Baldur’s Gate 3‘s principal narrative designer Lawrence Schick believes that Larian Studios’ critically acclaimed narrative-heavy role-playing game (RPG) will surprise players for years to come.
In an interview with Inverse, Schick offered some thoughts on the agency that Baldur’s Gate 3 affords its players. “Every stone will not be turned for years because so much of the game is a concatenation of unlikely variables […] There’s stuff that people will be discovering, including us, because of the way it was built, with synergies, and layers, and interacting reactivity. It astounds us, the stuff that comes up.”
Schick then elaborated on the studio’s narrative goals: “[Players] don’t have to admire it as an elegant piece of slick storytelling. They need to inhabit it. They need to live in it.”
When considering how the game was able to achieve this, Schick emphasized lessons learned thanks to those who played the RPG during its three-year stint in early access: “They got to be happy with it.”
At TechRadar Gaming, we were blown away by Baldur’s Gate 3‘s open-ended approach to storytelling. The sheer number of variables and scope for lateral thinking afforded by Larian Studios’ hit RPG is jaw-dropping. The game has a lot of moving parts and rewards playful solutions to its problems, often in ways that feel completely unexpected.
This refreshing emphasis on player agency is a big part of what helped the game win Game of the Year, not only The Game Awards 2023 but also here at TRG. In our Game of the Year list, we praised the game’s “attention to detail”, as well as its “transformative […] branching narratives.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 is still receiving plenty of attention from the devs, too. Larian is continuing to roll out fixes for the Xbox Series X|S version of the game, which has been beleaguered by save data issues. The last major update also saw the addition of an epilogue section for the game which boasted “some of the most complex writing in the game so far,” according to the studio.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the best RPGs ever made as well as one of the best story games of recent years.