Baldur's Gate 3 Scrapped Plans For Avernus And Candlekeep

thegamer.com:

Baldur's Gate 3 is a big game with a whole host of iconic areas from the Underdark to Moonrise Towers to the city itself, but it nearly had a few more. Larian Studios head Swen Vincke revealed in an interview that the team had to kill several "darlings" during development, such as githyanki queen Vlaakith's palace, the Gith Astral Plane, Candlekeep (where we start our adventure in the first Baldur's Gate), and Avernus.

"There was a moment where the maps were going to be smaller, and so we were going to be able to give you bigger diversity of locations that you would explore," Vincke told IGN. "But then the problem with those is that the sense of exploration wasn't really present. So that's why we killed a whole bunch of them. It was a very fine balance between trying to figure out what the right size of these things was, but we wrote a lot."

Spoilers for Baldur's Gate 3.

At the end of your adventure to stop the Absolute and save Faerûn, Karlach can return to Avernus in a quest to rid herself of the infernal engine burning away inside of her. Fans have been asking since the game's launch last year for an expansion so that we can follow her to hell itself (though we know now that there will be no DLC). We nearly did venture into the fiery underworld, but ultimately, the idea was scrapped.

As for Candlekeep, it's a fortified library housing all written knowledge of the Forgotten Realms. It's where the Baldur's Gate series began, as we - Gorion's Ward - left the safety of its stone walls to venture into the wilds to seek protection amidst Sarevok's ongoing attacks, the game's main antagonist. He even made an appearance in the third game.

A lot of ideas were scrapped during development as is par for the course with any game, but many of these concepts have been brought to light thanks to a recent GDC talk and subsequent interviews. We also found out last week that Wyll had more story planned, including a "big moment" at a war college. But the idea was left on the cutting