Community Update #19: Mechs and the City
Return to Baldur's Gate for the first time in 20 years as the city prepares for war
Our goggles are on, our posture is aerodynamic; like a gnome hurled through the air by a barbarian with a mean overhead throw, Baldur’s Gate 3 is rapidly hurtling toward launch.
This weekend, we unveiled the city of Baldur's Gate for the very first time, with a glimpse behind its walls and around its familiar labyrinthine streets. It's been about 20 years since we last had a pint in the Elfsong Tavern or crawled through the sewers beneath the city streets and, as you might have spotted during the PC Gaming Show, many of these locations are back, and many news ones are waiting to be discovered for the first time - giving you a chance to explore the menacing roads of the Outer City, the opulent estates of the Upper City, and the dark alleys and pubs of the Lower City.
But the Baldur's Gate that we've built is a lot more than faithful geography. As a modern adaptation of an iconic fantasy setting, this city couldn’t be a mere backdrop. It needed to feel more like a complex organism: alive, changeable, and interconnected. Your journey, and your story, has been heading in this direction since the start of the game. You’ve finally arrived.
Welcome To Baldur's Gate
Though your journey hasn’t been easy, you arrive at a city preparing for war. As the Steel Watch patrols Baldur’s Gate’s labyrinthian streets, the printing press prepares the daily news cycle. There are factions within the city vying for control, all disagreeing on what to make of outside threats, and new faces within the city walls. Opportunity in times of struggle is rife. What you make of it, and what it makes of you, will be determined by your choices up to the city walls, and beyond their shadow.
We’ve built a truly next-gen fantasy city, and upped the stakes. Our latest trailer gives you a sense of that scale, showing rolling vistas of grand buildings that recede into the horizon, boisterous docks with harbours thick with ships, and lively town centres populated with over a thousand individual characters. You can explore all of it.
On cobbled streets, bustling crowds go about their day, each one with a story to unravel, a secret to uncover, or a personal reaction to be stirred. Peer further down those steep hills and you might spot a distant bell tower that you can climb for a panoramic view of the city. Make a wrong turn to the visiting circus and explore your deep-seated clown phobia. Or you could case the local inn, where sinister rumours lurk in secret back rooms. In short, Baldur's Gate is your oyster. It is its own vast, complex organism inside of a game already filled with opportunities for exploration. What your role is within it is entirely up to you.
Our scope for the city is big. But it's also grown substantially over the past year.
From the very beginning, we envisioned a Baldur’s Gate that players could navigate however they chose - whether that’s flying to the hidden rooftop nest of Gale's pet tressym, burrowing into a locked prison cell as a giant badger, or slipping into the Counting House in the form of a little cloud (not technically considered breaking and entering as per Faerûnian property law). But in our original prototype, the city was actually much more compartmentalised - a series of small, contained regions connected by teleporters. And so it remained until midway into developing the city, when we decided to make some major changes.
"[Swen] said, like, can't we just connect everything?" reminisces World Building Director Farhang Namdar. "And that was an interesting day."
What's come out of that decision is something we’re very proud of. The districts of Baldur's Gate are now three seamless open worlds. No matter whether you’re investigating underground crypts, climbing the stairs of a towering citadel, or descending into hidden cellars, open-ended exploration reigns supreme. No longer are they broken up into much smaller chunks. This - though ambitious - means that we were finally able to achieve that grand sense of hustle and bustle, where all the stories within the city were truly interconnected. There’s plenty to discover, and to be distracted by, and nothing is off-limits. We wanted every house to have real characters who had stories, and who could offer quests with secrets to uncover.
Hello to Jason Isaacs
Like the city itself, the political landscape of Baldur's Gate is something that must be deftly navigated. While the streets may appear orderly, maintained in check by a security force of hulking automatons, beneath the surface lies an undeniable undercurrent of turmoil. Duke Ravengard has disappeared, and in his wake a power vacuum has emerged, leaving an opportunity for ambitious factions and individuals to seize control and shape the fate of the city.
Enter Lord Enver Gortash, commander of a clockwork army of Steel Watchers. Raised by a devil, a leader among loners, Enver Gortash freed himself of his bonds to envision wonders and become a master of both men and mechanisms.
Jason had this to say about the nefarious politician: "It was a thrill to join the Baldur’s Gate universe but I fear that the magnificent Lord Enver Gortash is being mischaracterized as a villain. In a brutal world of betrayals and butchery, he’s learned to lie better and backstab first. The joy in voicing him - apart from the obvious pleasure in getting to look so glorious - was that the creative team and I got to play loose enough to find ways that he could enjoy the ride and make the players hate him more!"
First revealed during last week's Summer Game Fest, Larian Studios is thrilled to announce that acclaimed actor and all-round great bad-guy Jason Isaacs is taking on the role of this dark and charismatic sovereign. Best known for playing classic antagonists such as Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter series, Captain Hook in 2003’s Peter Pan, and Captain Gabriel Lorca in Star Trek: Discovery, Isaacs adds a layer of depth to the characters you’ll meet here, bringing with him decades of experience in acting the villain to the recording booth and even modifying lines of dialogue between takes.
Through Gortash, players will help define the future of the legendary city, deciding who to align with in the struggle for the soul of Baldur's Gate.
We know, you want to know if you can romance Lord Enver Gortash… We get it.
The Road Ahead
In this year’s PCGaming Show, to celebrate the beginning of the end, we worked with Mashed to create this fun little animated short written by our very own Emily Gera, starring the original voice cast for Baldur’s Gate 3! Frooooooog. We hope you enjoy watching it as much as we did. Players of Act 1 will find a few easter eggs designed just for you. Awwww!
Baldur’s Gate 3 is much, much bigger than we had envisioned when we started this journey roughly 5 years ago. Looking at what’s in Act 1 Early Access right now, it’s fair to say that you’ve really only seen a glimmer of the full experience to come. In July, you’ll begin to get a more complete look not just at how far Baldur’s Gate 3 has come, but where it’s been heading all these years in development. We know you’re really eager to hear about all the playable races & classes in the game. It’s coming.
Spoilers! We also understand that many of you are cautious about spoilers and we don’t intend to spoil anything between now and launch as we release some new exciting video assets and information into the wild. We’ll try and give you a heads up about the nature of something before you see it, so you can make an informed decision as to whether it’s something you’d like to learn about, or wait to experience yourself at launch.
With regards to any other platforms Baldur’s 3 will release on, our plan is to release the game in order of platform readiness. Once we’re sure about dates, we’ll let you know. You can rest assured we’ll try to make BG3 run on every platform we can, but it’s a gigantic, truly next-generation RPG with split screen, multiplayer and incredible breadth & density and we don’t want to compromise.
With that said - ONWARD, to Baldur’s Gate! We’ll
see you in another community update in the not too distant future.
We’re nearly there.
And the second one didn't even featured it at all.
