Why did Baldur's Gate 3 blow up? Larian lead writer says it's thanks to "a big gamble" with CRPG standards
Why did Baldur's Gate 3 blow up the way it did? We put the question to lead Larian writer Adam Smith at Gamescom, and he reckons it's partly down to the fact that it doesn't just look like Larian's traditional brand of CRPG – it's a full-fledged cinematic RPG, too.
"I think part of it is visual," Smith says of how much attention the game's gotten. "When I first joined during pre-production, it was a player talking to a character in full 3D models, obviously rough, but it was like, we're doing this, we're not isometric anymore. We're going to bring the camera in close. And it's a big gamble, for two reasons.
"One, expense," he continues. "We mo-capped every single line of dialogue – not the voiceover ones, but this is where you get that 170-hour figure from. So we knew it would be expensive, we knew it would be time-consuming. It also means that it's a lot harder to edit and iterate. We still did. We threw away a lot of stuff and we did it because we wanted it to be better, and also because as you filled out the story, you're like, well, that bit is good but doesn't quite work anymore, so you tweak and adjust it. So we knew that our development style plus cinematics was a challenge.
"But also we didn't want to make a cinematic RPG if that meant not making a Larian RPG, so it had to be both. And [Larian CEO Sven Vincke] says it a lot: no compromise. You still want all the systemic stuff. You still want all the player-centric dialogues, you want to be able to miss dialogues entirely, you don't want to force-feed people. But the dialogue is suddenly much more expensive. But what it gives us is a game that looks beautiful. The characters feel more alive because we're close in on them. The cinematic art, the character art,
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