Baldur’s Gate 3 featured a lot of absolutely epic moments throughout the course of its long and satisfying storyline, but as with any game, some great ideas were unfortunately cut in in the final version.
Speaking to IGN at the Game Developers Conference 2024, Larian Studios founder and game director Swen Vincke revealed that Ketheric Thorm, the first of the three main villains in Baldur’s Gate 3, was originally supposed to be redeemable by players. Indeed, the dialogue in the final game leans toward that direction, but at the very end, it doesn’t follow through. It’s a shame, as it could have been a
You could convince him. So if you play the game and there’s a moment where you can convince him and you can see that a moment where he breaks, that moment led to recruitment normally. We cut that out when we were rescoped. It was part of the fixing of Act Two when we were stuck on it. That was what happened in the rescoping. He was supposed to be in your camp while you were dealing with Gortash and with Orin. So he became a source of information on them, and he could trust, you could get him to his arc. He could then be convinced by him to go to this side. So it was a great story.
Ketheric Thorm’s turning wasn’t the only major cut from Baldur’s Gate 3: players were also supposed to visit Hell (more than just the little trip to Raphael’s mansion) and even the Gith plane.
You were supposed to have an entire visit to Hell. Vlaakith’s Palace, and I keep on forgetting, Tu’narath, the Gith plane. We were going to go to the city, Candlekeep, where the original Baldur’s Gate 1 started. So there was all things that we considered that we, at some point, there was a moment where the maps were going to be smaller, and so we were going to be able to give you bigger diversity of location that you would explore. But then the problem with those massive is that the sense of exploration wasn’t really present. So that’s why we killed a whole bunch of them.
Unfortunately, Larian doesn’t plan to make any new content for Baldur’s Gate 3, as announced by Swen Vincke a few days ago. However, that doesn’t mean the studio is completely done with its award-winning masterpiece. Beyond mere bug fixes and the announced cross-platform mod support, Vincke said there are some ‘big features’ still in development, and the epilogue work is still underway, especially for the evil endings.
