Remember Candlekeep? The monastic library-fortress was the first area of the original Baldur's Gate, a place for introductory sidequests like curing a sick cow, finding a book in a haystack, and murdering rats in a storehouse. Classic stuff, most of which I managed to miss the first time I played it because I was naive enough to think I should get on with my quest instead of thoroughly rinsing the tutorial zone for every possible bit of XP. Oops.
While you do get to return to Candlekeep in chapter six of Baldur's Gate, we almost got to revisit it again in Baldur's Gate 3. "I had a bunch of ideas for it," lead writer Adam Smith told Rock Paper Shotgun. "I think that it's a good setting, partly because it's going back to where it all began. So that was always compelling. But also because you get an academic dungeon, and there's something interesting about that kind of library dungeon. It's vast, you know, within the lore. And the idea of having this place where you need to go to do research or something, or you need to go down into it. And then you also say, well, this is where the Bhaalspawn was raised—you know, it's very, very attractive."
