BALDUR’S GATE III
From bears climbing ladders to the combat ability of giant badgers, Larian tells all.
Look,” David Walgrave pleads with his fellow Larian developers. “The player will respect the fact that they’re a bear. They will not fit through the door, they’ll just have to change back. If my dungeon master told me ‘You can’t get in that house, you’re a huge bear’, I would go ‘OK, you’re the DM, you make the rules’. You just have to accept it.”
Walgrave is a producer, and producers are the reason you’ve ever played a finished game. They are the bulwark against feature creep, the developers who say ‘no’ when everyone else is saying yes. In Baldur’sGate terms, they are Elminster— the sage advisor who shows up in the woods to remind wayward adventurers of their purpose in the game.
It’s not clear what Walgrave did wrong in a past life to become head of production at Larian—a studio that likes to tackle everything and compromise on nothing— but he’s surely paying for it now. “No,” say his colleagues, embodying the player. “No, I simply cannot accept it. I’m a druid, I’m proud of being a druid. I want to be able to walk through a door, I’m a bear, I want to climb a ladder.”
In Baldur’sGateIII, bears will become playable as part of the shapeshifting druid class. And yes, thanks to the elastic imaginations of Larian’s animators, those bears will stride through doors and clamber up ladders. It’s a matter of druidic pride. Producers, Walgrave jokes, have a different role at Larian than at other game companies. “You need a guy to sit in the corner and say no—that’s when you know it’s a really good idea.”
BEAR NECESSITIES
Daft as it is, the ladder climbing befits a class that Larian was drawn to by its versatility. In Dungeons & Dragons, druids can throw magic about from the moment they step out of character creation. Larian has adapted 13 new spells and actions from the tabletop game, and they run the gamut of combat functions, from buffing to damage to crowd control. When enemies draw close, druids can cover themselves in bark and summon a flaming scimitar. It’s a toolbag practically begging you to ditch the party and do a solo run— especially if you pick the Circle of the Land subclass, which lets you pull extra spells from the earth beneath your feet. Talk about green fingers.
It’s the second subclass, however, that Larian refers to as the “real druid experience”—the Circle of the Moon. The literal Bear Grylls of the druidic discipline, this survivalist might spend weeks out in the wilderness without crossing paths with another human being. And even if they did, they might not be recognized as such, because they spend so much of their time in beast form.
The Forgotten Realms shares plenty of animals with planet Earth, but even Larian couldn’t provide the full encyclopaedia of organisms for players to pull from.
Instead, it surveyed tabletop D&D players to find out what their DMs let them get away with in wild form. Once druids are implemented in a future Baldur’sGateIII patch, you’ll be able to turn into a giant badger, burrow beneath the ground, and surprise your enemies from below. Or transform into a polar bear, and attract attention away from a vulnerable companion with a deafening roar. “For every beast, we tried to figure out the niche,” says lead systems designer Nick Pechenin. “A role in combat, and a little kit that they could use.”
That said, some wild forms are simply for roleplaying purposes. “We know that not everything revolves around combat,” says Pechenin. “You also want to just chill out and sneak around as a cat or fly about as a raven.” This being a Larian game, of course, roleplaying isn’t just for flavor—it’s easy to imagine players finding alternate
BEARS WILL BECOME PLAYABLE AS PART OF THE SHAPESHIFTING DRUID CLASS
solutions to encounters by slipping into something a little fluffier.
BEAST MODE
In anticipation, the studio has been clearing away any potential obstacles— the scripting that might prevent a player from flying through an area, for instance, or level design that could trap a larger beast in place. One headache was Thorn Whip, the druid spell that lets you lasso an enemy and pull them closer—an action no other Baldur’sGateIII class can do.
“You can pull them off roofs,” says Pechenin. “We needed to be very careful so you didn’t get locked into a clipping situation, or you didn’t fling an enemy god-knows-where—where they’re not supposed to ever go.” In a game that’s already taking us through the Underdark and at least one layer of hell, it’s hard to contemplate a void you shouldn’t enter. Then again, the Baldur’sGate series did begin with a Nietzsche quote about the dangers of gazing into the abyss.
Baldur’sGate has a long history with druids, too. One of the central characters of the Bioware games, Jaheira, was a headstrong treehugger dedicated to the balance of all things, even if that meant thwacking the scales with a club from time to time. Given that the new sequel is set a century on, she’s unlikely to still be around, and Larian says it has no plans to pay tribute to her.
A key faction from the early games still endures, however. Made memorable by their shocking and uncompromising stance, the shadow druids are cultists who believe civilization is a blight that needs to be burned away—so that a greener world can grow in its place.
The original Baldur’sGate featured a shadow druid companion named Faldorn, who turned venomous if Jaheira was in the party—ultimately attacking and, depending on how the fight went, killing her over an ideological dispute. By Baldur’sGateII, Faldorn had taken over a grove and set the wildlife against the locals, leaving the town of Trademeet under a bizarre state of siege. Where classic D&D is often accused of painting in black and white, its druids were as complex as animal activists are in real life—existing along a spectrum of belief which, at the far end, includes extremism.
True to form, the shadow druids have infiltrated Baldur’sGateIII. Without wanting to spoil anything, you may already have come across them in the game’s first act—which is currently available in Early Access—without necessarily recognizing them. Suffice to say that the Sword Coast’s druidic population is as susceptible to vicious infighting now as it was 100 years prior.
CLASS ACTS
Larian has carried out an extra dialogue pass on Act One’s grove area ahead of introducing its new class—ensuring that a den of druids acknowledges a fellow shapeshifter. “They should see through the fact that though I may look like a bear, I’m actually a druid,” says Walgrave. “It’s not easy to go back and organize the entire voice recording and cinematics because we introduced three new options in a dialogue. But we have to do it, because otherwise, you don’t feel like you made that choice in character creation. You want to have that reactivity.”
No matter what preparations Larian makes, however, the studio knows it can’t account for everything its players will try to do. “We release a game into the wild, and we see people play it and break it in all possible ways,” says Walgrave. “We think ‘we never intended that to happen’. And that makes it so much fun.”
The great breaking of Baldur’sGateIII began in October, when Act One launched on Steam. Perhaps more so than the average PC gamer, Larian fans are inclined to take the scenic route and discover indirect paths to success. In D&D, however, success is measured in experience points—and some players were disappointed that their creative solutions for avoiding combat weren’t being acknowledged with a decent amount of XP. As of December, for instance, 56% of players had dodged the goblin ambush set up to catch them out in Act One—but the lion’s share of the XP was to be found in goblin corpses.
“You can circumvent all the fights by talking your way out of them,” says Pechenin. “You make the goblins think that you’re actually secretly one of their commanders. Players shouldn’t feel compelled to kill every single goblin.”
It’s a problem with deep roots in D&D, which grew from miniature wargames into a system that tied progress to kills. That worked just fine for the PC dungeon
SHADOW DRUIDS ARE CULTISTS WHO BELIEVE CIVILIZATION IS A BLIGHT
crawlers of the ’80s and ’90s, but now that D&D games are massive, complex sandboxes which simulate stealth and social situations, that approach falls quite short. Pechenin says there are “several schools of thought” among DMs for handling rewards, with some simply doling out experience point caches when players hit certain milestones—letting adventurers reach those milestones in whatever way they want.
“But if it’s a videogame, you want to feel good about what you’re doing,” explains Pechenin. “You want the game to validate your actions, and say that you’re moving in the right direction. Small experience rewards really work as these breadcrumbs that say you’ve moved ahead in solving a situation.”
PEACE AND LOVE
As such, Larian has patched in new, bite-sized experience rewards for pacifist problem-solving. In any given area, it tries to balance out the big picture, ensuring there’s more than enough XP available to level appropriately for the next challenge, without mopping up enemies you might have cleverly sidestepped.
“If I know I’m gonna get a similar amount of XP for not killing a dangerous enemy, I’m gonna actually try,” says Walgrave. “In D&D especially, roleplaying is so important and you have stats that matter, so we want to use them in the game. We want to show you that you got this dialogue choice because you picked that option in character creation.”
Some of the quirks of D&D’s system cannot be ironed out by smart design. One is the spellbook, which contains magic such as Magic Missile and Charm Person. Players have decades of fond associations with these incantations, and they can’t be fundamentally altered for the sake of balance.
“At Larian Studios that’s a bit hard to accept,” says Walgrave. “With Divinity: OriginalSinII, we were looking at the statistics to make sure the distribution of spell usage was fair. If a certain spell was underused, it needed to be buffed up. We wanted to make all of the spells as attractive as each other. But in D&D, you need to accept that if one of the spells creates a flame in your hand and that’s it, then that’s it. It’s a different system.”
The magic is in knowing which spells to pick. In D&D, wizardry is not just a fireball-throwing fantasy—it’s the dream of becoming a gifted academic, steeped in arcane knowledge. In the original Baldur’s Gate, pages rustled as you flicked through your tomes, noting the effects of spells and memorizing those that best served your purposes. “It’s actually something that D&D’s fifth edition is explicitly designed towards,” says Pechenin. “So that you feel like a wizard going through all your options, creating plans.”
SURFACE DETAIL
Since launching Baldur’sGateIII, Larian has nerfed cantrips—spells that can be cast without advance preparation—so as not to undermine the good planning of wizards. As a side effect, battlefields aren’t blanketed by electrified pools and flaming oil the way they were in Divinity. “It was a big point of community feedback that players wanted surfaces to matter,” says Pechenin. “They wanted to feel like they cost something, so they needed to think about where they put them.”
Looking to the future, Larian is focusing on larger problems, like how to build the city of Baldur’s Gate itself. It’s the great promise of the title—not to mention the studio’s teaser trailer—and so the team has to get it right, creating a metropolis that doesn’t sacrifice its trademark depth for scale. A year ago, when I first spoke to Walgrave, he admitted Larian was still figuring it out.
“Back then, level design was still in
R&D phase,” he says. “They had a couple of ideas and we didn’t know whether it would actually give you that impression of being in a big city while still giving you that dense Larian feel. We don’t want to have to close down doors for no reason. But last week I saw a presentation from level design. We do have a solution, and we’re very happy with it. It’s still gonna be a lot of work, because it’s a city, but at least now we know how to tackle it.”
In the meantime, Larian can celebrate smaller triumphs, like teaching bears to talk to bears. Since D&D has a Speak with Animals spell, and druids will be able to take the form of animals, Larian has naturally committed to supporting animal-only conversations. “It starts with saying it’s impossible,” laughs Pechenin. But that’s never stopped Larian before, and it certainly won’t now.
Jeremy Peel
SOME OF THE QUIRKS OF D&D’S SYSTEM CANNOT BE IRONED OUT BY SMART DESIGN