Baldur’s Gate III Interview on Evolving the Series

While a lot can be said about Larian’s decision to move away from the familiar Infinity Engine-style gameplay for the third installment of the Baldur’s Gate series, this IGN interview with the studio’s senior writer Adam Smith isn’t about that. Instead, it focuses on how the Belgian studio plans to craft the game’s lore and narrative and what they consider important in that particular area.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Essence of Baldur’s Gate

Throughout development, the team have focused heavily on finding what’s at the “core” of the Baldur’s Gate experience. “I think if you ask 20 different Baldur’s Gate fans, then you get 20 different answers,” Smith laughs.

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.”