Baldur’s Gate III Interview on Crafting a D&D Adventure

Now that Baldur’s Gate III is live in early access, TechRadar’s editors sat down with Larian’s CEO Swen Vincke to learn a thing or two about this new Dungeons & Dragons adventure his team is crafting. The resulting interview touches on the game’s setting, its carefully adapted ruleset, and Larian’s expectations for the EA phase.

Here’s a couple of sample paragraphs and you take things from there:

“There are a couple of campaigns where Baldur’s Gate as a location shows up – Murder in Baldur’s Gate was the first that really went into detail about the city, and Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus, which gives an update. We’re basing our visualisation on what’s described inside the books, though we did get a bit of artistic license from Wizards.”

Often developers draw from real life when trying to make a location seem more realistic, but as the Larian team were researching how the Sword Coast could look in-game, the team hit upon a surprising geographical goldmine.

“It’s funny, we were trying to figure out how the Sword Coast should look, and one of our artists said we should go do some photogrammetry along the coast of Portugal, as he thought it’d be a good fit. But as he was doing his research, he looked at the emblems of one of the Portuguese cities and it was the same as the emblem you find in the books for Baldur’s Gate. He actually accidentally discovered where the Sword Coast was in the real world. So for the game we just scanned the real-life Sword Coast!”