How Baldur’s Gate 3 adapts its expansive RPG gameplay for your DualSense controller

blog.playstation.com:

Baldur’s Gate 3 is an expansive RPG – a game with a combined total of 600 spells and actions to experiment with, one that encourages you to navigate its environment in novel ways, to constantly interact with the world around you.

But how exactly do you translate an uncompromising RPG to a controller without it feeling like eating a wet hotdog?

Thankfully, we’ve got the answers. Baldur’s Gate 3 has been built for PS5 from day one. Today let’s take a look at the fruit of our labor, the hotdog in question: your DualSense wireless controller, and all that we’ve done to deliver the game’s complexities in just a few buttons and triggers.

While we had experience bringing controller support to the Divinity: Original Sin series, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a much larger and more challenging game to adapt by comparison.

So we took its interface and streamlined it, turning our original UI into radial menus which felt more intuitive to use with a controller. Your most essential tools can be accessed at the pull of a trigger button, which brings up a large radial for access to your map, journal, spellbook, character sheet, combat log, alchemy, short rests, long rests, and your camp, as well as your level-up screen and Illithid Powers skill tree.

Your actions, spells, cantrips, and items – their total number potentially in the thousands depending on how much armor, health potions, and wheels of cheese you may have accumulated on your journey – become muscle memory, accessible through a series of customizable radial menus. Organize your spells how you see fit, change up which items and actions are at your fingertips, add new radials to the list or rein things in and remove the ones that you don’t need.

We’ve also made some features more