Unveiling Baldur's Gate 3: The Art of Crafting an Acclaimed RPG

Having spent three and a half decades playing games and the best part of a decade writing about them, Adam Smith embodies a lifelong passion for gaming. His journey led him to Larian Studios during the nascent stages of Baldur’s Gate 3's production, where he now serves as Writing Director. In this exclusive interview, Adam shares profound insights into crafting narratives, balancing rich lore with innovative storytelling, and his vision for the future of interactive narratives in video games.

How does it feel to work on probably the most acclaimed game ever made?

It's been such a long development process, and we've spent so much time working on it, caring about it, trying to make it as good as it could be, that once it came out, my overwhelming feeling was relief. I thought to myself, 'I think we did it, I think it's good.' And I felt very confident in it, but it was still scary. The most important thing for me is that we found the audience, we found a really big audience.

And I've said this many, many times, but it's very true, that my biggest, most powerful emotion on release day was, 'I think we get to do this all over again,' and that was so exciting. But I also see everything that was not great in the game, because I spent so long looking at all the problems. The entire last six months of development were spent saying, 'This is broken, this is broken, this isn't as cool as it could be,' and trying to fix them. So, to me, it's something I'm exceptionally proud of, but the response is just surreal, it's really surreal. I think we made a good game, and I'm really proud of it. But I also see every single problem with it.

In your opinion, what makes Baldur's Gate 3 special?

I think it's a million things. For me, the standout aspect is that we made a game where we didn't put a lot of filler into it. We wanted to ensure that players cared about what they were doing in the game. But what's magical about Larian, I believe, is that we have a lot of people who are very talented at what they do. During Baldur's Gate 3, everyone was performing at their peak or close to it. I think we can always strive to do better, but everyone was doing great. So it's the combination of writing, music, cinematics, performances, the scripters who make it all work, and the engineers who ensure we can achieve all the cool things we do. Everyone brought their best.

So it's that collaboration. I think from a writing perspective, we got the characters right. We created characters that people care about, that they want to kill in some cases, want to fuck in others, and want to spend time with. I think we got that right. I'm very proud of that. But I think it's a very rich game. There's a lot to do. I'm the writing director, but my favorite part of an RPG is combat. Combat is the thing that I love. And I love some of the boss fights, some of my favorites ever in an RPG, and the vistas we get to see. I think it's a combination of all of that.

Since you're working on narratives and story, how do you balance staying true to the rich lore and history of D&D, while also introducing new elements within Baldur's Gate?

It's tricky sometimes. But our policy was always: if it enhances the story, we'll incorporate the lore. If it doesn't serve the story, we may need to adjust it. But the story always takes precedence. Story and character come first, with lore following. The good thing is that strong lore can bolster compelling storytelling. For instance, we had great fun exploring the gods. We crafted stories where players had personal connections to these deities, and delved into themes of religious trauma, loss, and faith. It's incredibly potent when working with these established figures.

When I look at things like the way we did the hells, I'm very proud of it. I think we did good work there. We had these kind of legal lawyer-style devils, which is very much the lore of D&D. That was really good fun to play with. For the specifically Baldur's Gate stuff, that was what I really cared about. To me, I've said this many, many times, I'm a Baldur's Gate fan. I'm not a huge D&D fan. Baldur's Gate is the bit of D&D that I always loved. That was this very interesting story about the Bhaalspawn, but it was a story really about resisting heritage. That was extremely rich.

What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in adapting the D&D 5th Edition rules into the narrative?

Some of them were substantial. For instance, ensuring that the classes feel true to their essence was complex due to their varied gameplay mechanics. What does it mean for Galel, one of our companions, to be a wizard? Is he solely someone who reads books all day? Probably not, since he's also an adventurer. We had to consider how that dynamic would appear. Why is he often tired? Why do wizards require more sleep than others? It's because they need to recharge their spell slots. Integrating these nuances was actually quite challenging.

Previously, what I was talking about was the Baldur's Gate-ness of it. Baldur's Gate used a different ruleset in Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. We had discussions about characters like Minsc. Should Minsc still be a ranger? Does that still make sense? We decided to keep him as a ranger because that's what he was originally. There were many questions like that. For me, it was an incredible toy box to play with. Wizards of the Coast were very hands-off. They never told us what to do. They left us alone. They trusted us, or they forgot about us, one or the other. We were free to do what we wanted.

There were only a couple of lore things that we asked them about. Using canonical characters, we wanted Volo. Volo is fun, and he was also in the original game, so it felt like a smart choice. I remember very early on, we proposed a scene where Volo accidentally lobotomizes you. They responded positively, saying it sounded like something he would do. We thought, okay, cool. These guys are going to be fun to work with.

There were moments when we questioned whether to introduce more characters. Ultimately, our focus remained on those from Baldur's Gate. We didn't aim to bring in the entire cast of Forgotten Realms; we wanted to carve out space for our own characters. One challenge that's particularly frustrating for a fantasy writer is managing the lifespans of different races. For instance, in the original Bhaalspawn saga, a century ago may seem like a few generations to humans but just yesterday to elves. It's like realizing there's no such thing as ancestral memory. It's quite tricky. I remember a specific instance where we had to establish timelines: How old is everyone? Is Jaheira middle-aged or elderly now? How about Viconia? What does it mean for Astarion to be around 400 years old and Minthara 500? What memories do they carry? What are they aware of?

Handling concepts like that is quite tricky because in the real world, we rely on memory. If I ask you about World War II, you'd likely say, 'Well, nothing—I wasn't alive, but I've read books about it or spoken to survivors.' But in a fantasy setting, imagine talking to an elf who casually mentions, 'Oh, that was 100 years ago. I'm 700 years old.' Suddenly, you realize nothing has the same meaning anymore. So it's fun, but it's also quite tricky.

What strategies do you use to create engaging storylines and characters that resonate deeply with players in Baldur's Gate 3?

It's making sure that they have an arc that you can actually follow through. So they start in one place, they end in another place. But then the extra spice on top of that is they can end up in several different places. We need to make sure that we have an influence on them. To have a good RPG character, you need to be able to impact their life in a meaningful way. So in BG3, because a lot of the themes of the game are about resisting and accepting power and darkness, a lot of the time what you end up doing is pushing people to be their better selves or allowing them to be their worse selves.

It's actually very intentional that if you don't impact them, then they tend to become the worst version of themselves. If you don't support them, if you don't give them the help they need, that's very powerful. But it really comes down to, in my opinion, it doesn't matter how good the character is, if as a player I don't feel like I've got a connection to them. And the connection has to be meaningful. It can't just be a case of, oh, I got to click a button and see three cut scenes. It's got to be like, well, I got to choose the direction that that story went in. I feel like I mattered to them, for better or for worse. And that goes right down to being able to kill them and continue the game as well.

I only speak for myself, or I speak for Larian to an extent, but mostly for myself. But I don't speak for everyone who makes games. I'm not trying to say this is a thesis. But if I care about the character I wrote so much that I won't let the player just say, 'I don't care, go away,' then that's not good RPG writing. They have to care themselves, and they have to be able to reject those characters. And that's OK. The most important character in the game is always the player. That's it. They're the star. Everybody else is supporting cast. You want to make them strong supporting cast. And to do that, you give them strong themes, you give them conflicts and struggles. There's a reason that all our characters are messed up. It's because they're interesting people because of that, but it also means that you can help them. It means that they need support, and they need someone to show them the way a little bit, which is, yeah, most of us are like that.

How do you ensure that each character in BG3 feels unique and multidimensional?

It's diversity, so where they're from, where they're going, making sure that they don't share stories. The stories have to overlap so that they can be on the same journey together, but making sure that they feel like they come from different places. And then it's the size of the team. So it's always a mistake to think that a character belongs to any one person. We make them as a team. Now the companions and the origins, they have a dedicated writer, but other people will help out with the writing. But then you've got artists who make these people come to life, cinematic artists who actually shoot them. And a lot of the time, the visual storytelling, you've got the actors who play them, you've got the directors that direct them in the booth and do that. The scripters who make them actually work, which doesn't matter if they don't work. And the scripters contribute to the characterization as well by what they do.

So you put all of that together and suddenly you have so many different people who are influencing these characters that they become complex. They're shaped by all of us. We're a team with many different voices, many different ideas. We come from all kinds of different places. You walk around a Larian studio and you'll hear a million different accents. And all of that, I think, brings out their uniqueness. But I'm also really strict when reviewing quests to ensure, 'Okay, this feels too similar. Change it.' It happens. People will create a really good storyline and I'll say, 'Yes, it's great, but it feels too similar to this other one. We need to do something different.' So we're very careful to ensure they don't overlap.

How do you design choices in BG3 to ensure they feel meaningful and impact the player?

The word 'meaningful' is crucial because it can encompass various things, right? So a meaningful choice could involve burning down the Druid's Grove or protecting it, but it could also be about making Karlach cry or giving her a hug. It might mean saving Minthara from the cult or killing her the first time I meet her. All these decisions are meaningful.

Sometimes it can just be, you know what, I'm going to insult this gnome because I think he's a piece of shit. That's Wulbren. Or it can be I didn't like the way that guy talked to my friend so I'm going to shove him in a chasm. All those things are meaningful, but leveling up is also meaningful. What choices do I make there? The way we do it, it sounds very difficult to implement, but it's actually quite simple. If you're working on a scene, you get everyone around you to play it. We're always playing our own game. And if somebody plays it and they see the choices and they go, 'Oh, none of these are the ones that I want to pick,' then you go and you rethink it. You don't always add another one because that gets too messy. But you ask, is there enough contrast between the choices? So we don't want to be quite as simple as saying there's a good, neutral, and evil choice. But we do try to explore, what is the most extreme version of myself I can be in this? And then what are some places in the middle?

You often see in the early drafts of a dialogue, in the early iterations, where you think, 'Okay, these are cool lines that I can choose as a player.' But then you realize, 'Well, they're all the same. I'm basically saying I agree with you in four different ways. I agree with you, but are you going to pay me? Or, you know, thanks, but I expect to get paid.' That's just the same thing with a slightly different spin. So we strive to ensure they are actually meaningfully different. Now, that's difficult because it means the player then expects the gameplay to diverge and the outcomes to vary. That's the challenging part. But it involves a lot of playtesting throughout development and never settling for something that doesn't feel right.

So how do you create dialogues that feel natural and immersive?

Well, again, I'm going to give a shout out to the teams because a lot of it is the cinematic guys and the artists and the performers. But the way we do it specifically from a writing perspective is, to me, there's a thing that we do that I don't see very often. It's forward momentum. So if you think of the structure of a dialogue, often what an RPG does is you'll have a starting point, like a single node, and then you have five different branches that come off from it. If you ask question one, then you bounce back to the start again, and then you can ask question two, and you bounce back here again, and you can complete the dialogue. You can choose every choice in it.

If you look at the way our dialogues are written, they actually always move forward. We never put you back to the start. We never say, 'OK, you're going to go back here again.' So we don't have the NPCs who say, 'What can I do for you today?' And then you say, 'Tell me about Candlekeep, tell me about the Lower City, tell me about Minsc.' Instead, we have somebody who says, 'Here's a problem that I am involved in' or 'Here's a thing that I'm interested in.' And then we can say, 'Oh, you know, who might be able to help you with that - Minsc.' And then they go, 'Oh, Minsc, I've heard of that guy.' And then they say something else about it. And it constantly moves forward.

It means that you end up with a lot more dialogue. So if you play through the dialogue, you might only pick three or four choices. But we probably wrote 100 different lines. But it's about ensuring that it's always progressing rather than cycling back around again. We're not unique in this; many others do similar things, but it's a significant aspect for us. It was also crucial to us that the characters felt, well, like I say, human beings—though many aren't. They needed to feel like actual people, and real people don't tend to stop and say, 'Here's my life story, here's where I came from, here's what I do.' They tend to say, 'Here's the thing that's pissing me off right now,' or 'Here's the thing that I want to do right now.' And then you respond in kind, so your conversations tend to be quite quick back and forth. Normal conversation has a flow—it goes backwards and forwards. It's really hard to write that and it's hard to get the pacing right. But it does make them feel more natural, I think.

How do you and your team collaborate with other departments such as art, design and other teams to share a cohesive and immersive experience?

It's done in multiple ways. We start with an idea for a character or setting at the narrative level. Then when the art team presents their interpretation, sometimes it surprises us because our communication isn't always perfect. But often, their vision turns out cooler than what we envisioned. We've recently expanded our concept art team, so now we have a whole army of concept artists, which is incredible. One of the most thrilling parts of the job is sharing a crazy idea and having someone on the other side of the world, maybe in Malaysia where many of our concept artists are based, come back the next day and ask, 'Is this it?' and you go, 'Holy shit.'

It's like magic. When you have that synergy, they influence us as much as we influence them. On a narrative level, everything we do impacts everyone else. If we tweak our story even slightly, it ripples through to level design, art, and cinematics. So communication is key. I spend most of my day talking to departments—I don’t spend it all writing. Well, not as much as some people would expect, I think.

I spend a significant amount of time liaising with other departments, ensuring mutual understanding of our goals and theirs. In Dublin, we have a tightly integrated team including writers, cinematic artists, and animators. We often gather together in the kitchen or around someone's computer to collaboratively construct scenes. Communication is constant and crucial. We welcome everyone's input to shape our ideas, remaining adaptable because nothing is finalized until the very end. If someone offers a different perspective and shows something cooler than what we envisioned, we're eager to revise and improve. This collaborative process has allowed us to continually evolve and create something better over time.

So you were talking about how the rest of the team affected the writing, how writing affected the rest of the team. But can you share an example of a major narrative change that was made based on player feedback?

Oh, wow, there are hundreds of them. The thing is, they're hard to pinpoint specifically because usually, we already know this due to our extensive internal review process. What players often do is confirm what we already suspected. If we see players saying, 'I have this one issue and it doesn't feel good, I'm not enjoying it, or it feels inaccurate,' usually someone on the team at Larian will say, 'I told you,' because we had already noticed it.

Specifically with BG3, it was the endings. We knew when we shipped that they weren't as good as they could have been. We wanted to include longer epilogues where players could see the end of the stories. Honestly, when we reviewed them, we were so close to release and thought, "I don't know if we can make them good with the time left." They would have been subpar; what we had wasn't sufficient for release. We had some ideas, but they weren't strong enough. We weren't trying to cut corners; we questioned whether players would care as much as we did. It turned out they did. They got to the end of the game and they said that was very abrupt.

We were already working on it because we knew. But it gave us the confidence we needed. We spent a lot of time with it. I can't remember how many lines we recorded. But we opened our recording booths again and we were back at work, everyone was back in. We were writing, recording, scripting again. It was a lot of work, but it was what the game deserved.

How have you seen the narrative elements in video games evolve over the years? And where do you think this evolution is heading?

I think it's just so much more varied now. So, like a lot of people playing Hades 2 right now, I think that combination of gameplay loop and narrative loop is beautiful. I've been playing roguelikes since Ancient Domains of Mystery, and I never expected to see that become something hooked into narrative in the way those guys have done it, and a lot of other people as well. In the RPG space, I see that we're still telling the same stories that people have always told. Obviously, the fidelity is better, the text is better, but it's only good if you use it right. Fundamentally, people still want stories that are about tragedy, triumph, heroism, villainy, like they've always had.

So to me, the really interesting stuff on narrative is the unexpected bits. It's the Hades 2 and other games. But I like it when genre is outside of RPG. RPG is a storytelling genre. I like it when I see story in places I didn't expect. I'm a huge fan of emergent storytelling, so I've always liked Crusader Kings. I see games like that and I get very excited. Games where you have modular stories that are being told across generations.

I think where RPGs can get stronger is in reactivity. Actually, just in the sense that we have better capacity to remember the thing you did 100 hours ago and give you proper payoff on that. We can keep track of so much now. I think we're still just starting out; I don't think we're anywhere near the limits. The medium feels very young to me still. I think we're still figuring everything out, but I think the same is true of cinema too, to be honest. I think there'll always be people who are pushing boundaries. I find games very exciting right now. Sometimes we can be a little pessimistic when we look at the industry, and I understand why, because there's a lot of crap that goes on. But I look at Steam and I go, holy shit, there are more good games than I'll ever have time to play.

There are games coming from solo developers. I'm hooked on Balatro; I have been for months now. I just started Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, which is kicking my ass because I'm not very good at math, but it's beautiful. It's so atmospheric, so gorgeous. I still play Into the Breach every day, and Dwarf Fortress—probably one of the greatest human achievements of all time—is still being developed. So, I hate the crap in the industry. I feel for a lot of people in this industry right now. But I look at the things that people are making, and I'm excited.

What kind of role will AI play in the future of storytelling in video games?

Well, my feeling is that any tool is useful as long as you don't think it's the answer to everything. I think when you look at any kind of new tech, you can find use cases for it. I think a lot of people are going to say this is itself an answer to something or a solution to something. I think they'll be wrong. I think a lot of people are going to end up looking at it and going, well, it did not solve all of the problems that I have. But I think there will be use cases for it.

I think for us, when you look at our games, we're very much about handcrafted situations. We don't have procedural quests. We don't have procedural dungeons. Everything is hand-built. That's very much in our blood. But I think somebody will do something brilliant with it. I also just mentioned Dwarf Fortress. I think that I've been playing games for decades that use procedural dialogue and text. So I'm not afraid of this thing.

I think that when things become accessible and are in the hands of millions of people who go, aha, I can click this button and now I've got a story, they're wrong. But I think there's space in games to use this stuff. Like I say, I play a lot of roguelikes. There's Ultima Ratio Regum, which is a game that I think will perpetually not reach 1.0. If the guy who is making it hears me say that, please make me wrong. But that's a game that, similar to Dwarf Fortress, it generates entire cultures, societies, histories, and then you can wander around it. And it's beautiful, it's ASCII, but the graphics are incredible. He does some incredible stuff with patterns, with armors. And that, to me, is an engine for a game to create itself. I think the AI models can help with things like that. They can certainly feed into them. They can bring good outputs from them. So I'm curious to see what people do with it.

I also fully expect a lot of people to do very boring stuff with it. But I think someone will do something brilliant, and we'll all look at it and go, "Oh wow, okay, this is a use that I hadn't expected or anticipated." It'll probably come from a model that we don't know yet. I think there's a lot of work being done that I'm not aware of, where it's probably much more exciting than the stuff that I see every day.