Baldur's Gate 3 is bafflingly reactive. You can't drop-kick an owlbear without the ripples spreading out and causing some kind of reaction later on down the line. But it goes even deeper than I knew: In a recent interview, Larian CEO Swen Vincke shed some light on the studio's "n+1" design philosophy, and revealed just how far it goes to create solutions for times when "the player fucked up everything."
Vincke was chatting to IGN when he mentioned Larian's approach to making sure its games can accommodate our terrible, terrible foul-ups: "It's called n+1. We introduce it with Original Sin… you always have to assume that all the antagonists and protagonists will be killed by the player." That means, essentially, there always has to be some fallback way to deliver plot-critical to the player even if they're standing on a mountain of corpses, or if they've totally ignored some vitally important NPC.
