The Miraculous Story Behind Baldur’s Gate 3

Hello, One Take Shrier here, and today I'm telling one of my favorite stories, the story of Baldur's Gate 3, a video game that should not exist. So, to tell this story, we have to go way back to the beginning of the video game industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Really, let's go back to the 1980s because video games were essentially first being invented then. The Atari um was dominating living rooms, the Famicom was about to hit uh US store shelves as the NES, and people were trying to figure out what a video game even was. And to do that, a lot of people drew inspiration from the game that they had all been playing for years on tabletops, Dungeons and Dragons. And there were a whole bunch of successful franchises that drew from D&D, Wizardry, and Ultima that would wind up becoming would wind up becoming the foundations of of video game franchises and video games for the next four decades or so. Um and at the same time, TSR, which was

the maker of D&D, decided, "Hey, uh everyone's taking our ideas, we might as well make our own games." And they wound up partnering with a couple of different developers to make Dungeons and Dragons games. And a whole bunch of a more than a dozen D&D came games came out during that time period in the 1980s and 1990s, varying quality, I would say. At the same time, there was a publisher named Interplay that was on the rise, led by this guy named Brian Fargo, who might not be a household name to gamers, but is actually one of the forefathers of the video game industry, someone who has played an integral role in uh what we know of as games today, from Interplay to Blizzard and many more. Well, I'll tell his story down the road one day, more on him in the future. But Interplay um had a subsidiary called Black Isle that was led by a guy named Feargus Urquhart. And Black Isle um it was responsible for a whole bunch of stuff. It it made um uh it published and made Fallout. Um uh I don't think it made the first

Fallout game, but like it it wound up being involved with Fallout and was working with a developer in Canada founded by some doctors named BioWare, which released a fairly successful game in 1995 called Shattered Steel with Interplay. At the same time, Interplay had actually acquired the license from TSR to make Dungeons and Dragons games. And they said, "Hey BioWare, why don't we make a D&D game together?" So, BioWare teamed up with Black Isle to make what would be called Baldur's Gate, a role-playing game with these beautiful, for its time of course, beautiful, although they've aged pretty well, beautiful isometric graphics and this detailed recreation of mechanics from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons including the very confusing THAC0 to hit armor class zero as the acronym was called, um, which essentially meant that the lower the number you saw when you equipped armor was the better it was, which was extremely confusing cuz you would be like equipping some like terrible leather armor and have it would have a higher number than the plate mail that you could equip. Um, you had to just

remember that negatives were a good thing. But still, this game, despite some quirks of AD&D, this game was a full package. It had a huge world, it had a ton of quests with like a lot of different potential solutions to them. It had characters who would just interact with each other and disagree with your actions and even leave your party if they didn't like you were doing what you were doing. If you had, if you were kind of like a good aligned character and you were doing the the kind of quote unquote good um, responses to quests and doing good good actions in quests, um, then the evil characters in your party would be like, "Hey, what the fuck?" and they would just bail there or sometimes they would pick a fight with you and turn hostile. Um, you could be good or evil or anything but in between. It really, at the time, felt like this authentic recreation of this huge, well-crafted D&D campaign. And plus, it came with this sleeve. I think I still have mine somewhere that had five CD-ROMs on it, which felt like a lot of value at the time. Um, PC games that used to be on CD ROMs soon were entering an era where nothing will be on on discs, but it used to be that you would

get five CD ROMs with a single game. Um, it also came with this booklet that had all this cool stuff in it. It was it was a very cool package. Um, and of course Baldur's Gate they they didn't really expect much from it, but it became the surprise hit. It wound up selling a million copies in its first year, helped her Interplay turn some some kind of negative financials around, led to an expansion, and then a sequel Baldur's Gate 2, which took things even further. Baldur's Gate 2 was this incredible evolution released just 2 years after Baldur's Gate with a much better story, a bunch of new sub classes, more elaborate side quests, and I think the most important thing that it brought to the table was a higher level cap and a higher level floor. So, in Baldur's Gate 1 you started at level 1, which in D&D, for anyone out there who plays D&D knows, uh, can make the first few hours a little bit rough, especially in those old D&D days, the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2.0 and such. Um, you didn't have many skills you could do. There wasn't a lot you could do at level 1 other than just equip a weapon and whack things with it. Um, the combat didn't get interesting until you got to level three, four, five. By the time you got to Baldur's Gate 2,

you had a lot more options, a lot more spells, a lot more skills, um, and, uh, like by the end of Baldur's Gate 2 you were fighting dragons and liches and delving into the Underdark. It was pretty damn cool. And then there was an expansion, Throne of Bhaal, which like took you into a it basically made you a god, um, by the time you got to the level cap in Throne of Bhaal. You could do all sorts of crazy things and cast level nine spells, and it was pretty damn cool. Um, so the natural next step was Baldur's Gate 3, of course, which Black Isle began developing internally at Interplay. They codenamed it or they called it the Black Hound. Um, but that game was canceled in 2003. Interplay was struggling. They lost the Dungeons & Dragons license, and they would eventually go down to shut down Isle by the end of 2003, which led Feargus Urquhart, who was the boss of Black Isle, and a few people who worked with him to go and co-found a new studio called Obsidian Entertainment that would keep working on RPGs at this point with

the Dungeons & Dragons license under Atari, which was now the owner. The D&D license throughout over the last few decades has just been like a game of hot potato till it finally wound up with Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast where it has stayed in recent years. Um and so Obsidian, Feargus Urquhart's studio, the this new studio that was just founded, which of course you might know now for all sorts of things. They're currently working on a new Fallout game, which we broke the news of a few weeks ago, but they've also made Avowed and Pillars of Eternity and South Park: The Stick of Truth and so many other games, Alien Protocol, oh sorry, Alpha Protocol. An alien game they were working on was canceled. Obsidian in the mid-2000s pitched their own version of Baldur's Gate 3 cuz a lot of those guys had worked on the first two games at Black Isle. And they talked to Atari. They spent about a year working with Atari. Feargus Urquhart would tell me in 2012, I interviewed him about this, and they even reached terms on a contract with Atari to make it happen in 2008. But by

the end of 2008, Atari was going through its own financial struggles and to quote Feargus Urquhart, he told me this in 2012, "We negotiated a whole whole contract, years worth of work, and it turned out they didn't have the money." So that game did not happen. Over the following years, Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 3 became this white whale for a whole bunch of studios because this was the a game that was in a very successful franchise where people really wanted to make it and like had all sorts of ideas for where D&D could go, where this game could go, where the characters could go, where the world could go. It seemed ripe for a sequel, but it just didn't happen. So you had all these studios that were trying to make it happen. Obsidian kept trying to make it happen. InXile, which was a new studio from Interplay's founder and boss, Brian Fargo, they tried to make it happen. Beamdog, which was a new studio from ex-BioWare staff, they tried to make it happen. They actually wound up working um on enhanced editions of the first two games. So, they might have come the closest to potentially working on a Baldur's Gate 3, but that didn't happen.

All sorts of factors, um there were D&D licensing issues as I wound as I mentioned, um Atari, which had this kind of 10-year contract with um Dungeons & Dragons, they wound up in this legal battle with Hasbro over the rights. Hasbro sued them, wound up settling. The game never came together. One of the studios that was interested in Baldur's Gate 3 was called Larian, which was this this developer that was founded in Belgium that had been quietly making niche RPGs for many years. Until I would say 2014, which was their kind of breakout hit, this uh Ultima inspired systems-based RPG called Divinity: Original Sin. And at the time, after that game, they went to Wizards of the Coast, which now had the D&D license, and they said, "Hey, we want to do Baldur's Gate 3." Wizards was not interested. But Larian's founder and president, this guy named Sven Vincke, who ran the company and also ran their games, kept pitching and kept pitching and kept pitching. And by the time Divinity: Original Sin II came out in

2017, the wheels finally started to turn. DOS II, Divinity: Original Sin II, was a big hit. It was a huge leap from the first game. Um it had all sorts of things going for it, the systems-based RPG set in this fantasy world where um as I mentioned in the last video uh about my my most played Steam games, of which Baldur's Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin II are two of them, um this is a game that said yes to the player a lot. Very inspired by the Ultima games, very inspired by {quote} "immersive sims," and was very much a game in which you could just kind of play with systems to your heart's content. You could teleport anywhere you wanted, you could try to break things, you could carry around barrels and throw them at people, and pick up anything in the game. It just It had all sorts of cool systems you could play with. It was a big hit, and Larian was becoming a well-known, kind of prestigious, powerhouse studio. Um so, uh eventually Wizards said, "Yes." And Larian and Wizards teased the game in May of 2019, and then officially announced it at E3

of that year, to which my reaction on Kotaku was, and I quote, "Holy [ __ ] shit." I was working for Kotaku at the time. I was very excited about this. I think this is before a lot of people even knew what this was, but a fair a good number of people who had played Baldur's Gate back in the day knew how special those games were. And also, if you had played any of Larian's games, you knew that they had something going for them, right? So, I actually I wound up speaking to Sven Vincke, who is a guy I've interviewed quite a few times over the years, and Mike Mearls, who was running D&D at the time. I wound up meeting with them at this at a hotel lobby during E3 of 2019 when they had announced the game for my old podcast, Split Screen, and they told me the story of how it all come together. Um it was really the perfect fit, this systemic role-playing and strategic combat of DOS 2 combined with D&D mechanics and story, and you could bring back the characters in the world of Baldur's Gate. They told me that it was going to be set way in the future from Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. So, it wasn't going to be a direct continuation of that story, but maybe you'd see some of the same characters coming back. Um I'll see if that I wonder if that episode of

Split Screen is still online. I'll see if it If it is, I'll post it in the show notes. Um and then I actually got to you preview the game a few months later at this event in New York City on February 24th, 2020. Um whole lot of fun, very fun event. Uh Sven Vincke wound up playing through this early section of the game where you're infiltrating the Goblin camp, and just would let the dice just take him wherever they took him, which means he messed up a lot. Um this was a time before they wound up adding weights to the dice to make them a little bit more player friendly, so there were all sorts of shenanigans, shenanigans, I remember from that preview event. Um but of course, uh that would be the last preview event that I attended in a pre-COVID world because the pandemic hit 2 weeks later, threw a monkey wrench in the development on Baldur's Gate 3 and other games. In fact, I wrote a piece for The New York Times. Um there was a period when before after I stopped working at Kotaku, which was April 2020, and before I started working at Bloomberg, which was May of 2020, um I did a couple of freelance pieces for The

New York Times, including one about how the COVID pandemic was affecting video game production, and I interviewed Sven Vincke about like some of the hardships that COVID had brought, um communication issues, performance capture issues because they were putting so much into cinematics in this game. They needed to do a lot of motion capture and and audio capture, voice capture, performance capture in a studio, and the studios were all closed because of COVID. You can't bring people in there. Um he told me at the time that they were at about 70 to 80% of their productivity, which I think was a common theme during those early months of COVID. So that put a monkey wrench into this whole situation. But still, Baldur's Gate 3 wound up entering early access that fall, um in the fall of 2020, and reached a fair number of people, sold maybe a million, 2 million copies, something like that over the coming years, although it was incredibly buggy. But that period was very helpful for them because it allowed them to iterate and get player feedback and fix bugs on Act 1. There's a reason that Act 1 is the most polished of of any parts of Baldur's Gate 3.

Um over the next 3 years, and it would take another 3 years of development. Um Larian wound up expanding, Vincke told me, from 140 to 450 people, and they ran into all sorts of issues along the way. I did a Bloomberg story about the development of this game in 2023 around the time when it came out, and Vincke told me about all sorts of obstacles that they ran into, in addition, like not even counting the kind of the pressures and hard work and long hours that people on their staff had to work. But like for example, the Russian invasion of Ukraine at the beginning of 2022 forced Larian to relocate staff and close one of its offices, which was in St. Petersburg, Russia, and help get people over the border and and get people kind of safe from out of Ukraine and stuff. Um so all sorts of obstacles along the way. Uh the biggest change for Larian was actually what I mentioned, which is adding cinematics to the game because conversations in the Divinity games in DOS and DOS 2 especially were all done via text boxes. And you had audio, you had voice acting and

narration and stuff. But um there were no kind of close-ups of characters. There was no people moving around while they talked. It was all just you would see the text book text box in front of you and just watch the conversations unfold and you would have the same isometric view whether you were in a conversation or in a battle or walking around the world. Um so to do cinematics, I mean, when you play the game it feels seamless, but that is a whole lot of work to do cinematics for every single conversation. And they needed this massive production pipeline with all sorts of people to work on the cameras and the lighting and a cinematics QA team to go through every cutscene and and find all the bugs and log them and recreate them and so on and so forth. All sorts of programming work. It was a a huge huge effort and that's the reason they had to expand from 140 to 450 people. Then in 2023, they ran into one more obstacle, which was that Bethesda's much hyped Starfield was announced for release in early September 2023, the same week that Baldur's Gate 3 was planned for. At the time, believe

me, this seemed like a major problem because Starfield was set to be the next game from the makers of Starfield and Fallout 3 and Fallout or sorry, the makers of Skyrim and Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 and it had a lot of hype surrounding it. People thought this was going to be a phenomenal new game. So Sven Vincke, he he told me this uh the my Bloomberg story, he told me he called a meeting with his team. Uh everyone's exhausted and burnt out and they're just like sick of working on this game. They're nervous he's about to say that he's delaying Baldur's Gate 3. And instead he goes, "Hey, we're moving this game 4 weeks earlier to avoid Starfield." Which I think led to some some cheers. A little bit of nervousness, but also some cheers. Um probably a few more bugs than it would have shipped with otherwise, though, too. Um because remember, as as amazing as of a game Baldur's Gate 3 is, it did ship with quite a lot of bugs, especially in Act 3. So, August 3rd, 2023, game finally comes out. It is a hit beyond what anybody

expects, anybody at Larian, anybody who's following this game, certainly beyond what I expected. And I expected it to be big, um but not what it became. It sold many millions of copies. I don't know the final number, but it's like well up there. Let me um let me see if I can find the final copy or final number right now. Uh more than 20 million copies to date. Um won a slew of Game of the Year awards, including the big one, Game of the Year. Um I remember uh talking to some of the Larian folks uh um at the JW bar right next to where the Game Awards is hosted um the night before uh the Game Awards. I was sitting with a with a bunch of them, some of their writers and publishing folks, and I was like, "You guys know that you're winning this, right?" And they were like, "No, no, like it could be could be Tears of the Kingdom, could be whatever." I was like, "Come on, like enough with the false modesty nonsense." And I they they eventually kind of acknowledged it. They were actually um planning on announcing, I think it was an Xbox port at the time. Like they were like, "Okay, Sven Vincke is going to come up, he's going to do

his his speech, and you should go watch his speech cuz it's a a pretty good one. Um he's going to do his speech, and he's going to announce the Xbox port." And then Vincke forgot to announce it. So, pretty funny sequence of events. He had to tweet it afterwards. Um so, the game was a massive success, has set up Larian for the future pretty well. Um the secret behind its success, I would say, is beyond these miraculous circumstances that even made it possible, is that Larian is a unicorn in the video game industry. Larian is a studio that is the size of a AAA studio, more than 500 people at this point, but is still privately owned, which means that they are not sus- susceptible, they are not um they do not have to face the same sorts of pressures that a publicly traded company does. They are not accountable to quarterly earnings reports and having to deal with year-over-year growth and having to justify their decisions to investors and and um and their biggest shareholders. They do not have any sort of financial pressures, they do not have to have an IR department, um which I

think allows them to make some decisions that would be riskier for publicly traded companies. Uh Sven Vincke, who is the founder and creative director of the games, president of the company, is also the majority shareholder along with his wife. Um Tencent owns a minority stake and they have a say as well, but uh Sven Vincke is the majority shareholder, which allows Larian to make games on the scale of publicly traded companies, EA, Activision, etc. Or I guess Activision isn't I guess neither of those are public God, there's only like one publicly traded company left. Everyone else has consolidated. Take-Two is the only one left. Take-Two and Ubisoft are the only western publicly traded game company. Anyway, it allows Larian to make games on that scale of AAA games, but also allows them to take risks that like other companies wouldn't, like releasing their games in early access for three plus years or filling them with these choices that most players will never see and making other creative decisions that I think would be considered crazy at other studios. Um so yeah, I mean, a lot of people when

Baldur's Gate 3 came out have asked, has this set a new bar for RPGs? Should this be our new expectation of like what an RPG can do? And I think in many ways the answer is yes, but you also have to consider that it's a miracle that this game even happened and that Larian is a unicorn in the games industry in the first place. Um so, what's next for them? Larian's next game is Divinity announced at The Game Awards last year. Um you might remember the big statue, the big mysterious statue. Um and Larian plans to put it in early access at some point just like BG3. Um I would guess 2027 they do that. Um and I'm sure they will have to deal with all sorts of production hiccups and obstacles along the way just like they did with BG3, but I'm looking forward to seeing what is next for them. And of course, I really want to go replay Baldur's Gate 3 cuz I still haven't done a dark urge run. So, I will hopefully be able to do that at some point in the near future. All right, that's the story. It's quite a tale, huh? I'll see

you all next time.