Baldur's Gate 3 is making its long-awaited full release on PC in August, PS5 in September, and perhaps Xbox Series X/S sometime beyond that. This RPG embraces everything about Dungeons and Dragons 5E and turns it into a highly reactive world where no two players will see the exact same story. Of course, creating so many branching moments and permutations is not easy. Baldur's Gate 3 features over 174 hours of cutscenes just to accommodate all of this.
Recently, Game Rant sat down with Baldur's Gate 3 lead writer Adam Smith to talk about every ounce of writing that went into this work, including the characters and their romances, the game's plenitude of cat dialogue, the various permutations in the quest and story design, and much, much more. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Could I get you to state your name and role?
A: I'm Adam Smith, and I'm the lead writer on Baldur's Gate 3 from Larian Studios.
Q: In regard to the subclasses, how is the writing team involved and do they all adhere to the handbooks or expansions that these subclasses come from?
A: The subclasses are much more on the gameplay side. For the writing, we tend to react to class rather than subclass, so it's mostly on the gameplay side. For the adherence to the handbook, everything else is a translation, right? Very early on in the early access, we had our take on the ruleset and how it should work in the video game. I think they got most of it right. There were some things that we experimented with and played around with, and it has continued. It's always 'What works here in our campaign, in our world, getting maximum utility out of the subclasses?'
The Way of Shadow Monk is my favorite, partly because we added it last week and I have been playing and experimenting with it. Once you see what's possible for your shadow monk in the city, you realize why you want to be that monk in the city because the monk in the wilderness, it's fine. It doesn't make a huge amount of sense to me. Once you're in a city environment, you're skipping across rooftops, you're faster than everyone else, you can escape guards, and you can also do your hit-and-run tactic on things.
Q: It's been said that the story is bigger than all the Lord of the Rings movies combined. Did you see it growing that big when you first started on this project?
A: No. Never. No. I mean, we knew that it was a big story. We knew the climax had to be earned. To go back to the D&D aspects for a second, if you take a level 1 adventurer and then you're going to end at level 12, the power curve is so big by that point. They're so insanely powerful compared to a normal person that we need to put them up against things of equal value or greater power to make the challenge bigger. We knew players couldn't be running around fighting goblins for 100 hours.
We need to keep raising the stakes and to keep raising the stakes, you need to earn it. You need time to earn it, so we knew it'd be big. What we didn't realize at first, I think, is how dense it would be and how complex it would be. So it's not back-to-back like all of these books and all of these Game of Thrones series or whatever that press release said. To use the Lord of the Rings example, we're giving you a game where you can start as Frodo in the Shire. Then, you can say I'm going to end up at the Prancing Pony, and I'm going to end up meeting with my Hobbit friends on the way.
But, when your Hobbit friends catch up, you can just kill them and then just carry on. When you meet with Gandalf, you can just say f*ck this quest. I don't care about that. You can wear The Ring too often and go mad. You know, we let you do that. So your Lord of the Rings story could be you are the guy who did walk into Mordor. You're probably going to get your ass kicked, but we let you do it. Rather than it being this is the length of it, it's more this is the complexity of it. This is how much there is.
Some of it depends on the different companions you might have with you. You saw that Jaheira will help you in certain situations. Sometimes, they're unhelpful as well. They sometimes screw things up. Karlach, you know, she's a barbarian. She's really angry. When she rages out, she sets on fire. She's an infernal barbarian, our own little creation, and we have a scene in the game where you encounter a really dangerous person who has a really dangerous set of minions around him. Everyone in your party is like, 'let's just keep it chill,' but Karlach is like 'I'm going to f*cking wreck him.'
A true barbarian.
She's really great. I forgot about this, but you could actually just be like, 'Okay, guys, let's leave it to her' and she just gets arrested. You have to break her out of jail or just leave her there to rot, you know. That's only going to happen in some people's stories because there are all these different versions of the story. You're never going to get all of it back to back, it's impossible. You can't get it all in one playthrough.
You can have most of the companions on a single playthrough. You can keep them in camp, you can swap them in and out, and you can do all the stories. You can't do every romance in one playthrough because some of them are okay with that, and some of them aren't okay with that. We genuinely have it where some of them are like, 'Oh, I see you were hooking up with such and such as well, that's fine. I'm cool with it.' They're not bothered. Some of them will be like 'I saw you were flirting with such and such, and I'll break your neck if you do that again.' Which happens? We have characters who will say, 'Hey, I've decided that I like you, get rid of the other one,' and then you have to have that conversation, all while this other stuff's going on as well.
There are two companions that you can never have in the same party because one is only available if you kill the other, which is cool. So yeah, I mean, it's very complicated.
Q: Speaking of romance, how did Larian manage writing all of that and trying to adjust for all these possible permutations?
A: Part of the answer is we have really good designers, and all our writers are designers as well. For the romance in particular, we had one person dedicated to it, who literally worked out all other permutations, sat down and worked it out, and then gave us dialogue files and said, 'I need this reaction to this, I need this to this, I need this to this.'
We wrote it all and then we tested it, and we see what works and what doesn't feel quite right. They would do that, but you know, it happens with an army. I mean, like, there's not a single line of dialogue in the game that one person can take credit for. Because even if you're the one who wrote it, the artists made it look good, and the voice actor performed the hell out of it. The answer is always because somebody did their job really well. That's how it works.
In terms of the actual writing, every one of the companions has their own writer. They all have a dedicated writer, but they do a lot of other stuff as well. We don't have anyone who only does an origin, but they know them so well. At this point, they've been working with them for six years. So if I say to like Lae'zel's writer, 'hey, I need a line for when Lae'zel walks in on me having sex with a druid,' they just go okay and they just do it because they know the character. You know, that was probably too quick. They all have these characters in their heads.
Q: There are some returning characters and references from the first two games, so how did the approach differ between these legacy characters and original characters?
A: I mean, Minsc is a weird one because he is so popular. On the surface, he's really simple. Slotting him into our game was actually quite complicated because Minsc, as a character on a screen in Baldur's Gate 1 where it's isometric, you don't really need to think about how weird he is. Suddenly, we're like, 'Okay, we're going to model this guy in 3D, and he's going to look like a real person.' Like, he's really weird. We drilled into it and, you know, he has Boo, he has his hamster on his shoulder. He doesn't yet because you haven't seen that yet, but he does get reunited with his pet hamster. And it's a lot of fun.
However, it's really challenging because, suddenly, he's in a much more realistic world, and he's suddenly in high definition. We need him to be believable, as weird as he is. There's a bit with Minsc that I'm really proud of where you can ask him about the old days. You can ask him about Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, he reflects on it, and he says, 'You know, oh, everyone tells the stories about it. I don't remember half of them. There's one thing I remember.' And then he tells a story, which is really sad.
He says, 'This is what I remember because that's the one who didn't survive. We lost her.' It genuinely comes out of nowhere, and it's just like holy shit. Then Boo squeaks, and he's just like, 'Yeah, I know. I miss her too.'
It really gets me. Yeah. Humanizing Minsc was a tough thing.
I can see how that would take a lot of work. I mean, he crawled out of a Mimic.
Oh, it really does. Yeah, Jaheira was easier in the humanizing sense because she came very early in terms of wanting her and finding a space for her. There's this element of wanting the connection to the past games, and we have the connection in a lot of ways that aren't just the two characters. But when you hear her, she's somebody who survived this, she saw the crisis of the past, and she survived it. She's somebody who has traveled the world, put right many wrongs, and seen far too many people die. She is just about ready to hang up her swords and call it a day.
When you first meet her, she's really just like, 'There's no hope left. We're f*cked. Everything's finished.' It's a really bleak moment. Then, she looks at you and says, 'I think you might be who we were waiting for. You're the new heroes.'
That's a really cool moment because it's the passing of the torch moment. The other really cool moment is if she says that and you just gut her. You can do that as well, like you got it wrong, lady!
Q: I can't even imagine how many world states that would even be.
A: I don't even know. I mean, at one point, we were running through the origin characters, testing permutations with them, and saying, 'Have we seen this aspect? Have we seen this aspect?' I realized that for one of them, just to test every branch of this story, I needed to play the game 18 times.
I mean, there's a lot and some of this is the romance stuff. You can see some of it by save scumming, but some of it is a completely different story that makes it that much more complicated. Then, it works on a faction level as well, and by the time you reach the ending, you've told your own story.
Q: Wow, yeah. The rolling of the dice feels as high risk as an actual tabletop game.
A: A lot of time went into conversations around the timing of that and the sound of it because we needed it to feel like there was tension. It's great. Some of the best moments are when things go wrong, and some players will always reload if it doesn't go the way they want. That's fine. But trying to get out of bad situations and living with the consequences is fun too.
We are not precious about our own darlings like, you know, the characters will kill each other sometimes. You can kill them yourself. One of the maddest things in the game is like Karlach, one of my favorite characters, is a full origin character. You can play as her, you can have her as a companion, she has full romances, she has everything you'd expect. A lot of work went into that character, and immediately upon meeting her, you can cut her head off because somebody asked you to.
On the flip side, we have Minthara who is one of the leaders of the goblins in Act One. She's one of the bad guys, and your main quest is to kill her and the other bad guys. If you don't kill her, you can recruit her and take her to the end of the game. She's got a full romance arc and everything, but most people just kill her.
Q: Going back to the origin characters, what can you tell me about the additions of The Dark Urge?
I think of The Dark Urge as a hybrid, so it's an origin character but also a custom character. It's both at the same time. You can choose the race, you can choose the class, and it doesn't have to be a Dragonborn. The Dark Urge can be a Halfling Cleric, it can be a Half-Orc Monk, or anything you want. However, you'll always have the storyline which, in very simple terms, is you woke up on the Nautiloid with no memory, but you really want to kill someone right now.
You have these moments where you'll be encountering the scenes that everyone else encounters, but you have different options. Some of the options are to resist the urge, and some of them to indulge in it. For instance, Gale the Wizard comes through that portal, but if you're playing The Dark Urge, you have a dialogue option where you imagine cutting his hand off. If you choose that, everything fades out, you hear screaming, and you come back to realize you've just murdered that man. But you don't remember doing it.
It ties into the setting of the story very, very strongly, and you get plagued by these thoughts, visions, and dreams. Sometimes, you go to sleep and wake up to a dead body in camp. You don't remember doing that. You have to hide the body from your companions or confess to it. Of course, the natural thing for them to assume is that it's probably the parasite, but why's it not happening to them? SPOILER: It's not the parasite.
Q: What can you tell me about the new Dragonborn race too?
A: Yeah, Dragonborns are not quite outsiders like the Gith, who are literally aliens from a different plane, but they're very much fish out of water. Dragonborn are pretty uncommon, so people often going to react them in different ways. You know, 'we don't see your kind very often.' You get a little bit of that, and people are pretty intimidated by them as well. They have their own cultural notes. The typical Dragonborn is about clan, order, and belonging, but you don't need to play the typical Dragonborn either. You can play it however you want.
A lot of your options are going to be persuading people to stick together, they are big on teamwork, but they also have the whole draconic ancestry trying. If you are in a situation where dragons are involved, you'll have connections there as well. And with it being a D&D game, there are going to be these situations.
Q: Changing gears drastically, how did you approach cat dialogue?
A: I think 90 percent of the cat dialogue is written by one writer who either really likes cats or really hates them, and I can't tell. She nailed this. I think everyone has a favorite cat. In the game, there's a bunch of them. My favorite cat in the game, when you hover over her, is called Your Majesty.
It's in this rundown tavern. If you click on the cat and you've got Speak with Animals, then it's just like, 'What do you want?' You can ask what everyone calls the cat, and it'll answer. I think it's Kittykins, but'll prefer to be called Your Majesty. You can say 'I'm going to call you Kittykins,' and it's just like, 'Please don't.' If you say thank you, it'll just tell you to go away.
What I love about it is it's just this snooty-ass cat. At one point, you can be like 'You're great,' and it'll say 'I don't think you're very great.' You can ask it to join your company, and it'll say 'I'd rather die' and just walk away. It's the most cat thing I've ever seen.
Q: I know we keep going back to those permutations, but how hard are they to also manage on the quest level?
A: The serial killer quest you saw, the one with the Speak with the Dead spell, is one of the biggest headaches I've ever had. This is a quest in which a serial killer is killing people around the city, so you can unlock the quest at various points, wherever you find a body.
When you find any of the murder scenes, then you can begin the investigation. Your investigation then takes you to look for other murder scenes eventually, so we need to know which order you're finding them in and react to that. We need to know whether there's an investigator on the spot or not. You could have killed the investigator because we let you do that. We even have cases where you can find out a murder is going to happen and try to get there in time to stop it from happening. Or you might not get there in time. You can even intervene in the killings by being there when the murderer is there.
That's just one quest, it's madness, and that's just the beginning of it. Then, you start to look for evidence, and you just go deeper and deeper into it. It leads to places you'd never imagine. I mean, it feels like a side quest, but it's not a side quest. It goes deep, literally. Even just working out how the quest starts was a headache, and then in co-op, someone else could find a different body. We have to account for that too.
Q: As a wrap-up, there's likely going to be a whole lot of new players outside those who played early access, so what would you say to them as they start building their own worlds within Baldur's Gate 3?
A: Don't be afraid to f*ck things up. Improvisation is part of tabletop, and it's part of our game as well. If it feels like things are going badly, try and survive. Surviving by the skin of your teeth will sometimes give you something that you didn't know you had, whether it's slightly different banters, slightly different recovery, or a completely different story. Don't be afraid to poke the edges of the world, and don't be afraid to experiment. We've got character builds, multiclassing, and origin characters. Experiment and see if you can use the thunderwave to get Gale across that chasm. The answer may often be no, but sometimes it works. Baldur's Gate 3 is a big world of connections, systems, toys, characters, and more. Experiment with it, play with it, and see what's possible.
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Baldur's Gate 3 is coming to PC on August 3 and PS5 on September 6. An Xbox Series X/S version is in development.