I’m sure you could fill a bottomless pit with the things Larian decided not to add to Baldur’s Gate 3. One of those things was, in fact, a bottomless pit. Not just a bottomless pit, but a conveniently portable, Looney Tunes-esque hole into which you could seemingly chuck everything from items and equipment to characters. Speaking to me during the same interview in which they discussed long-abandoned plans for bringing back Baldur’s Gate 1’s Candlekeep, Larian CEO Swen Vincke and Baldur’s Gate 3 lead writer Adam Smith (RPS in peace) touched on the subject with tantalising brevity. Argh, if only I hadn’t had to run off and catch a taxi, I’d still be there now, discussing the many applications of a portable hole. Bypassing carrying capacity limits would just be the start of it.
The hole came up during a discussion of whether Larian have considered testing any smaller, more focussed videogame concepts, perhaps to let younger developers try their wits on something less sprawling than a Baldur’s Gate. “Oh, you mean within Larian in terms of incubation? But there’s always stuff happening that you never see,” Vincke began. “I think people still underestimate how much work these big RPGs are already, and how many components there are in there – you never see a lot of small things that are being done, but there’s a lot of innovation happening, other things that never see the daylight.”
“You see small groups, and juniors in those small groups, you know, they’ll bring the things that they care about,” Adam added. “You can see, I think, in Baldur’s Gate 3 that there a lot of scripters who are immersive sim fans, and who are bringing ideas from elsewhere. The world is sandboxy, and within that they are playing with their favourite genres. I get to play with horror, you know, one of my favourite genres, in the storytelling. An RPG of that scale, you’re kind of making lots of things all at the same time. So there’s definitely the space to do that.”
