Hey everybody, Trisha Hershberger here, bringing you the
essential information you need about Baldur’s Gate 3, the 20 years long
awaited next installment in the classic Dungeons & Dragons RPG franchise. If
you’re a little out of the loop on this one, we’ll catch you up. Here are the
things you need to know. First up, let’s cover the basics - what is Baldur’s Gate?
There are actually two answers to that. First, in-fiction, Baldur’s Gate is a city
in the Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms campaign setting. It’s been
featured in novels and a number of D&D supplements over the years, most recently
the 5th edition “Descent into Avernus” adventure book. In the world of video
games, the Baldur’s Gate series is one of the most important role-playing game
franchises of all time. For many people the original game and its sequel,
Baldur’s Gate II, represent the best-ever adaptations of D&D to the world of video
games. The games came out in 1998 and 2000, and have seen expansions and
spin-offs and re-released versions, but Baldur’s Gate 3 will be the first actual
sequel the core franchise have gotten - so it’s been a 20 year wait! Onto number two.
Let’s talk about the developers behind the Baldur’s Gate franchise, because
hat’s part of why it’s been so important to the Western RPG genre. The
original game was actually one of the very first games developed by BioWare
you know, the company that developed Dragon Age and Mass Effect! And if that
wasn’t enough, the games were published by Interplay, which had an in-house
studio called Black Isle that also played a role in the Baldur’s Gate games.
Black Isle developed the first few Fallout games, and would later make
Icewind Dale and Planescape Torment, so we’re talking about the kings of the isometric
RPG world, all working on the Baldur’s Gate games in some way. Fast-forward to
today, and BioWare and Black Isle aren’t quite the same as they once were. BioWare
is now owned by EA, of course, and Black Isle was dissolved and sort of mutated
into Obsidian, which is now part of Xbox Game Studios. So who is developing
Baldur’s Gate 3? Larian Studios, of course! Larian Studios, if you don’t already know,
are the Belgian developers responsible for the Divinity games, most famously
Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel. Now of course those games are among the best-
reviewed and best-selling RPGs of the past decade.
Wizards of the Coast, the company that makes Dungeons and Dragons, has been
holding on to the Baldur’s Gate rights for years, and Larian actually approached
the company wanting to make Baldur’s Gate 3 right after they put out Divinity:
Original Sin 1. Apparently Wizards thought Larian weren’t quite ready to
take on the Baldur’s Gate task at that time...but a few years later, when the
studio was getting ready to release Original Sin 2, Wizards came calling -
and that’s why Larian is now working on this new official D&D game. Onto number
three. So now we come to the most controversial element around Baldur’s
Gate 3 so far - the fact that it has purely turn-based combat That might seem
obvious at first, since Larian’s RPGs and Dungeons & Dragons itself both have
turn-based combat - but that’s actually not what we saw in the classic Baldur’s
Gate games. Those games used a “real time with pause” combat system that was really
common at the time, and that we’ve seen more recently in the Pillars of Eternity
franchise. Combat is real-time, with everyone acting at once, but you have the
chance to pause at any point to give new orders to your party members. So while
Larian’s turn-based system might be closer to “real” D&D than the real-time
battles of the original Baldur’s Gate games, this feature looks to have split
the fans, in terms of early online reactions. If you’re coming to Baldur’s
Gate 3 as a Divinity fan or as a newer D&D fan brought into the club by 5th
edition, you’re probably thinking that the early gameplay looks just about
right for a D&D game from Larian Studios but if you're a die-hard fan of the
classic Bioware and Black Isle games, well...this looks to be a pretty big
departure from that, at least in terms of combat. Moving on from the turn-based
debate, let’s talk about what else we know about the gameplay of Baldur’s Gate
3. We know it will have multiplayer. It will also have core characters with
background stories, like the Divinity games, or you can make your own from scratch.
The game will be based on the 5th edition rules, and in the recent look at
gameplay we actually saw visible dice rolls on the screen, letting you know
whether checks succeeded or failed. You’ll also be able to play the game with a
traditional isometric or more modern third-person camera. When it comes to
building your character, you can choose from a variety of races, classes, and
backgrounds for your character. Elves, half-elves, drow, half-drow, dwarves,
tieflings, githyanki and halflings were all mentioned in that recent gameplay
demo, and they also highlighted classes including wizard, cleric, fighter, ranger,
rogue, and warlock. Those are the six planned classes for the game’s early
access release, but we’ll have to wait and see if the missing ones - like druid
and sorcerer - are added in the game’s final form. Alright, we’ve
covered the developers and the gameplay - here’s what we know about the storyline. Obviously
we’ll be seeing the city of Baldur’s Gate in a big way, and it looks like
there’s going to be a major battle going on between the mind flayers and the githyanki.
In the cinematic that was recently revealed, we saw a fight going
on between a mind flayer in a flying nautiloid ship and a few githyanki riding
on dragons. It looked pretty awesome. The mind flayers are purple tentacle-faced
monsters that have psychic powers, enslave people, and eat brains. The githyanki
are a race that were slaves of the mind flayers a long time ago, and now
they’re sworn enemies. Interestingly, githyanki aren’t usually the “good guys” in
D&D stories, so this game might be telling a story where there’s a big
conflict between two hostile forces and everyone else is dealing with the
fallout. Just speculation on that point, though.
Baldur’s Gate 3 will be coming to early access some time in 2020, and will be
playable both on PC and Google Stadia. Gosh, we didn’t even talk about Google
Stadia...but that will have to wait for another video. For more info on Baldur’s
Gate 3, check out the links to GameCrate below this video, also hit up those links
to head over to Newegg for the latest deals on games and hardware.
See you next time!