Avowed devs compared notes with Baldur's Gate 3 to make "mercurial" companions with "distinct personalities"
Aug. 13, 2024“I want to take a lot from that and compare that to what we’ve been doing with companions”
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Baldur’s Gate 3casts a long shadow over any RPG that’s going to follow, and even the genre legends atAvoweddeveloper Obsidian seem to feel there are some lessons to learn - particularly with the D&D game’s approach to party members.
Feargus Urquhart - head of Obsidian and a storied RPG developer in his own right - says Baldur’s Gate 3’s take on companion characters is the subject of plenty of scrutiny from the Avowed devs. In Baldur’s Gate 3, “the companions can be very mercurial in a lot of ways, and they have distinct personalities,” Urquhart said on theHit the Limit Break podcast. “I looked at a lot of that stuff. I want to take a lot from that and compare that to what we’ve been doing with companions. That’s a lot of what we’ve been talking about internally about Baldur’s Gate 3.”
In the new interview, Urquhart says that it was “bittersweet” not getting to work on Baldur’s Gate 3 himself. “I love the games, so getting to make that was always something that I’d hoped to do. I always wanna make ‘em. You give me something like a Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale - I don’t know, Teletubbies, whatever it is - and I wanna make an RPG of that. That’s why it’s bittersweet. It’s great to be able to play it, but I also would have loved to make it.”
There’s at least one key difference between the party members of Avowed and Baldur’s Gate 3:You can’t romance your Avowed companions because Obsidian didn’t want the RPG’s platonic relationships to suffer.
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