'We owe them a huge debt': Baldur's Gate 3 lead writer hopes they did '90s BioWare proud
There's no doubt in my mind that Baldur's Gate 3 will have its own legacy, especially as we've just awarded it an extremely rare 97% in our review. But it's also part of an existing lineage as the third game in a BioWare series dear to many longtime PC gamers. Baldur's Gate 3's lead writer Adam Smith tells us today during the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast that Larian never lost sight of the long shadow it was stepping into.
«It's easy to forget because the game's out there now, but when we first started working on [Baldur's Gate 3], it was 'shoulders of giants' stuff. [Baldur's Gate] was such a big shadow,» Smith says. «We were like, 'Do we ever look okay in this shadow?' There was anxiety about it.»
Smith repeats an appraisal he often heard during Baldur's Gate 3's early access: «It's Divinity: Original Sin 3, not really Baldur's Gate 3.» It's not a totally unfounded assessment. Larian's Divinity: Original Sin 2, also one of the best RPGs in recent years, was a bit bright and silly, and everything was constantly on fire, and Baldur's Gate 3 does carry some of that Larian vibe.
It is, however, markedly darker and full of body horror. There are still occasions of 'everything is fire,' but fewer, anyway. Baldur's Gate 3 is not just «Divinity: Original Sin 3» wearing Forgotten Realms' hand-me-down robes. It came from a lot of fondness for the original games. Smith says his own first RPG love was Ultima 7, followed by Baldur's Gate, and then BG2, which superseded the rest.
«We were like, 'No, we love Baldur's Gate. We want to make Baldur's Gate 3.' And there was a reason for that, because so many of us did [grow] up with it.»
Smith cites Jaheira, a druid party member in the original Baldur's Gate games, as the most important
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