Yesterday, Larian Studios provided Baldur’s Gate 3 fans with the final juicy details of what will be included with the full version of the game. During the last pre-launch Panel from Hell live stream, CEO Swen Vincke and other developers presented the upgraded character creation system, delved into the many romance options allowed by the game (including mating with a druid transformed into a bear, apparently), and unveiled the last playable Origin called the Dark Urge. This is a customizable character who doesn’t remember a thing except a seething urge to kill everything and everyone.
While those were the highlights, Larian also shared many smaller yet equally exciting Baldur’s Gate 3 details. For example, CEO Swen Vincke discussed a dynamic newspaper system for the titular city, and it can be tampered with by the player.
We’ve got a newspaper system in the city. It’s gonna react to your actions, it’s gonna cover stuff that you’ve been doing. What I really like about the newspaper is that you can manipulate it. You can basically break into the printing house and you can start swapping stories around. There’s going to be a big surprise when you do that.
The game is going to react to that. What goes into the newspaper is going to affect what the citizens of the city are going to think about you.
It’s one of those things that may sound relatively less important but actually increases the believability of a virtual world. Pushing reactivity even further than the already great levels seen in Divinity: Original Sin 2 was clearly a major goal for Larian. The city itself will be explorable seamlessly and players will be able to interact with pretty much any NPC in the bustling Sword Coast metropolis.
Overall, Baldur’s Gate 3 is poised to offer an astounding amount of roleplaying options:
- 11 playable races (Human, Elf, Half-Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, Halfling, Half-Orc, Tiefling, Drow, Githyanki, and Dragonborn) & 31 subraces
- 12 classes (Barbarian, Druid, Fighter, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, Bard, Monk, Warlock, Paladin, Cleric, and Wizard) and 46 subclasses
- Over 600 spells and actions
- 7 playable protagonists with their own stories (the so-called Origin characters)
- 170 hours of cinematics
- 2 million words of script
The game also supports multiclassing as well as resetting your class/stats. Originally launched on Steam Early Access in October 2020, Baldur’s Gate 3 has already sold over two million units. The full release was originally scheduled to drop on August 31st, but Larian chose to bring the date forward to August 3rd on PC to avoid clashing with Bethesda’s Starfield. The PlayStation 5 version will drop on September 6th, while the Xbox Series S|X version is being held up by a technical issue encountered by the developers in their endeavors to implement split-screen multiplayer on the Series S.
