Baldur's Gate 3 devs tried to make D&D's Dispel Magic work for a long time, but they had to can it: 'it would've doubled the size of the game'
I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Baldur's Gate 3, but I did have several instances where I thought: «man, it'd be good to have Dispel Magic here.» Clouds of darkness, enemy buffs like Haste—they'd all make for prime tactical dispel targets. In an interview with D&D, founder and CEO of Larian Studios Swen Vincke revealed that they'd tried to make it work, but couldn't for one tragic reason—it'd break the game in half.
«We wanted to do Dispel Magic, for a long time it was on the table, but then it just became too much, because there's so much magic in the game. It was always like: 'what if I come in and I do Dispel Magic? And I'd say 'oh my god, my head is exploding'. So that's why you don't have Dispel Magic in the game.»
For those of you who aren't magic initiates of Dungeons & Dragons' 5th edition (D&D 5e), Dispel Magic is the cousin to Counterspell, except it can be used after the fact. Here's a snippet from the spell's description, courtesy of the publicly available Systems Reference Document (SRD): «Choose one creature, object, or magical effect within range. Any spell of 3rd level or lower on the target ends.»
The design headache here lies in the words 'magical effect'. In D&D 5e, spells do exactly what they say they do. Using those words instead of 'spell' has major implications for its use cases, since the word 'spell' is, specifically, any spell cast by a creature.
Granted, the spell then goes on to state that any spell on the creature, object, or magical effect ends—but plenty of DMs will tend to give a bit of leeway on that, since they don't typically want to homebrew an entirely new spell every time they put a magic barrier on something. Not to mention, the spells their players have access to and the spells
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