“A scripter was convinced that it would make the scene complete if you could be turned into a wheel of cheese,” Larian Studios’ lead systems designer Nick Pechenin tells me. The main story of Baldur’s Gate 3 is about an invasion of tentacle-mouthed creatures that wouldn’t look out of place in one of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu horror stories, so a sidequest where a disgruntled wizard transforms you into cheese may seem out of place. But moments like this encapsulate why Larian is the game developer that comes closest to capturing the anarchic freedom of real-world sessions of Dungeons & Dragons.
More than 20 years ago, before Mass Effect and Dragon Age, before even Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, much-loved developer BioWare made its name with Baldur’s Gate and its sequel. “When the original games came out, they were the bleeding edge of what was possible technologically, visually, and story-wise,” says Pechenin. “BioWare was trying to release a game that was as beautiful and as technologically powerful as could be humanly achieved at that stage; that’s what we are trying to do.”
