The director of Baldur's Gate 3 has revealed his least-favourite D&D class - but also explained that it took a lot of work to get right in the game.
In an interview with Dungeons & Dragons, Swen Vincke was discussing a few of the game's systems that required a disproportionate amount of work to get right; spells like Speak with Animals or Seeming "are things that require a lot of effort from a development point of view," but Vincke says that he's happy they made their way into the final game.
That's a sentiment that extends to Vincke's least-favourite class - the humble Bard. "If you see how much effort went into the Bard," he says, before revealing that "I never would play a Bard in my life, I wouldn't even be close to touching it."
Vincke's anti-Bard sentiment extends back at least as far as the early development of Divinity: Original Sin 2: "We had a poll, and my head of production said we should do a Bard. I said 'we should do a Polymorph class for sure, we should not be doing a Bard, nobody likes playing a Bard'." In that case the audience sided with Vincke, but in D&D, where the Bard is a standard class, they had to be included regardless of the director's personal preferences.
I do see Vincke's point - mechanically, the Bard is all over the place, and their sky-high Charisma scores mean that they're a DM's worst nightmare. However, that's exactly why my first Baldur's Gate 3 playthrough was a Bard, and why yours should be too - it's a slightly less punishing way of making your way through the game while you're still getting to grips with it (here are the best Baldur's Gate 3 Bard class builds, if you're tempted).
Vincke's Bard dev comments are in line with his desire to make sure every Baldur's Gate 3 player has a good experience, even if only 0.01% of players make a specific choice.
Perhaps contributing to Vincke's concerns was the amount of work that went into Baldur's Gate 3's Bards: "With what the team did on the Bard - the music playing together and all the insults, all the taunts that you could do, it was really well done, but it was a lot of effort trying to support non-combat interactions."
Those 'non-combat' moments include using the Bard's musical gifts to distract NPCs while a more roguish player robbed them blind, but between Cutting Words, Bardic Inspiration, and the music that plays whenever your song-slinger casts a spell, there's a lot of smaller details that are captured very effectively for the Bard. Even if Vincke doesn't like them very much.
I accidentally made the best possible Baldur's Gate 3 party.
