Baldur’s Gate 3 was released around a month ago to massive critical and commercial acclaim. In case that wasn’t enough, Larian Studios got the approval of cRPG veteran David Gaider, who worked on Baldur’s Gate II, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and all of the Dragon Age games. Gaider said on Twitter that Baldur’s Gate 3 managed to resurrect the feeling of the first two installments in every way, proving to be a worthy successor.
Yesterday, Gaider returned to talk about Baldur’s Gate 3 on the thorny topic of the cut content, which Larian addressed with the latest community update. The industry veteran (now co-founder of Summerfall Studios and Creative Director of the recently released Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical) claimed BG2 also had a lot of cut content, just like every Dragon Age game, and it’s usually for the best.
Not surprised to hear of the amount of stuff apparently cut from Baldur’s Gate 3. Baldur’s Gate 2 had a mountain of stuff cut over its development, some early and some even after lots of work had gone into it… Almost every game does. Every Dragon Age game did. Heck, even Stray Gods had some considerable cuts.
The things to remember when discussing game cuts:
1. If it was cut late, it probably wasn’t working – technically, conceptually, or both.
2. A lot of cuts were early enough it was never “real” to start with.
3. Most cuts can’t be resurrected. It’d be easier to start over, to be honest.
I think people form this mental image like it was this perfect, functional thing that the devs removed for arbitrary reasons when the truth is a lot would remain cut even if those devs magically got extra time to work on the game.
The latter statement rings particularly true. There is definitely a romanticized idea that the cut content would be extremely beneficial to the game, but in most cases, it is unlikely. Still, Baldur’s Gate 3 will get at least some of that content back, more specifically the character epilogues. The first one dedicated to Karlach was already added with yesterday’s patch #2.
