Avowed devs compared notes with Baldur’s Gate 3 to make “mercurial” companions with “distinct personalities”

Baldur’s Gate 3 casts a long shadow over any RPG that’s going to follow, and even the genre legends at Avowed developer 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 the Hit 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.” 

Urquhart, of course, has plenty of experience with Baldur’s Gate, having worked on the original games at BioWare decades ago. In fact, there was a point in time where Urquhart and Obsidian were on board to create Baldur’s Gate 3 themselves, way back in 2008. In a 2012 Kotaku interview, Urquhart said “We negotiated a whole contract. Years worth of work, and it turned out they didn’t have the money.”

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.