Baldur's Gate 3 has been praised for the lengths it goes to to allow players to carve their own path through its story - but during development, that freedom was often a point of concern for its developers.
In an interview with GQ, a number of developers weighed in on their reaction to finally releasing the game after six years in development. Writing director Adam Smith mentioned his "overwhelming" sense of relief, discussing how "sometimes we'd do a playthrough and at the end of it, you'd go 'this is really, really good'. Sometimes you'd do a playthrough and go, 'this is so close to being good. But right now, it's really not very good'.
That line between good and not good is a very fine one, and many studios - BioWare and CD Projekt Red among them - have discussed the pitfalls that come with relying on everything coming together at the last moment. But asked what specific pitfalls Larian in particular was facing, lead systems designer Nick Pechenin explained that much of the difficulty stemmed from the sheer extent of player freedom offered by the game.
"It was a big challenge for us to really wrap our heads around how different players can play. You can skip massive chunks of content. We could have playtesters who just never saw areas where you can spend ten hours." I'll confess that that rings true to some aspects of my experience with the game - struggling to gain a foothold in Act 2, I sped through to Baldur's Gate quicker than I would have liked, missing substantial tracts of the second act in the process.
Perhaps, however, that means that the issue is more with the players than with the game. Smith recounts a story where he asked a group of six playtesters which of the game's Origin characters they'd chosen for their Baldur's Gate 3 romances. "Every single one said 'No one will have sex with me!', and I was like 'Oh god, this is the worst thing that can happen in an RPG'." Smith goes on to say, however, that once Larian had looked into the balance and seemingly discovered that this wasn't a problem on their end, they decided that maybe this was a problem for the playtesters to overcome: "I was like, 'I think these guys just aren't very good at it'."
Nevertheless, having dabbled in multiple different playstyles, it still baffles me how seamlessly Larian is able to stitch the game back together around even the most narratively destructive choices.
Chances are they would've picked Shadowheart, along with another 51% of the entire player base.
