“A scripter had a vision of completing the scene by transforming you into a wheel of cheese,” reveals Nick Pechenin, the lead systems designer at Larian Studios. The central storyline of Baldur’s Gate 3 revolves around an invasion of monstrous creatures with tentacled mouths that resemble something out of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu horror tales. Therefore, a sidequest where a disgruntled wizard turns you into cheese may appear out of place. However, moments like these perfectly capture why Larian is the game developer that comes closest to capturing the anarchic freedom of real-world Dungeons & Dragons sessions.
Before Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and even Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Bioware gained its reputation with the beloved Baldur’s Gate and its sequel. “When the original games were released, they pushed the boundaries of what was technologically, visually, and narratively possible,” explains Pechenin. “Bioware aimed to create a game that was as aesthetically pleasing and technologically advanced as humanly achievable at that time, and that’s exactly what we are striving for.”
Video game developers have frequently explored the fantasy realms of Dungeons & Dragons, but they have struggled to replicate the freedom found in the tabletop game. Around a table, when a player unexpectedly decides to set fire to a seemingly friendly inn instead of asking the bartender for local gossip, the Dungeon Master, who functions as a writer, director, and storyteller, can improvise and respond by narrating the ensuing events. In contrast, video games can only account for behaviors that game designers have predicted.
Baldur’s Gate was one of the first games to pursue the freedom found in a tabletop D&D session. You could negotiate your way out of battles, break locks instead of searching for keys, and your choices in quests influenced the branching paths your group of adventurers would take. While the possibilities were not endless, Baldur’s Gate offered a level of flexibility rarely seen in other games, particularly with its intricately detailed art (for that time).
Larian’s interpretation of the series takes this to another level; the team has created a dynamic world that appears to respond to every choice you make. For instance, if you choose to play as a druid, you can transform into a bear and communicate with animals, receiving vital clues from a talkative squirrel that players without that skill could never access. On the other hand, if you opt for a wizard, you can turn into a cloud of gas and easily slip through narrow prison grates, bypassing challenges that other characters would face. Furthermore, the way characters interact with you varies greatly depending on your race, gender, class, and the decisions you’ve made throughout the story. At times, it feels as though the game has been meticulously tailored to reflect your every action. Most of these interactions are scripted and voice-acted, unfolding in cinematic sequences.
Beyond cutscenes, you guide your group of adventurers and command them during battles.Photo: Larian
The magic behind the immersive experience of Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t lie in some groundbreaking technology; rather, it’s the result of 400 developers across multiple studios working for six years to create layers upon layers of possible actions and tailored responses. “The scale of the project was monumental,” admits Pechenin. The team even developed a tool that generated a first draft of conversation cinematics, which then had to be finetuned by a cinematic director. Additionally, the game has been in early access for three years, with thousands of players providing feedback and suggesting new possibilities for encounters.
For Larian, it was crucial to craft such a vast array of content that it becomes impossible for a player to experience everything in just one, two, or even a hundred playthroughs. This approach ensures that the game world feels uniquely their own. This large team of writers, artists, coders, and designers have poured immense care into countless scenes that many players may never even witness, all with the aim of constructing an imaginary world that feels as free and flexible as those players create around a D&D table. And that’s how valuable and expensive development time is spent creating a sentient wheel of cheese that bounces around and emits foul-smelling gas clouds.
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When you permeate the game with such a density of possibilities, players develop trust that any action they attempt will have a meaningful effect. The limitations of the game world fade away, leaving players with a fantasy realm they can truly believe in.