​There’s A New Baldur’s Gate And It’s About People Turning Into Monstrous Squids

It's official, Baldur's Gate is back and Larian is making it. The developer of Original Sin 1 and 2, two of the best RPGs in recent years has its hands on one of the most famous RPG series in gaming history. It's been nearly 18 years since Baldur's Gate 2's last expansion, Throne of Bhaal, so it's about damn time someone dusted it off for a new game.

You can see in the teaser trailer below that the years have not been kind to the city. A heavy dust hangs over Baldur's Gate and the Flaming Fist, the mercenary troops that grip the city, lie dead in the streets. The thing that killed them? Mind flayers. In Dungeons & Dragons these strange creatures begin life a tadpole that, if it can get into the mouth, ears, or nose of a human, will burrow into the brain and grow. When it comes to full term it will burst out of the skull and skin of the unlucky sap, turning them into a tentacle-faced monster.

That's all we have to go on for now. Baldur's Gate is taken over and the forces of mankind are being devoured from the inside out by Cthulhu-like creatures.

We spoke with Larian founder Swen Vincke about what it's like to bring Baldur's Gate back, how it came to pass, and what exactly their take on the famous series will look like. After all, the old Baldur's Gate games made in the Infinity Engine, weren't as sandbox-y as the newer Divinity games. In Divinity, every element of a scene interacts with the next. If a character stands in a pool of blood, you can conduct electricity through it, shocking them, or freeze it, causing them to lose their footing.

In Divinity: Original Sin, your spells and actions interact in a sandbox

Combat in the Divinity games is very different from the old Baldur's Gate games, what can we expect from a Larian-made Baldur's Gate?

Vincke: We make games that have systems. And we give you a world in which you have to overcome a whole bunch of hard challenges. It's up to you to use our systems any way you can to overcome those challenges. We give you a reason to overcome those challenges, which is in the narrative reason, or the origin story, reason... When you look at Dungeons & Dragons, that's literally what they do, also. They give you a hook for an adventure, they give you a reason to go on the campaign. You get your character class, you're supposed to get your background, so you have a reason why you're in this world and why you're looking for adventure, you go on an adventure, and they give you a toolbox of things that you can do.

At the DNA level, it's literally the same thing. If you are looking to see what we're going to do with Baldur's Gate, we're going to stick to this vision, and then we're going to evolve it. It's not a jump back to the Infinity engine, we're not going to try to exactly replicate what Bioware did back in the old days, we're going to make it a Larian game, heavily rooted in Dungeons & Dragons, the lore of Forgotten Realms, and the history of Baldur's Gate as a city.

Will it be recognisably a Dungeons & Dragons game?

The campaign that Wizards of the Coast is launching now, which is Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus, we're right after that. We've been working together with Wizards very closely - they adapted some things in their campaign, we adapted things in what we're going to do so that it would fit with what they were doing. And so now you have a Baldur's Gate story, essentially.

Throne of Bhaal was the last of Bioware's Baldur's Gate games

The Bhaalspawn storyline of the original games was wrapped up in Throne of Bhaal, so how come you're calling this Baldur's Gate 3 if it's not a direct continuation of the series?

So it's set in Baldur's Gate, in the city, but it's also set where the world is at now. The world has evolved since previous campaigns, you had Murder In Baldur's Gate, which was the pen and paper campaign (which the original Bioware games were based on). And now we have Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus. And we're the chapter after that. The things that we are going to be doing in Baldur's Gate are based on all of the lore that happened to Baldur's Gate. By definition, it has links to what's happened in the Bioware games. But it is not the continuation of that story. It is a new story so people who haven't played the previous ones will understand what's happening. People who have played the previous ones will get a lot of references and callbacks to what happened in the previous games,

Are there going to be returning characters?

Some characters are very long lived. So they might. That's as far as I'll go,

Will there be any hamsters returning?

So I'm not giving any detail any of companions yet.

In the original Baldur's Gate, one of your companions carried a hamster called Boo with him wherever he went

The Flaming Fist are having a rough time...

They deserve it. They're corrupt bastards.

What role do they play in the game?

They're going to be friends or obstacles when you encounter them, depending on what you do and how you handle it.

Is it something they've brought on themselves?

I am not going to go into the details. We're not going to talk about the specifics of the story other than what was in the teaser trailer. So, you can clearly see that there is a problem. There are Mind Flayers, there's a Nautiloid hanging in the air, there are people walking the street transforming. So these are all problems for the city.

Looks like the Flaming Fist is no match mind flayers

How did this project come about? Who approached who?

I started the mating ritual [Laughs]. After Original Sin 1 - it was one of the very first things I did. I flew to Seattle, I tried to get their attention. We were a bit too green for them back then, but we kept on talking. And then as we were making Original Sin 2 they suddenly reached out to me and said 'We're seeing what you're doing. Would you be interested in making Baldur's Gate?'. We then had to actually give them a pitch of what we wanted to do, while we were making Original Sin 2. The core of that was good, but we still had to work on it more. Wizards said '[Come back] after you ship Original Sin 2, when you have a bit more time, we can see you're busy right now.' They were very generous in this, I have to say. We came up with what was going to be the core story of Baldur's Gate 3, and they loved it. And so the ball started rolling. And now we're heavy into production.

Are you talking to the old developers?

It's very much Larian's game, but we've been talking to a lot of people. I mean, we wanted to know what the origins were of certain things, to understand where it comes from. We spent a shitload of time at Wizard's offices, I know it like the back of my hands. They spend a lot of time at our offices also. It's been a very good relationship. The day after the teaser trailer, there's a video that will show exactly how close we work together. But his is the Larian version of a Dungeons & Dragons game. So and I think it will appeal to a lot of people as a result of that.

Google's game streaming service is set to change how we game

What does Stadia mean for the game?

It means more people can play it. Anywhere you can access Stadia, which is essentially any screen with internet, and if it's a country that's supported by Stadia, should be able to play. In that sense it democratizes access to the game, which is good, because it does allow us also to put the specs higher. This is our biggest game ever, the production values are very high for us. So the ability to play on a shitty PC, if you want, is a big thing.

There's more to Stadia, it has a lot of community bits that they're adding that are new that we haven't really seen elsewhere. We're deeply integrating those also. The extent to which that actually affects the gameplay is being underestimated right now.

Can you give some examples of that?

No. Anything that they have announced I can talk about, but I can't announce that talk about anything that they didn't announce yet.

If I'm watching someone streaming them and I have a Stadia account, I can drop into their game?

Yeah, so that's a very obvious one. I mean, the ability to just send a link to somebody and say, join my game is very powerful. And for somebody that's making big, hundred-hour multiplayer games, the ability to be able to join at any moment, anywhere you are, on any screen that you want, is going to make it more accessible to people to play multiplayer.

I think part of Original Sin's success is accessibility on a variety of platforms, and the ways of how to play it. If you pick up a controller, the entire UI changes, and you're playing with a controller. You have two controls you go into split screen, you could be playing with somebody on the other side of the world who is playing on his PC or laptop. These are things that should be basics for RPGs, because it's great ways of playing them. So we're going to continue to support those. Stadia allows you to do much more. If we can get more players to play it, we get more money, which you can then waste on our next games. And that's good.

The Divinity games look far better than the Infinity Engine games ever could

Are we likely to see Original Sin 1 and 2 come to Stadia as well?

That would require us to go back to those and we were kind of finishing up with them. We're still doing a bunch of stuff with our gift packs. There's still things coming out for Original Sin that I think will slow down. Although, I've been saying that for years now, that we're going to slow down, but we just keep on adding stuff to it. So I probably shouldn't say anything. It's certainly possible, but we're not working on this right now.

When are you planning on releasing?

I know what I'm planning, I just don't know if... I doubt it will be true. When it's ready, honestly. People have been waiting for a long time already, so they can wait a little bit longer.

Will it come to Early Access?

We're not Kickstarting it, that's for sure. Anything else will evolve. We can't make a game without our community. We're going to be very close to our community and developing this and together we'll evolve towards the game that this should be. We will probably have some clashes with our community, which we always have, but that's inevitable - it's not a democracy. We're making a game. But we want to know what they think we want to listen to their input, they often have a tremendous amount of good ideas, and everything that we can do, we will.

Topics: Baldur's Gate 3, Google Stadia