Baldur's Gate 2 sent us on a lot of unusual detours: running a playhouse, going undercover in the Underdark disguised as a drow, becoming trapped inside a magically-transformed circus tent. I love 'em all, but now I know we missed out on possibly the most audacious detour—one that would have involved time travel, alternate dimensions and the return of BG1 villain Sarevok.
James Ohlen is the man behind this quest-that-was-not-to-be. The co-lead designer on Baldur's Gate 2—now taking a break from games to recover from burnout—had an understandable desire: "I wanted to have a time travel plot."
The storyline would involve someone using "the Planar Sphere to go back and help Sarevok actually win, and he would become this dictator of the Sword Coast," Ohlen tells us. Sarevok, the protagonist's half-brother and fellow Bhaalspawn, served as the original Baldur's Gate's antagonist, before becoming a companion in the excellent Throne of Bhaal expansion for BG2.
While this all sounds potentially quite elaborate, Ohlen didn't go wild with the scope, and told his colleagues it wouldn't be as big as they thought. "It's just, what district was it, the Market District? It's just that district. We just have to change everything there."
Athkatla's market area is Waukeen's Promenade, the first location you visit when you escape the twisted laboratory right at the start of Baldur's Gate 2. It's by no means a tiny area, and I imagine quite a lot would need have been added, removed and tweaked to make it fit a version of the future where the mad child of a dead god was in charge of a whole region—though not, it's worth noting, the region in which BG2 takes place.
Ohlen's inspiration was a storyline from DC's Legion of Super-Heroes, "where some of them realise that the timeline they're in is wrong, and then they remember the original timeline, and they have to figure out how to get back to the original timeline".
Unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be. "Kevin Martens [co-lead designer] was the one who was like, 'James, it's enough. Enough!' So I was like, 'OK man. OK, all right.' I did the design for it, but no dialogue had been written yet or anything like that."
It's hard not to feel like we missed out—but every big RPG has unfinished ideas like this, sitting on the cutting room floor. At some point, you've got to say, as Martens did, that it's enough. And BG2 certainly had no dearth of fantastic quests. Still, let's pour one out for the alternate dimension where horrible Sarevok got everything he wanted.
