CGMagazine: From the demo there are so many branching storylines, and every character has different origin stories that can be told. What was it like building those storylines, how daunting was that?
Adam Smith: We’re still doing it. It’s an ongoing process, and it’s very daunting. My favourite part of any writing is when somebody finds a corner of a dialogue, and they made specific choices just to get here. You found that, and no one else in your party did and very few other people would, but that’s the coolest part when it happens. So, putting in those bits always just feels really special. After that there is a point when we started to get the VO coming in, and we studied putting together cinematics, building the characters and it feels incredibly complicated. Basically, it is a piece of spaghetti on your screen and then you’re like “look what they did with it and now it’s real.” That’s a really cool moment.
Knowing that the endpoint will be somebody playing it with a smile on their face or feeling very sad because you did something terrible. That’s really exciting. We are pretty good at knowing how to pull this stuff together. Once we have people playing it we will get 100 new ideas because it’s a role-playing game, so that means that I want you to be able to do the stuff that you feel your character would do. That means that when thousands of people are playing a dialogue and it goes a select way, we can react to that quickly. We can see that some people want something, so let’s do it. We are very reactive.
CGMagazine: How did you balance fresh material while still keeping true to past instalments?
Adam Smith:
Baldur’s Gate 3 needed to not feel like it’s just a throwback or a nostalgia trip. It has to feel new, because that’s part of what
Baldur’s Gate always was. It was the thing that was pushing things forward. We want to be there as well. Narrative wise, canonically, we are set 100 years later, so that means that we’re not going backwards. But the stuff that happened in
Baldur’s Gate, the Bhaalspawn Saga, is not the kind of stuff that gets forgotten. So, it is part of our world. And we have characters who remember it. We have characters who have strong memories of it. 100 years is a long time if you are human, but it is not a long time if you are an elf. So, some people are still around who know what it was like to live through those events.
But it is that sense of both the history of the games, but also the history within the world of the events of the game, that is powerful. The story within the game, within the
Forgotten Realms, has a legendary status so there was no way we could ignore it. You don’t need to know what happened 100 years ago to have your own story now. I don’t need to know the history of New York City to be able to be in New York City and experience it. Our objective was always to tell a new story that takes place in a world that recognizes the same world and all history that came before.
CGMagazine: With such an iconic series, did you ever feel limited by the world and how did you find ways to make it your own?
Adam Smith: I always say, making it our own because it feels like a collaboration, it’s really inspirational now working on something that’s licensed. I’m sure it can be restrictive for some, but I haven’t found that at all. Again, I think I already said,
Dungeons & Dragons is a storytelling system. I think that the freedom of it, of saying, I want to treat storytelling as a form of play—which is what
Dungeons & Dragons has always been about—it’s very much what I enjoy as a writer.
CGMagazine: For the players that are going to be jumping into Baldur’s Gate 3 for the first time, what should they expect and how will playing this game be different from past instalments?
Adam Smith: For me, the most important thing is to acknowledge and respect the choices that you make. So, this is a game where the first two clicks you make will be in character creation, and we want to reward your cause, we want to acknowledge them, and we want to say we see you. You will immediately realize the world, and the story is reacting to that. Then when you start to make other clicks, whether it’s a click to equip or to talk to somebody or pick their pocket, that all goes into our collective memory, and we’re going to recognize that as well.
So, that is the thing that I’m proud of. To see how deep we go with that, especially with the origin characters, but also because we give the characters a huge amount of choices, and that point—making sure the players know that we are respecting their decisions and acknowledging them and saying: “We want to give you as much freedom as possible.” If you want to play straight or play completely chaotic and tear our story apart, we want to respect that. We’re in this together.
CGMagazine: Thank you for taking the time to talk.
Adam Smith: Thank you so much.