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In a dark dungeon of bar in Paris, after getting a tantalising look at the sequel to one of the games that shaped my teens I was taken to an alcove and left to await my interviewee.



After hearing whispers in the dark, for a moment I thought I saw the shadow of tentacles on the wall, then footsteps drawing ever closer.

A man suddenly entered despite his feet not seeming to touch the floor. He entered the alcove with an awesome t-shirt and a crazed look in his eyes, and it was in that moment I knew, I might not make it out of here alive.



In a calm reassuring English accent that at times sounded louder in my head than out loud he introduces himself.

He tells me his name is Adam Smith, possibly a made up name I noted as he sat down and I began to ask him questions about the up and coming Baldur's Gate 3 .



Adam tells me he’s a Senior Writer on BG 3 and is one of a team of 14 writers working on the game. He is responsible for one of the pre-built Origin characters, certain scenes, quests and key story moments.

(Image: Larian)



What are some of your influences ?

Adam Smith : It's mostly D&D, and the actual source books. When we first started working on BG3 we spent a huge amount of time researching.

We knew what our main plot was, we knew we wanted Mind Flayers and to be strongly tied to the first two games.

One of the questions that comes up again and again is, 'why is it called Baldur's Gate 3?' and it's because it is a true sequel.

All the events of the past games, we studied thoroughly and what their impact in the world was. I'm a huge horror buff so and you can imagine how delighted I was about the teaser trailer and the Mind Flayer transformation because I actually wrote the transformation stuff.

Wizards of the Coast had never actually described how Ceremorphosis works. All they said was it takes seven days, you get the thing in your head and then seven days later turned to a Mind Flayer.

So we said to them, we want to show it and we want to talk about it in more detail because our characters are infected. I wrote a document for them and I said day by day what happens and it was so hideous, and all of that came from Cronenberg stuff and body horror.

Yeah, I can definitely tell.

Adam Smith : We thought, how do we make this something that's terrifying? And we gave Wizards the document and thought this might be a little bit too much, but they loved it.

Most inspiration came from Forgotten Realms lore .There's so much, it's decades of stuff to look at, and getting the ideas from there and the deeper we dug the more weird stuff we found.

What are you guys most excited about what this game?

Adam Smith : Everything really. I think the Origin characters are something that Divinity did incredibly well, we took that further. So with Astarion, you play as a vampire. So each character has something unique, but also the way that they talk to each other and how they build relationships.

The fact that you can just kill them, sometimes you'll have to fight them. There was a point when you could sell survivors over to the Drow. That is the first hub you meet and full of innocent people. You can destroy it completely. You can do it just by walking in and do it yourself. But you can also just sell them out. And when you go back there, it's pretty harrowing.

You see the consequences of your actions?

Adam Smith : Yeah, we really want to go deep on that. These real senses of 'I just did something terrible or something great'. It's not just the case of people saying "oh, you're a great hero", or "you're a horrible villain", but the world is changed by the things you do.

The other layer of that is you'll have your companions actually commenting on it and reacting to it. The relationships can go into so many different ways because of that.

As soon as we started to get the origins stories in, and getting the banter between characters at the campsite, because you go deeper and deeper into the the nights, you know, we have a lot of stuff that starts to happen at the campsite.

Suddenly I felt like this doesn't feel like a story we are telling. It feels like a story is happening. And that was a big moment.

I think that for me when we just play in the office to test something, it does feel like playing a real RPG. It's meaty, is deep, it's difficult, but there's just so much reactivity in it.

Other than the titular city Baldur's Gate, do we see any other locations from the previous games?

Adam Smith : We're on the Sword Coast. So we start 200 miles east of Baldur's Gate. You're not gonna travel the whole 200 miles, but you're going to see a lot of stuff on the way there.

Then when you get there, there's going to be things that are recognized within the city, there'll be specific places, and taverns.

You'll see things and say "I recognize that. Oh, that's changed a little bit", or "what's happened here", and you can dig into that. Some of it will just be visual, some of it will be in dialogue.

There's other parts of the Sword Coast that we were really excited to go to as well. It's funny, one point was when Sven [Larian co-founder] went into a place underneath a Druid Grove. You know in Dungeons and Dragons, that you start going downwards, there are certain places you might end up.

(Image: Larian)

The trailer looks like it conveys a much darker tone than the original Baldur's Gate and looks more in line with BG 2. Is BG 3 a darker game?

Adam Smith : When something is this size, the amount of time that we're gonna be playing it for, and the amount of times they'll hopefully replay it. And there's not one tone, there's many tones.

You'll have areas of the game that are quite light hearted, you'll have relationships that are very light and very loving. And you'll have incredibly dark points as well. So yes, there's an incredibly dark tone at points there has to be because of the nature of the story. But we don't want to feel like one kind of tone. And even in terms of genre, we flit around. One of the overriding things is just the sense of needing to survive.

That's how we start. There's a terrible thing happening to you. How are you going to survive? That carries through the entire game.

There are a lot of choices in the tone that you get from the game yourself. And again, with the Origin characters, playing as Astarion. He's way more blasé about some of the dark stuff because he's lived through worse, or died through worse.

But some of them are much more horrified and much more afraid of what's happened. So the tone shifts and it should. If you had one tone for 100 hours, then you wouldn't have a job, right?

Are any of the original voice cast returning? I'm hoping for Jim Cummings as Minsk

Adam Smith : I'm saying nothing.

How linked to BG1 and 2 is this game? Do any of your choices or characters from the previous games carry over

Adam Smith : There's no save game coming across or anything like that.

(Image: Larian)

Which would make sense as that story of those games concludes.

Adam Smith : Yeah, exactly. Well, this is a really important point. I think that that story was told, and told incredibly well. What we don't want to do is go back and change that and start saying 'oh but what if this?'. So instead, we take that as an incredibly important historical event that has left scars on the city or the world.

And there are people who remember it like Volo, but there are other people from the old games that will make appearances and we can't name them.

We're 100 years later and some people live a very long time in Faerun, and some races are naturally long lived. And also magic helps people to live like Volo. Canonically he is alive and there's a long story behind that which he'll probably tell you, but he is the canonically existing in published material. Volo is still around and it's kind of a miracle because he just gets himself into some much trouble.

We wanted to have very strong links to past games, like the the sense of embracing darkness. The sense of having something inside you. Something about yourself that is unfamiliar, that may offer power burden with consequences. That idea of choice and consequences baked into it, but also that sense of feeling something about yourself being wrong, and having the choice of saying 'would I want that power?', or the choice to turn away from it, and there'll be consequences for both.

(Image: Larian)

How do you strike a balance between honouring the original games, and creating something new and innovative?

Adam Smith: I mean, all of it's hard. But it's just exciting. I think one is that if you stay true to D&D then you stay true to Baldur's Gate, and we're incredibly true to D&D. So there's a lot of things where there are elements of Divinity that you will see. But a lot of that is in terms of how we treat the environment. And a lot of the reasons that stuff works in Divinity is because that's how the world works.

Baldur's Gate wouldn't have existed unless a few brilliant people hadn't said 'we want to make our own game'. We want to make our own story. If we were trying to copy, we're trying to be too beholden to [the previous games], we wouldn't be doing the game because BG 1 and 2 are wildly different. That's important to us, that we say we know the core values of what the name Baldur's Gate means: to do something innovative and to do something that feels fresh.

There’s always been a disconnect between playing D&D tabletop and having the option to do 'anything' and limitations of video games. How have you addressed this problem?

Adam Smith : It's one of the main things we want to do. We often think about it as we want Larian to be the Dungeon Master and we want it to be your game. So that means we give you as much freedom as we possibly can, but within our campaign.

We have a few home rules, we have all these settings and characters but the way you interact with them is completely up to you.

One of the things that really helps is multiplayer. So if you play single player you still get the same experience of the companions talking to you and having their own opinions about things. But in multiplayer, you can absolutely be the person who ruins your own party's plans or you can be the person who's supportive.

Like with the combat, the stealth is really important to us, we want you to feel playing a proper rogue. And stealth is incredibly tricky. It's one of the reasons the forced turn-based mode is so important to us because you can just click at any point and go to turn-based. You get view cones that you can manipulate by turning lights off using special arrows and make darkness by blocking line of sight with things that you move.

How do you top villains like Sarevok and Jon Irenicus? They such legendary bad guys.

Adam Smith: In terms of villains obviously we can't say anything yet. There's obviously some Mind Flayers involved...





What is a Mind Flayer for those who don't know?

Adam Smith : A Mind Flayer, also called an Illithid, is an alien creature. It has long tentacles, looks very Cthulhuian.

It can reach into your mind, it can dominate your mind, it can eat your brain, that's what they do. They eat brains, that's how they survive. They are kind of made of brain tissue, their entire bodies are made of grey matter.

They have very long history actually. We work so closely with every team and every single shot in the CGI trailer had writers' eyes on it. Right at the very beginning, the very first shot that you'll see of the game when you play is an engraving.

That's in the Nautaloid ship and if you freeze frame on that, then you get the entire history of the Illithid empire.

We don't want to have just "here's a bad guy". I think that takes us a long way already. There's lots of people that you'll meet, some of them you'll think of as the villain of the story and then later on you find out" No, no, that was a puppet of the villain of the story". He actually isn't necessarily a villain.

And also, what is good and what is evil? It's such a core thing in D&D, but also it's kind of up to you...

Love Island is evil.

Adam Smith : Hahaha, Damn it, that's in the game!

Baldur's Gate 3 will be coming to early access and Google Stadia sometime in 2020