Baldur’s Gate 3 devs made the RPG for “a modern audience” including D&D newcomers, not just “fans of the original BioWare games”

Larian Studios reveals that while creating Baldur’s Gate 3, developers had a far bigger audience in mind for the RPG than only longtime fans of BioWare’s original D&D duo.

Speaking in an interview with Edge, Baldur’s Gate 3 art director Alena Dubrovna admits that the developers at Larian wanted the game to reach more players – especially newcomers to the RPG series and people unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons altogether. “We’re making it for a modern audience that are young people like me,” Dubrovna explains. “So they probably haven’t really played the first or second game.”

That same thought process during development extended toward potential fans who may be D&D newbies as well. “We really wanted to make it so that even if you don’t know D&D or Baldur’s Gate, you would still have exciting choices as a player, visually and narratively, and be able to enjoy the experience.” This doesn’t mean that Larian didn’t consider the dedicated stans of the first two Baldur’s Gate games at all, though.

Lead writer Adam Smith expands on this, recounting worries from older fans about the third Baldur’s Gate: “During the whole of early access, I remember reading a lot of comments from people like ‘it’s good, but it’s not Baldur’s Gate.’ And we were like ‘just have a bit of faith – we know what we’re doing on that front.'” Larian managed it by pulling recognizable elements from the original two games, like the character Jaheira, all while striving to remain “honorable to the canon.”

“Jaheira was the one who really tied it together,” Smith explains, “and always gives me that warm, tingly Baldur’s Gate feeling. To me, there’s something very heroic but tragic for Jaheira to be reminded of the worst times in her life.” As someone who played the games in reverse order following the third entry myself, I loved seeing Jaheira’s evolution and other Forgotten Realms legacy characters’ newer selves – especially Volo, of course. 

Baldur’s Gate 3 studio CEO says that if he couldn’t make a D&D game, Fallout and Ultima were the only other RPG licenses he would have considered instead: “There was not a lot to choose from”