The rules are so complex an engineer with a Ph.D. was baffled. The setting was long the butt of jokes. Combat proceeds at the pace of a courtly duel. And some of the biggest names in video games released competing titles.
But Baldur’s Gate 3, a game that lets you talk to spiders and the dead, slip through cracks as a cloud of mist, reveal invisible foes by splashing them with drinks, bargain with a devil, give your eye to a hag and romance an amnesiac priestess or a squid-faced telepath, as you see fit turned into the surprise hit of 2023.
The chief executive of Larian Studios had told his team to expect about 100,000 concurrent players when it fully released Baldur’s Gate 3, a role-playing game based on Dungeons & Dragons. A few days later, nearly 900,000 people were playing at the same time.
Actors soon began to hear from players moved by their performances as a debonair vampire and a green otherworldly warrior, among others. Critics praised the game’s sweeping freedom and the depth of its writing. PC Gamer gave its highest review score in 16 years to Baldur’s Gate 3, which went on to win game of the year accolades in Britain and the United States.
The staggering success was no sure thing.
“I did not think that it was going to flop,” said Josh Sawyer, the studio design director at a competitor, Obsidian Entertainment, and the lead designer on Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity. “I did not think that it was going to be niche niche. But it was hard for me to see the return on the investment.”
Larian spent six years creating Baldur’s Gate 3, pouring money and talent — its cast of nearly 250 actors includes the Oscar winner J.K. Simmons — into a throwback game.
Although role-playing games remain popular, the genre has largely moved on from the turn-based combat and isometric design that was more common when the first two Baldur’s Gate titles were released in 1998 and 2000.
As role-playing games became more like cinematic action games, other genres began adopting their principles. Soldiers in Call of Duty started earning experience points and leveling up, not unlike the gnomes and half-orcs of tabletop games.
But Larian, previously known for its Divinity role-playing series, had an uncompromising vision for Baldur’s Gate 3. Swen Vincke, the Belgian studio’s founder and chief executive, said the company wanted to create a game that would truly let each player have a different adventure based on the branching consequences of decisions, big and small.
“They managed to fulfill the ultimate player fantasy of having influence over the story, often in very dramatic and unexpected ways,” said Sebastian Kalemba, a game director at CD Projekt Red, which made The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077. “I felt that I was discovering the world on my own and had the opportunity to experiment endlessly.”
At a goblin lair early in Baldur’s Gate 3, players can barge in with swords swinging, lure goblins into traps or poison their punch. There is no shortage of tactics. Players can push enemies into a spider pit or convince the spiders to revolt; join the goblins’ cause or pretend to do so; quietly take out their leaders or lead them into a distant battle — and then decide whether to betray them.
“They managed to fulfill the ultimate player fantasy of having influence over the story.”
Sebastian Kalemba, the animation director on Cyberpunk 2077 and the lead animator on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Adam Smith, the game’s lead writer, said the goal was to create a fleshed-out world for every scenario imaginable, even those that only 0.01 percent of players would ever see.
“We made it at a scale that we thought might be impossible,” he said. “And it turned out it wasn’t.”
Developers throughout the video game industry attributed the effusive praise of Baldur’s Gate 3 to its complex but approachable system, high production values and emphasis on creativity and memorable characters. A bard might bluff and deceive his way through the Forgotten Realms, while a barbarian cannonballs through them.
There also had been no big-budget game quite like it in several years, said David Gaider, who worked on Baldur’s Gate II and is now the creative director of Summerfall Studios. Its reception, he said, showed that fans were hungry for a meaty, narrative role-playing experience.
“For a game with so many old-fashioned features in it, it’s really served to dispel a bit of that so-called industry wisdom about what the audience will and will not accept,” said Gaider, the lead writer of Dragon Age titles. “People just want good games, don’t they?”
Baldur’s Gate 3 has drawn in millions, including the chief executive of Hasbro, Chris Cocks, who said in an email that he had spent more than 160 hours with a half-elf sorcerer named Quincy Tipperton. Part of the appeal was forcing players to confront the often surprising results of their choices, as well as the random rolls of a 20-sided die.
That also made building the game enormously complicated: The abundant rules of Dungeons & Dragons were not simple to adapt, especially its spells.
“My lead gameplay programmer had to explain to a guy who had a Ph.D. how it works, and he spent an hour trying to explain to him spell-slot systems, because he had to implement it,” Vincke said. “It was crazy. We had many arguments.”
Despite the challenges, the scope of the game grew. Neil Newbon, the actor who plays the vampire, Astarion, called it “a spider’s web madness of narrative nodes.”
A team of about 12 writers developed hundreds of pages’ worth of dialogue, in-game books and descriptions of items and skills, trying to account for whatever a player might want to do. Actors spent years getting in and out of motion-capture suits, recording more and more lines. (Including distinct dialogue for both a spell that allows characters to speak to animals and a skill to “handle” them.) Larian said the 174 hours of cinematic material it produced was more than twice the length of “Game of Thrones.”
There was so much material that Devora Wilde, who voices the warrior, Lae’zel, said that while playing through the game herself she was sometimes taken aback encountering dialogue she had recorded years earlier.
“It was being written as we were going along,” she said. “I couldn’t play the ending because I didn’t know.”
“It’s really served to dispel a bit of that so-called industry wisdom about what the audience will and will not accept.”
David Gaider, a writer on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and the lead writer on Dragon Age: Origins
The ambition was so great that Larian could not achieve everything it had imagined.
Smith said he would have liked to add depth to the relationships with companions, creating more nuance in moments of romantic rejection and platonic friendship. The classic spell Dispel Magic proved too disruptive for a virtual world full of magic. And a plan was scrapped, Vincke said, to send players who had died to adventures in the Fugue Plane, an afterlife zone in D&D lore.
“Everything you’ve done would have stacked up in the Fugue Plane,” he said, “so you would have been confronted with the consequences of your actions.”
Although the original Baldur’s Gate games by BioWare are regarded as masterpieces of their time, the series sat dormant for many years.
Once Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro unit that runs Dungeons & Dragons, reacquired the legal rights, it reached a deal with Larian, which had fund-raised on Kickstarter to help make Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel.
Larian is privately owned, so it faced less pressure during Baldur’s Gate 3’s lengthy development process than many studios do under the umbrella of a corporate giant like Microsoft or Electronic Arts. But the investment was still a risk.
“It’s a rarefied air when you get to spend that kind of money and on a genre that traditionally doesn’t break out,” said Ben Smedstad, who worked on the original Baldur’s Gate games. “That’s a gamble. That takes some guts.”
It was not always a smooth journey. The coronavirus pandemic disrupted production, as did Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which forced Larian to move a team who had been based in St. Petersburg.
But Baldur’s Gate 3 benefited from the three years it spent in early access, a period when people can buy and play an in-progress game. The increasingly common strategy gives a studio additional time and resources to make improvements, along with valuable feedback.
“Our initial approaches weren’t that successful,” Vincke said, adding, “We had ideas, and we were told in friendly and sometimes not-so-friendly manners that maybe we should rethink some of these ideas.”
Larian was responsive, engaging directly with players and delivering updates in conversational posts.
“Nintendo is like a far-off entity that you couldn’t even, for a moment, consider would see anything you have to say,” said Liv Kennedy, a co-host of the podcast “3 Black Halflings.” “Larian’s almost like a bespoke game developer.”
“They completely nerded out on the rules. They fell in love with what they were working on.”
Trent Oster, the director of technology at BioWare during the development of Mass Effect
The year was full of new role-playing games expected to be bigger hits: Diablo IV by Activision Blizzard, Final Fantasy XVI by Square Enix, Starfield by Bethesda Game Studios and an expansion to Cyberpunk 2077. But in the months before the arrival of Baldur’s Gate 3, intriguing clips spread of the game’s stranger possibilities, like a tryst between a vampire and a druid who turned into a bear.
“They completely nerded out on the rules,” said Trent Oster, a veteran of the original Baldur’s Gate games and the chief executive of Beamdog, a Canadian studio that remastered them for modern systems. “They fell in love with what they were working on, and they went over the top in terms of how much content they put together.”
Once Baldur’s Gate 3 officially came out on Aug. 3, players began to discover details written for a tiny percentage of players, like a character who persists in annoying patter even beyond death, a transformation into a wheel of cheese, or the stray observations of a ranger and the hamster only he can hear. Others found tricks the developers never anticipated, like changing an antagonist into a sheep so she can later join your party.
With the attention came memes, and impassioned posts on social media. Some players wrote about how the game helped them cope with grief and depression. Others flooded sites with fan art or shared hard-to-find bits of dialogue. CNN published an article about Newbon’s vampire.
Samantha Béart, who voiced the character Karlach — a barbarian on the run with an infernal engine for a heart — said that people exiting abusive relationships, transgender women finding themselves, veterans confronting P.T.S.D. and people with medical diagnoses all contacted her.
“We continue to be blown away by the cultural and social impact of this game,” said Béart, who, like several of the actors, has streamed the game on Twitch.
Sawyer, the studio design director at Obsidian, said he was impressed not only by the companions Larian had created, but by the game’s sheer variety of abilities, items and quest resolutions.
But he suspected that many executives would still consider it a huge risk to make a role-playing game as ambitious as Baldur’s Gate 3.
“I would love to be proven wrong,” he said.
