How Baldur's Gate 3 might have brought back Candlekeep, the library fortress where Baldur's Gate began

rockpapershotgun.com:

Videogames and especially role-playing games are chock-full of sheltered upbringings that go tits up. Innocent times and places like the prologue for Baldur's Gate, which unfolds in the vast, fortified monastery of Candlekeep (beware spoilers from this point on).

BioWare's first ever RPG opens with your unsuspecting Chosen One learning the ropes from the old sage Gorion. There are fetchquests that take you around the enormous citadel, bits of combat training to do, cosy formative chinwags to have with characters like your childhood friend Imoen. But it's not to last, of course: Gorion is murdered, and you must rove the Sword Coast in pursuit of his killer. When you return to Candlekeep later in the game, this once-proud bastion of learning has been filled with doppelgangers of Gorion and other acquaintances, a parade of chatbots waiting to stab you in the back.

For a while, Larian thought about rebuilding Candlekeep in Baldur's Gate 3, which begins many years later. And who better to take us through those plans, as we reckon with the acquisition of Gamer Network and the departure of our incredible deputy editor Alice Bell, than an old friend of RPS - one of the site's own former sages, Baldur's Gate 3's lead writer and our deputy editor till 2019, Adam Smith.

I spoke to Adam about Candlekeep following a characteristically illuminating and uncorporate presentation about Baldur's Gate 3's writing at this year's Digital Dragon's conference in Krakow. Some highlights from that presentation: "the sausage of sadness", a Larian term for when dialogue writing leads the player into a dead-end, and an audience participation element in which Adam asked people to decide whether various Baldur's Gate 3 romance scenes qualify as sex from the perspective of Youtube content guidelines, which amongst other things is the first time I have seen the other kind of sausage screened at a videogames conference, to say nothing of cunnilingus and whatever the hell Gale is doing in this