D&D: Baldur’s Gate’s Light At The End Of The Tunnel Is Here
In a recent interview, Larian Studio head Swen Vincke outlines the road ahead for Baldur’s Gate 3, along with the early access endgame in sight.
Now that druids have been added to Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian Studios has a roadmap to the end of early access, and in a recent interview with Destructoid, studio founder Swen Vincke, opines on what challenges and triumphs lie in store for Baldur’s Gate 3. Let’s take a look at the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ for Baldur’s Gate 3.
As long as it has a giant badger, I’m cool with whatever they have in mind.
As we’ve mentioned before, one of the big guideposts for Baldur’s Gate 3 is the community feedback–Larian listens to its players, and uses the data collected to see where people are dying, which NPCs they’re flirting with, which party members they’re killing, and which they’re recruiting. According to Vincke, the team is quite happy with the way the Early Access has been going, but the road ahead involves tweaking the dice.
Baldur’s Gate 3’s dice mechanic, which involves the randomness of a d20 roll with your skill modifier added–you know, like you would in D&D–has been a bit polarizing within the community, to the point that with the last patch, Larian had to introduce a ‘loaded dice option’.
“It brings back memories, actually, of Original Sin 2 where it was about other topics, which was the armor system, which was also polarizing, right? Or god forbid durability, which was a fight where we had to swallow our pride and say, ‘Okay, well, this is the end of durability as we know it.'”
According to Vincke, the studio is still trying to figure out if people are playing the game they want them to be playing, and if not, where it’s failing at communicating its goals.
But with the player data that Larian collects, the BG3 team as access to all manner of things like, which dialogue options players are picking, which branching options are repeatedly shutting out players, and what feels satisfying to the players.
All of which Baldur’s Gate 3 uses to craft a more cinematic approach–and looking back at the latest patch, which introduced druids, new dialogue, and reworked old cinematics, you can see the work in progress. Vincke says they don’t want to spoil everything, that with players already having put in hundreds of hours on just Act 1, Larian wants to make sure the game is up to speed before expanding any more Early Access.
Early access continues to be for finding feedback on systems, like the skillchecks, or the party system or the transformation aspects of the druid, which according to Vincke was especially difficult:
“It was one of the hardest classes to get right. So we wanted to put it in there to force ourselves to go through the entire process of that class, and at the same time to see what people were going to be doing with it, because we are going fairly far with what you can do with Wild Shape.”
As Vincke says, the players haven’t even begun to glimpse what Larian has in store, including “significant changes to the main storyline” that weren’t quite baked yet, even for the first act. So even if you’re playing Baldur’s Gate 3 now, you can expect to see it change when you get to the final iteration.
For now, Vincke wants players to continue to experience the best the game has to offer, and he looks forward to seeing how players use the mechanics that Larian has built to break the game:
“I mean, that’s why we put those mechanics in there. So the creative use of the mechanics for the players is the thing that we try to maximize. D&D is about your agency, your creativity. We’re trying to give you the same tool set still, in a fairly accessible way.”
And with Early Access in full swing, it feels like the best is yet to come.
Happy Adventuring!
