Baldur's Gate 3 designer says "there's stuff that people will be discovering, including us" for "years"
Dec. 21, 2023With 17,000 different endings, one would hope that’s the case
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Having logged somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 hours (not accounting for my shameless overuse of save scumming), I feel like my playtime pales in comparison to pretty much everyone else playingBaldur’s Gate 3. And even so, principal narrative designer Lawrence Schick expects the RPG to continue yielding new discoveries, including by the developers themselves, for literal years to come.
“Every stone will not be turned for years because so much of the game is a concatenation of unlikely variables,” Schick toldInverse. “There’s stuff that people will be discovering, including us, because of the way it was built, with synergies, and layers, and interacting reactivity. It astounds us, the stuff that comes up.”
Larian famously estimated thatBaldur’s Gate 3 has around 17,000 different endings, which puts into context just how much agency players are afforded as they make dialogue and gameplay choices that split the narrative into one of so many branching paths. In reality, that 17,000 figure has come under some scrutiny, but directorSwen Vincke recently defended the claimby saying, in short, that some of the endings are “subtle.”
Regardless, it’s actually fairly easy to see how we’ll still be finding new stuff in Baldur’s Gate 3 for years - in fact, it’s not even unprecedented in modern games. Take The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, for example, a game of a loosely comparable scale that’s been slowly dripping secrets for the nearly seven years since its release. Its sequel,Tears of the Kingdom, is likely to be yet another well of fascinating findings for many more years still to come. I can’t wait to see what mechanical and narrative rarities Baldur’s Gate 3 players turn up.
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After scoring a degree in English from ASU, I worked as a copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG on the side. Now, as GamesRadar’s west coast Staff Writer, I’m responsible for managing the site’s western regional executive branch, AKA my apartment, and writing about whatever horror game I’m too afraid to finish.
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