At Summer Game Fest 2023’s PC Gaming Show, Larian Studios took the virtual stage to show off Baldur’s Gate 3. More specifically, they demonstrated the titular city, which has been upgraded to be fully seamless between its districts. A few key developers commented on this shift made during development.
Farhang Namdar (World Building Director): The city of Baldur’s Gate is seamless, which it originally wasn’t going to be.
Joachim Vleminckx (Art Director): You only can judge the game when you have all the components together and if the mix doesn’t work we start over.
Farhang Namdar: At some point, CEO Swen Vincke said ‘Can’t we just connect everything?’ and that was a very interesting day.
Chrystal Ding (Associate Writing Lead): One of the things that that’s done is it’s brought a level of believability and immersion and also complexity that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.
Farhang Namdar: Now it was this seamless giant organism and it really, really felt good.
Adam Smith (Lead Writer): Now you’re able to look out of a window and see down the city slopes. You’re seeing down toward the docks and you’re like, one of my teammates might be down there.
Chrystal Ding: It feels like you are walking around a place where there are lots and lots of people living their actual lives.
Swen Vincke (CEO): You have crowds that are walking around. You can talk to pretty much anybody and they react to every single thing. It’s very alive in that sense.
Lawrence Schick (Expert Writer): Every person that you meet in Baldur’s Gate has got a story to them. We actually build anticipation through all these characters that you’ve met, through all these situations that you’ve been through. All the stories that you have been following and all the decisions that you’ve been making come to fruition in that city.
Adam Smith: The great thing is if you so choose you can be another bad thing that’s happening to the city. You can arrive and be like, this place is on fire, and then you can throw petrol all over it.
Farhang Namdar: During production, we felt like the city was our destination.
Swen Vincke: We spent I think three or four times as much effort on the city than we originally planned, but the result, the feeling of walking in there, is just fantastic.
When you walk into the city, the noise of everybody talking to each other, the knowledge that everywhere you look you can go there and you can do something, the knowledge that you can fly through, it’s great.
Following nearly three years of early access, Baldur’s Gate 3 will be released on August 31st for PC and PlayStation 5. An Xbox Series S|X version is also in production, though it may come at a later date due to technical issues.
