If you play as a druid, you can transform yourself into a bear and speak with any animal you find, learning clues from a chatty squirrel that a player without that skill couldn’t access. ![]() Larian’s take on the series, however, is on another level the team has built a world that appears to respond to your every choice. The possibilities weren’t endless, but Baldur’s Gate suggested flexibility many games hadn’t offered before, and certainly not with such detailed art (for the time). You could talk your way out of fights, smash locks instead of searching out keys, and your quest choices would send your party of adventurers down dramatically different story branches. Around a table, when an adventurer unexpectedly says they’d like to burn down the friendly looking inn instead of asking if the bartender knows of any local gossip, the player in the role of Dungeon Master – who is equal parts writer, director and storyteller – can improvise and respond, narrating what happens next, whereas video games can only accommodate the behaviours that game designers have predicted from players.īaldur’s Gate was one of the first games to reach for the freedom of a tabletop D&D session. Video game developers have often set adventures in the fantasy worlds of Dungeons & Dragons, but have struggled to compete with the tabletop game’s freedom. ![]() “BioWare was trying to release a game that was as beautiful and as technologically powerful as could be humanly achieved at that stage that’s what we are trying to do.”Ĭharacter creation in Baldur’s Gate 3. “When the original games came out, they were the bleeding edge of what was possible technologically, visually, and story-wise,” says Pechenin. More than 20 years ago, before Mass Effect and Dragon Age, before even Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, much-loved developer BioWare made its name with Baldur’s Gate and its sequel. ![]() But moments like this encapsulate why Larian is the game developer that comes closest to capturing the anarchic freedom of real-world sessions of Dungeons & Dragons. The main story of Baldur’s Gate 3 is about an invasion of tentacle-mouthed creatures that wouldn’t look out of place in one of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu horror stories, so a sidequest where a disgruntled wizard transforms you into cheese may seem out of place. “A scripter was convinced that it would make the scene complete if you could be turned into a wheel of cheese,” Larian Studios’ lead systems designer Nick Pechenin tells me.
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