Historical Continuity
That doesn’t mean that Larian is just scrapping all of the lore established by Baldur’s Gate I & II, though. The team is looking at everything that happens up until the end of Baldur’s Gate 2 as canonical history. ”No one's ever going to know if you picked the pocket of that one innkeeper,” Smith laughs. “But everything that happened, happened.”
The city's changed, Smith continues, and they’ve had fun looking at what would have happened, politically or socially, in the gap between games. “So we look at all of that, but [the gap between games] is enough time to give us a clean slate for new characters. Although some of them have long memories, as well,” he adds, wryly.
It
is a relatively traditional fantasy setting, after all. Elves, for example, regularly live well into their 700s, so it’s entirely possible that characters - even our own, given the options available during creation - would remember
the Bhaalspawn crises, or that we’ll see characters like Kivan or Coran or make a return in Larian’s take on the Sword Coast. “One of the interesting things,” Smith says, “is for some people that's ancient history, for some people, it's recent history… We're 100 years later, but that's not a long time for a deity.”