experience.
Baldur’s Gate 3's character creation features photorealistic fantasy races, based on 3D scans of actors and models (blemishes and all), selected because their features roughly resembled the direction for each race in the game, as well of course for diversity and variety in the human-like races. Our team spent much of pre-production carefully selecting, scanning, and moulding these scans, to become the base heads for character creation. Launched into Early Access is a total of 150 heads to pick from, across the 16 races & subraces.
We have bad news, and good news. But first, the bad news! We're delaying to October 6, by a week. We'll be back later today with the romance & companionship update to pick you all up again.
WolfheartFPS talks about the potentially important locations in Baldur's Gate 3.
loading...
This video shows some important locations on a map of Faerun, which is the continent that Baldur's Gate is located on. Some of these cities / locations were big story areas in BG1 & 2 and will likely be referenced if not visited, in Baldur's Gate 3. Our BG3 journey will begin in Avernus where we will eventually find a way out and crash land a nautiloid ship on Faerun in between the cities of Baldur's Gate & Elturel. Faerun is a continent on the planet of Toril and most of our epic tale will take place in the sword coast.
Community Update 3# for Baldur's Gate 3 talks about multiplayer and cinematics.
“You’re telling your story, and we’re shooting it for you,” explains our Cinematic Director, Jason Latino. “We’re taking that camera down from being above the players, and down into the drama, right into the action.”
“I can’t think of another Early Access game that’s done cinematics, on this level. There’s a lot of games where the moment you add cinematics, they have to get smaller.”
“We didn’t want to do that.”
Everyone - it’s time to talk about multiplayer. Cinematics, Crowd Choice, and Twitch integration. We’re creating a huge, sprawling RPG with all the tools you need to direct your own adventure, and weave your own tale. Or, weave that tale with your friends, or your audience online. No matter if you choose to play solo, with friends, or with your audience -- Baldur’s Gate 3 is a huge cinematic experience spanning over 1.5 million words, and that story can be enjoyed together through the games cinematics, in multiplayer, or as an audience in a stream.
If your character walks into a dialogue situation, the cinematic dialogue begins with you by yourself. If one of your posse comes close, they can choose whether or not they join you in the discussion. Once they do, they can tell you what options they would like you to select as you ponder your next choice.
Your party is of course free to roam around the world while you independently charm your way through conversation. They can even pick-pocket you while you’re in a dialogue. Or cause a fire. Or abandon you. Or, put an end to your waffling and kill the person you’re talking to.
Whatever you do, the game will react appropriately. Even if your friends aren’t.
Our ambition is to make all of this as seamless and interactive as we can and during Early Access you can expect us to continue building more and more ways to interact, observe, intraject, and subvert expectations. Raising the level of drama, and expanding the level of depth.
As far as we know, there has never been an RPG this large, with multiplayer, attempting these intimate, character driven cinematic moments throughout the entire experience. We put a lot of effort in it and are super curious to hear your feedback. Applying cinematics to a multiplayer game, and one launched in Early Access, means that our cinematic ambitions can grow alongside all the other iterations and tweaks that come with working directly with our community and that can only lead to good things!
TWITCH / CROWD CHOICE
With Crowd Choice, a Stadia Enhanced Feature, you’ll be able to choose the next story path and alter what happens next during your favorite YouTube Creator's livestream.
Twitch integration works by numbering each dialogue option, which corresponds to the viewer choices. This feedback is seamlessly integrated into the game, where both streamer and viewer will see each percentage vote next to each dialogue option. What’s more, players will be able to interact with the Twitch overlay to access the player’s inventory, character sheet, skills, and spells.
Both of these features are launching day 1 of Early Access respectively on PC or Stadia. This too is something we’re very excited about not only because it brings the community closer to the player, but also because due to the amount of permutations in dialogues, it enables streamers to “DM” their own adventure for their viewers, and have their viewers partake in their story regardless of whether or not the viewer owns the game.
You’ll be able to become a part of your favourite streamer’s own private canon. Or, as a streamer, or viewer, disable the feature entirely. It’s up to you. As always, the game reacts appropriately.
THE NEXT STEP
loading...
Today’s Community Update video begins with a memory of Divinity: Original Sin quite deliberately. Interactions in DOS1 were merely relegated to rock-paper-scissors (literally!), and dialogue moments between players were a wall of text that scrolled down the screen. We took this a little further in Divinity: Original Sin 2, as characters and players reacted to who you are, and what you’ve done, with many permutations spanning multiple races and tags. Still, dialogues between characters, and interactions in multiplayer were rudimentary though much evolved over DOS1.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is the next great leap and once you’ll start playing, you’ll find that the distance between DOS2 and Baldur’s Gate 3 is tremendously large, as we begin to push the boat out on not only cinematic dialogues, but also the ways in which you can interact with them.
In Baldur’s Gate 3 dialogues have more permutations, more depth, and a cinematic layer that reacts seamlessly to any situation using custom adaptive camera technology (see: elves and dwarves are nay the same height) as well as performance capture. Now, not only do we retain the narration our games are so well known for, but you’ll often see the action on screen - whether it’s a vampiric bite in the night, or a slip of the tongue on a goblin’s foot. Long gone is rock-paper-scissors, as we’ve built tools for debate not only within the multiplayer party, but also as an extension to the thousands of people who watch at home, all in the spirit of the D&D spirit of bringing people together. And we still have some surprises up our sleeve when it comes to multiplayer, but we’ll leave those for another time. There have never been a greater number of ways to gather your party in a single game. Now’s the time!
Q&A
Finally, thank you all for your organization across Reddit and Discord regarding the questions you’d like answered. We’re going to try and answer around 10 questions every update, which we’ll try and do quite frequently. Here are the answers to your questions for number 6. Having questions organized in this way gives us time to read them and respond to them, and also gives us a great sense of how to prioritize them based on how you all vote/rank them. We really appreciate the sense of community spirit and organization.
Will difficulty choices affect more than just enemy health and damage? e.g. increasing the DC on some rolls while exploring the world? Yes there are many features planned for different difficulty levels, which we’ll go over in a future update - but EA isn’t launching with difficulty choices, as we prioritize everything you need to have an enjoyable experience.
How much of an impact will alignment have? None, similar to D&D 5e we don’t have a strict alignment system. But your actions and decisions will have a major impact on how the world and people react around you. So you can be evil, or good, or something in between - but there’s no strict system. As we’ve mentioned, EA is about 25 hours of content “in a straight line” so to speak, but we’ve built everything you need to try many different types of characters, interactions, and combinations. The world in Early Access will react. Tell us what happens.
Will early access get modding support, like the steam workshop and its various modding tools? We loved what our modding community did with DOS2, and we’re excited to see what they’ll do with BG3. Modding will be supported, but not before 1.0, not during EA. Again, we really need to focus on working with feedback and creating the game.
Is there a Lone Wolf mode planned? This is actually a question already being asked by a number of our playtesters who are currently playing the game. A Lone Wolf mode is planned, but won’t be in the game at the beginning of Early Access. One of the many great discussions that come from people playing, and talking with us.
About how fast can you make an entire campaign now that you have the game engine made? I’m thinking it’d be absolutely amazing if you could make a few popular 5E DnD campaigns using the BG3 engine now that you have everything working. This is a very interesting question. Indeed since launch a lot of our time has been put into creating the tools and pipelines (including entire new departments) needed to create a game much more ambitious than our previous games. All we can say at this point is that our pipelines are very much up and running, and we’re seeing the fruits of all that labour. Now that everything is plugged together, we’re able to work quite quickly when it comes to content - though many departments are involved, and many things are plugged into each other. However, it takes a long time to make a very big game with so many permutations.
Will there be ultrawide support? Our previous games work well on UW so it’s something we’ll put effort in, we’re already taking it into account in cinematic dialogs so it's something we plan for the future. (Director of Publishing interjection here: I’ve been playing BG3 on UW at home and at the office since day 1. Ultrawide for the win! Let us know how you get on.)
Date + Time of release globally? 10am PST - assuming everything works out exactly as it should. As soon as we hit the button you’ll be able purchase and install the game, or launch it right from Stadia without the need to install it.
What languages are coming for Early Access? And which will be included later? We’ve confirmed English, Simplified Chinese, French, German, Polish, Russian, Spanish will be available in Early Access. We have decided to include Brazilian Portuguese and Italian in 1.0, but not during EA. This is because it would be too cumbersome to add additional languages as we write the game during Early Access, but we want you to know that we will support you.
Will we be able to carry our characters over from early access into the full game? Unfortunately, as with most Early Access games, there are changes, bug fixes and patches that dictate the fact that wipes will happen to saves. This is because certain fundamental changes to engine, story, etc create incompatibility issues. We will try and tell you when this will happen, in advance.
Will EA be available on GOG? Working on that.
What integrations will be available for Twitch & Stadia streamers? DIDN’T YOU READ THE UPDATE? :D
Dropped Frames interviewed Swen Vincke about Larian and Baldur's Gate 3.
loading...
This week JP, Cohh, and Zeke are joined by Founder and game director at Larian Studios: Swen Vincke! We ask him all manner of questions about him, Larian, the games he has worked on, and of course their upcoming game: Baldur's Gate 3!
Wccftech quoted Swen Vincke from a PC Gamer magazine interview on what to expect from Hell in Baldur's Gate 3.
The soul coin is basically made of a person’s soul. It’s the currency of Hell, it’s how payment is done. You’ll encounter soul coins early on in Act One. When you get into Hell, soul coins are the thing.
You’ll get a good sense of how the mechanics of Hell work. There’s an element of perpetual fear and competition. There’s a strict hierarchy and the absolute rule of holy law. It allows us to do interesting moral situations and quests, and we tie it all into what’s happening in the real world above. If you’ve accepted pacts that have been offered to you by devils throughout your adventure, that changes things a lot.
Some more info about the Early Access version of Baldur's Gate 3:
Community Update #5 - Early Access
Hello everyone! We hope you’ve recovered from the Panel From Hell. We have a huge, bumper community update for you today. We’re going to talk about Early Access at some length, so get a cup of something ready, and maybe a snack. Nestled in? Let’s go.
[...]
If you made it all the way to the end, you learned we’re aiming to launch Baldur’s Gate 3 into Early Access on September 30. The Steam page has been updated to more accurately describe what we’ll be releasing first. While the content will be limited, there should be enough bells and whistles to make it a fun, engaging experience.
Early Access will feature around 20-25 hours of gameplay in a single play-through, with performance captured dialogues and cut-scenes, voice overs for most dialogs, multiplayer (but no split-screen for now), several translations available (but not all) and an Act 1 story that should feel fulfilling to play through many multiple times, with multiple characters. At the start of Early Access, support for custom characters will consist of 6 classes and 9 races, with several subclasses and subraces included. You won’t be able to play as an origin character yet but you will be able to recruit 5 of them as companions when your journey commences.
Here’s a little about who you’re likely to meet on the road to Baldur’s Gate:
Shadowheart A loyal cleric of Shar, Shadowheart is the sole survivor of a holy mission undertaken for the Mistress of the Night. She alone must deliver a relic of immense power while threatened by foes on all sides, and a strange, untamed magic burgeoning from within.
Wyll Noble by birth, Wyll made his name as the heroic 'Blade of Frontiers'. But to become a living legend, he made a bargain with a devil - and he now longs to break free before it consumes him for good.
Lae'zel Lae'zel is a ferocious warrior, mighty even by the standards of a githyanki crèche. Faced with transforming into the very monster she's sworn to destroy, Lae'zel must prove herself worthy of rejoining her people - if they don't execute her first.
Astarion Astarion prowled the night as a vampire spawn for centuries, serving a sadistic master until he was snatched away. Now he can walk in the light and has the chance at a new life, but how long can he keep his past buried?
Gale Gale is a Waterdhavian wizard prodigy whose love for a goddess made him attempt something no mortal should. Blighted by the forbidden magic of ancient Netheril, Gale needs to undo the corruption that is overtaking him, a corruption that threatens to destroy the lives of thousands.
IGN talked to Senior Writer Adam Smith about Baldur's Gate III.
For Smith, it seems to boil down to a trusty few factors – the first one being tone. Baldur’s Gate always managed to blend a bunch of different styles together, rather than placing all its chips on one fantasy subgenre or another. “I see people talk about the darkness of Baldur's Gate,” he says. “And it's absolutely something that we want to bring out. But Baldur's Gate was very, very lighthearted and strange and silly and bizarre in places, as well. And that's really a quality that I think separates it from a lot of other RPGs. It is tonally all over the place and it hits its beats so, so well.
“Occasionally it wants to be romantic, and it's very good at being romantic. Occasionally it wants to be darkly romantic, occasionally it wants to have fun. There are characters that are so cartoonish and strange, and they coexist alongside torture and horror... and getting all those things to sit well together, I think, is part of what Baldur's Gate is.”
[...]
It is a relatively traditional fantasy setting, after all. Elves, for example, regularly live well into their 700s, so it’s entirely possible that characters - even our own, given the options available during creation - would remember the Bhaalspawn crises, or that we’ll see characters like Kivan or Coran or make a return in Larian’s take on the Sword Coast. “One of the interesting things,” Smith says, “is for some people that's ancient history, for some people, it's recent history… We're 100 years later, but that's not a long time for a deity.”
WolfheartFPS previews the races we can expect to see in Baldur's Gate 3.
loading...
In this video I go over the races that will be available in Early Access for Baldur's Gate 3. Subraces, racial features, and which EA classes go best with which EA races. Hopefully this video helps get you more prepared for BG3!
Larian have announced via Twitter that the Early Access for Baldur's Gate 3 won't be available August but say that it is around the corner.
Good news and bad news. BG3 won’t hit August, but it’s just around the corner. We’ll be announcing the release date, as well as big news on the Panel From Hell alongside
A new community update from Larian about combat & stealth in Baldur's Gate 3.
Community Update #4: A Little About Combat & Stealth
Hey everyone!
We haven’t spoken in a little while - at least not since we released our latest trailer and took a deeper dive into development during our live gameplay stream - but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been extremely busy working on the early access version of Baldur’s Gate 3.
We know you all want to know when we’ll release BG3 into early access but you’ll have to be a bit more patient before we can announce an exact date. The one thing we can tell you is that we are making good progress.
Today we’d like to take a bit of time to discuss how Baldur’s Gate 3 gives you plenty of easy to understand systems which you’ll use to overcome increasingly more complex challenges. The way combat works and how you can use our brand new shiny forced turn-based to get advantage are good examples of this.
BG3 deploys fifth edition D&D rules and is class-based. We’ll go into what that means per-class later this year, but for now let’s focus on how BG3’s combat plays. It’s come a long way since the reveal in February. It’s now faster, and more responsive. And it works well in both singleplayer and multiplayer.
If you watched the gameplay stream, one thing many of you have noticed is how fluid combat in BG3 now feels. Despite being turn-based, which allows you to have an authentic D&D experience and really deliberate over your moves as a team, BG3’s combat is much faster than DOS2. But how? Magic? A rift in the space-time continuum? Currently, neither of those things. In fact a lot of it is down to how animations are both created and processed. We invested heavily into what drives our animation pipeline, and specifically made tweaks to improve the feel and motion in combat. The increased brevity and flow is down to many, many changes shaving off microseconds (and sometimes entire seconds). For example, another character’s turn will begin - behind the scenes - as the previous character is ending their animation. Even things as simple as combining move animations with the hit of a melee strike shaves seconds off combat.
Since the initial gameplay reveal in February, we totally overhauled the order of combat. Early Access means change, and change is shaped by feedback and testing over time. BG3’s combat is now set so that each combatant takes a turn at a time but there’s a twist. If multiple combatants of the same faction follow one another in the turn order, then you can simultaneously command each of them.
That means that based on the results of the initiative roll, you’ll experience a different tactical puzzle in each combat that really mixes everything up but still allows you to react to the “cards” you’re “dealt”, so to speak. (There aren’t literally any cards, sorry MTG fans!) Between the RNG of initiative, and the planning, you should be able to have a fresh experience with every combat while still being able to predict and plan with friends how to combine spells and abilities, and ultimately win the fight.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a party-based game that you can play alone, controlling each character, or as a party of up to four where each person rolls their own character. (It’s of course possible to also play as 2, or 3 people, with AI, etc).
In multiplayer, when your avatars and companions are next to each other in the turn order players can simultaneously control characters. This allows you to communicate with your friends and combine spells and abilities to take advantage of more brains on the battlefield, and more hands on the keyboard. This, compared with Divinity: Original Sin 2, drastically reduces the amount of time each player would have to wait between turns, since they’re able to move together.
Stealth is also a big part of Baldur’s Gate 3 - if you want it to be - and it goes hand in hand with the game's great sense of verticality, and ability to shove people. Sneaking is a really useful technique for positioning your party prior to the initiative roll, ensuring you get the first strike. Using stealth, it’s perfectly viable to sneak into a camp, avoid being seen, and roll crits to victory. With a little thought comes the perfect ‘shove’.
Using stealth to prepare for combat is even more fun due to the introduction of forced turn-based mode. This is a big new feature that allows players at any moment during exploration to switch to turn-based rules. Each turn equates to 6 seconds, allowing players to predict and navigate enemy movement, or solve puzzles that require clever navigation (for example, not getting hit by a fireball!).
Our stealth mechanics now also take light and darkness into account. You can be obscured or heavily obscured so that even when you are caught in the visibility cones of the enemy, you still have a chance to slip through unseen. Of course, that is if your enemies don’t have darkvision. Here’s a little table that summarizes how light, darkness and darkvision affect stealth.
Things get even more interesting when you discover you can manipulate light by using spells or throwing water at a torch, as lighting is dynamic, and thus shadows are also.
To summarize, forced turn-based mode, allows you to switch to turn-based rules in exploration, to set up traps, bypass patrols, steal, and otherwise head on many other roguish exploits. But you don’t have to be a rogue class, of course.
These are all super useful techniques that, when used imaginatively, really help you to get the best chances during your initiative roll as combat starts. Baldur’s Gate 3 has high-stakes combat, so making good use of surprise mechanics will give you a leg-up.
If you haven’t already, check out 90 minutes of live Baldur’s Gate 3 gameplay which was aired as a part of D&D Live 2020. It showcases several of the features highlighted here.
In the show, we allowed people to vote on which adventure we’d take. Down into The Underdark, or to dive deeper into the Goblin Camp. If it wasn’t clear yet, player choice is going to be a huge part of Baldur’s Gate 3 and not just for those playing.
But enough teasing, we’ll talk about that another time… Stay tuned!!!
RockPaperShotgun had some questions for Larian about Baldur's Gate 3.
loading...
New Baldur’s Gate 3 gameplay? Go on then. And loads of new Baldur’s Gate 3 information as we quiz the game’s lead system designer about combat, stealth, classes and, er, how vampires work in Baldur’s Gate 3. Loads of juicy stuff here, and more to come!
loading...
Our first Baldur’s Gate 3 gameplay breakdown explained stealth and combat, and now we look at Baldur’s Gate 3 spells, death, alcohol, reactions, halflings… all the words that get your video flagged. I hope you enjoy this Baldur’s Gate 3 features deep dive with Larian Studios' Nick Pechenin.
A gameplay video for Baldur's Gate 3 and some interviews with Swen Vincke are available for your perusal.
loading...
Get an exclusive look at Baldur's Gate 3 gameplay in this live stream that kicked off D&D Live 2020. Larian Studios' Swen Vincke plays the game and gives fans a great look at the upcoming game.
loading...
After a short Baldur's Gate 3 demo we sat down with Larian's founder Swen Vincke to talk about the early access plans as well as the huge scope of the game.
loading...
Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke speaks with us about telling a story in a game where you're free to do anything, and how Baldur's Gate 3 is becoming more like Dungeons and Dragons over time.
Baldur's Gate 3 will be an Early Access title on Steam. Larian is planning for this August.
loading...
Get ready to venture forth. Baldur's Gate 3 is planned for an August 2020 Early Access launch on Steam and Stadia.
Almost exactly one year after we originally announced Baldur's Gate 3 and months after our World Gameplay Reveal at PAX East earlier this year, here we are with a new trailer to help showcase the tone of the game and get you pumped up for the road to Early Access.
Plus we discuss the impact of Covid19 on development and we reveal our plans for a new gameplay live stream so you can see the magic that we've been working on. Roll with us, June 18, on twitch.tv/dnd/
DSOGaming reports on a gameplay teaser trailer for Baldur's Gate 3 ahead of further reveals this June.
Larian Studios has released a gameplay teaser trailer for Baldur’s Gate 3. This new teaser trailer showcases some of the game’s environment and characters, as well as the combat mechanics. It also features some magic spells, something that may interest some of you.
Wccftech reports that Baldur's Gate 3 will feature large staging areas.
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…
[...]
Venture Beat reports that Goblins can be friends not fodder in an interview with Adam Smith.
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.
[...]
PCInvasion has a bit to say about the villains shown so far.
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.
[...]
Screenrant embraces turn-based for Baldur's Gate 3.
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."
Baldur's Gate 3 - Continues the Story from Baldur's Gate
by Hiddenx, 20:20
Rock Paper Shotgun reports that Baldur's Gate 3 will build up on earlier titles of the series:
Yes, Baldur's Gate 3 will build on the series' existing story, say Larian
Baldur’s Gate 3 is well out of the bag now and despite the lengthy gameplay reveal that Larian hosted at PAX East last month I have oh so many questions. So do you lot, it seems. Larian hosted an AMA yesterday to answer them all and though there were a few things they declined to answer, we’ve mostly rolled well on our Persuasion checks and come out with new details. Most importantly, yes, Baldur’s Gate 3 will continue the story from Baldur’s Gate and its sequel. It isn’t a direct sequel, but Larian say “we wouldn’t call it Baldur’s Gate 3 if there wouldn’t be a link.”
That’s been a big question from the start. A lot of time has passed since the original Baldur’s Gate games developed by BioWare and plenty of time has passed in the Forgotten Realms as well. Larian have hinted previously that we may spot familiar characters but the ways that Baldur’s Gate 3’s actual plot ties back to the earlier games isn’t yet being shared. That hasn’t changed much with this new Q&A, but Larian CEO Swen Vincke did at least assure players that they are connected.
“Let me just say that we touch upon the story of BG 1 & 2 in meaningful ways,” Vincke says. “There are returning characters and what happened in BG 1/2/[Throne of Bhaal] leads to what happens in BG3. You won’t necessarily see that at the start of the adventure, but you will quickly understand once you get further into the game.”
Jorphdan explains the lore behind the Mind Flayer Space Ships that will feature in Baldur's Gate 3.
loading...
Episode 142 - In this video we talk about the Spelljammer Campaign Setting! Baldur's Gate 3's opening cinematic features a Nautiloid which is a Mind Flayer Spelljamming ship! We discuss the world of Spelljammer, Mind Flayers, Phlogiston and more! #BaldursGate3
Wccftech recently interviewed Matt Holland, Combat Designer, and Adam Smith, Senior Writer for Baldur's Gate 3.
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.
[...]
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.
Eurogamer has talked with Baldur's Gate 3 Executive Producer David Walgrave about the gameplay presentation of last week, the relation with Stadia, the Telltale people, some of the choices made during game design and other stuff.
How'd you feel the gameplay presentation went? Happy? There was a lot of chaotic energy...
David Walgrave: Yes! When we do these presentations, we have the script in mind so that we cover everything that we want to cover. Because it doesn't look like it, but we do have a plan with it. And then you enter the chaos factor Swen Vinke, and as a developer your heart stops every time he does something. He goes like, "Oh but I could also try this" and you're going "No! You can't!" [laughs].
So it's always a bit of an adventure but I think - what we are trying to show - is that there are so many options and choices and ways that things can go. And we have actually implemented all of them. What we don't always know is whether they work or not, at this point. But I'm very confident of the systems. So for instance, dialogue choices and scripting, that's something that can break because QA is still going through the game. But systemics is a thing that we've been building up for the last decade or so, and systemics we can trust.
But I do think - or I hope - that from the presentation, you see what we're trying to do with Baldur's Gate.
BellofLostSouls reports that Baldur's Gate 3 will be available in Early Access. This was discovered during a Hasbro held investor event at the New York Toy Fair where Wizard's of the Coast unveiled their digital plans for D&D for the next five years.
Specifically there are 7 games in development: Baldur’s Gate 3 and Dark Alliance are the two that have already been announced, but according to Hasbro, we should be seeing at least one new D&D video game every year from now until 2025. And while there was no mention of the newly opened Archetype Entertainment, the WotC owned game studio working on its own sci-fi project, it was revealed that Baldur’s Gate 3 is scheduled for Early Access later this year, so players will be stepping into the world of mind flayers and Minsc a lot sooner than you might have thought.
Larian Studios' Swen Vincke will together with jesse Cox, play Baldurs Gate 3, which for the first time will provide us with some actual gameplay.
We are excited to announce the eagerly anticipated gameplay reveal of Baldur's Gate 3. Our Creative Director Swen Vincke will be playing live on stage with Jesse Cox, revealing more about the story, mechanics, and the answers to much asked questions. With seating for 1000 people, don't worry if you can't make it to the live show, it'll also be streamed on YouTube. For those at PAX, there will also be a short, live Q&A where your questions can be asked and answered.
We will also be present in the expo hall of PAX East, with an all-new booth dedicated to Baldur's Gate 3. At the booth, our team will be serving up live gameplay presentations for the entire weekend, starting after the live show concludes.
Baldur's Gate 3 was announced back at E3 last year, and since then we've have been continuing to grow to 350 people (including outsourcers), and working on new technology and pipelines that allow the team to create a truly next-generation RPG, spanning 100+ hours of content, with all the depth you'd expect, and many surprises along the way that even fans of critically acclaimed Divinity Original Sin 2 won't expect.
loading...
Also the board game will be shown at Pax East.
In addition to attending PAX East with our brand spanking new Baldur's Gate 3 booth, we will also be showcasing Divinity: Original Sin - the Board Game with our friends and collaborators from Lynnvander.
Divinity: Original Sin - the Board Game was launched on Kickstarter in November 2019 and hit its funding goal in less than five hours. With the help of 10,565 wonderful backers we raised more than 10 times the original funding goal over the course of the campaign. The game is reaching the final stages of development and we're working closely with Lynnvander to make it the best it can possibly be. Come by the dedicated booth for the board game at booth 20002 and try it for yourself! We'll be running demonstrations all weekend, and the scenario we're showing will not be part of the main game so you won't be spoiling the story for yourself.
If you missed out on the board game Kickstarter we now have late pledging available through our pledge manager CrowdOx here.
IGN reports on a new publicity image for Baldur's Gate 3 which shows an Illithid in a Nautiloid ship.
Larian Studios, the developer behind the recently announced Baldur’s Gate 3, has revealed a new slice of fresh hell from the forthcoming roleplaying game, depicting one of the tentacle-faced, brain-eating psionicists from the race of interplanar slavers called Ilithids — more commonly known as mind flayers.
Though scant on details, the image below reveals an illithid psionically floating through the darkened hallway of a nautiloid ship.
Swen Vincke and Mike Mearls were interviewed by Metro about Baldur's Gate III.
GC: [laughs] I really enjoyed the combat in Divinity: Original Sin because of the obvious XCOM influence, but because it’s an adaptation of existing rules does that mean it’ll be very different in Baldur’s Gate III?
SV: Yeah, that’s the one that I’m not answering. [laughs] I will tell you what the idea is though. So, the reason why I’m not saying anything is because combat is something that is so sacred in this, when it comes to Baldur’s Gate, so we want to show it to people rather than just talk about it. However, I can tell you what the idea is. When you play D&D you get thrown challenges that you need to overcome. Some of these challenges require you to go into combat. And to ensure player agency you have to give the player a whole bunch of systems so that they can use them in any way they want to overcome the challenges that are thrown at them. That’s what we did in DOS2 because in DOS2 people come up with craziest ways of winning, unwinnable combat. That’s also what we’ll do in Baldur’s Gate III. You’re going to see combat that is very easy and you’re going to see combat that is hard. You have an entire toolbox at your disposal, which goes beyond just a rule set. It also depends on your imagination, so that you will overcome situations in a variety of ways.
GC: There’s always a sort of rule of thumb for me, for a good RPG, and it’s whether you can resolve a conflict – a major story set piece, not necessarily fighting with grunts – outside of combat.
PC Gamer reports how RPGs have to be changed from tabletop to PC games:
How Baldur's Gate 3 and Bloodlines 2 are rewriting the rules of the tabletop games they're adapting
What works for a pen-and-paper campaign doesn't always work for a videogame.
You can tell tabletop roleplaying games are in the midst of a renaissance because suddenly everyone is making videogame adaptations of them again. Some of this year and next year's biggest projects are based on tabletop games: Dungeons & Dragons, Cyberpunk 2020, Pathfinder, Vampire: The Masquerade, and the list goes on.
But converting tabletop rules to digital form obviously isn't as simple as translating every page of the Player's Handbook into code. Combat and stats, the bits rooted in numbers, are often easy enough to reproduce, but they're only a small component of tabletop role-playing—and for many, not even the important part. I recently sat down with developers behind Baldur's Gate 3, Bloodlines 2, and Pathfinder: Kingmaker to discuss staying faithful to the source material, where it made sense for them to diverge, and—perhaps most surprising—what happens when their experiments are so successful they end up back in the tabletop version. [...]
Baldur's Gate 3 - Will the Ranger Class be changed?
by Hiddenx, 07:44
TheGamer thinks that the Ranger Class will be enhanced in Baldur's Gate 3:
Baldur's Gate 3 And Dungeons & Dragons Will Be Changing The Ranger Class In The Future
The ranger is one of the weaker classes in the current edition of Dungeons & Dragons, but that will be changing soon, as the class will be different in both Baldur's Gate III and in some new updates for Dungeons & Dragons in the future.
The future of the ranger class was discussed by Mike Mearls, who is the creative director for Dungeons & Dragons, and Swen Vincke of Larian Studios, which is the development studio that is currently working on Baldur's Gate III. The two appeared on an episode of Kotaku Splitscreen, where they talked about both Baldur's Gate III and Dungeons & Dragons.
@Fextralife An interview with Swen Vincke about Baldur's Gate 3 which reveals some gameplay details.
loading...
Baldur's Gate 3 Gameplay details! In this video we show you our interview with Larian Studios Founder Sven Vincke and Mike Mearls of Wizards of the Coast and Creative Director of Dungeons & Dragons that took place at E3 2019. https://baldursgate3.wiki.fextralife.com/Baldur%27s+Gate+3+Wiki
Larian is bringing us the first edition of their Baldur's Gate 3 Community Update as part of the Larian Gazette.
Welcome to the first edition of the Larian Gazette!
The Gazette prides itself on bringing you the latest and greatest breaking news about all things Larian, and the insider stories that go with it.
Yesterday's headline was the show-stopping, heart-pounding revelation that "LARIAN STUDIOS IS MAKING BALDUR'S GATE 3!" A teaser trailer of our new role-playing game was unveiled yesterday, and it was so spectacularly intense that the internet went into auto-censorship mode.
The Gazette was more than a little intrigued by the mind flayer invasion of Baldur's Gate. Our best reporter pursued their slimy trail to discover how Larian convinced Wizards of the Coast to let them unleash their madness on the crown jewel of the Sword Coast.
The brave reporter went deep undercover and resurfaced with a harrowing tale involving no less than the brutal abduction of Wizards' own Mike Mearls! Interpol has been alerted of the situation, and you, dear reader, may rest assured that the Gazette is monitoring the situation closely! In the meantime, please enjoy our full video report:
They call it Ceremorphosis. The excruciating seven day process by which a humanoid might transform into a Mind Flayer. Stick one illithid tadpole in the brain and one week later you’ve got an octopus for a head and a craving for more grey matter. And what better visual metaphor for the return of Baldur’s Gate: the adventure that lodged in the hearts and minds of every RPG fan of a certain age, until it could find a host capable of doing it justice. The search took 20 years. That body belongs to Larian Studios. The game is Baldur’s Gate 3.
[...]
loading...
[...]
And all this is true of Baldur’s Gate 3? “Yeah. The party’s going to be big, exploration’s going to be big, player agency is going to be big, decisions are going to be big, multiplayer is going to be big – and single player, obviously. The originals were also tough games, so challenges are going to be big.”
If you’ve played Larian’s Divinity: Original Sin you’ll know all this can be said of those games, too. Baldur’s Gate was based on a modified version of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rulebook, and Larian is a studio partially born from a passion for D&D. Several campaigns run continuously in the office, and Vincke has long turned to the player handbooks and monster manuals for inspiration. “The thing Wizards Of The Coast is incredibly good at is making idea generators,” he says. “When you read a campaign, you get plenty of ideas that you roll with and create your own adventures.”
