GamesRPGBaldur’s GateBaldur’s Gate 3Baldur’s Gate 3 has at least 24 ways Shadowheart can hurl the main MacGuffin at you as part of Larian’s New Vegas-Style ‘n+1’ system for players who ignore the plot: ‘It might be even more’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesRPGBaldur’s GateBaldur’s Gate 3Baldur’s Gate 3 has at least 24 ways Shadowheart can hurl the main MacGuffin at you as part of Larian’s New Vegas-Style ‘n+1’ system for players who ignore the plot: ‘It might be even more’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Larian)
Baldur’s Gate 3 is bafflingly reactive. You can’t drop-kick an owlbear without the ripples spreading out and causing some kind of reaction later on down the line. But it goes even deeper than I knew: In a recent interview, Larian CEO Swen Vincke shed some light on the studio’s “n+1” design philosophy, and revealed just how far it goes to create solutions for times when “the player fucked up everything.”
“We have a whole bunch of creative ways of dealing with it,” said Vincke, “So with Shadowheart and her Githyanki artifact, she had 24 versions of giving [it to] you, I think at some point… It might even be more.” All so that particularly carefree or destructive players “would not be hindered” as they played BG3.
Which is, frankly, spectacular, and utterly unsurprising now that I hear it. It reminds me of Fallout: New Vegas’ approach of imagining a player who has a flamethrower constantly firing from their front and back, annihilating everyone who gets close. Plenty of RPGs will simply make plot-critical NPCs invulnerable, but my favourites always come up with clever ways tostilltell their stories despite players’ best efforts to disrupt them. For New Vegas, that was the game’s “Yes Man” route, and for BG3 it’s dreaming up 24 distinct ways for Shadowheart to Amazon Prime you a Gith d20.
Alas, it seems we’ll never get a 25th, as Larian has announced it’sleaving Baldur’s Gate behindto focus on new projects in the years ahead. That means no sequel and no DLC, just whatever patches and updates Larian has left in the tank before it continues on its merry way. It’s a bittersweet thing, but hey, at least it means we’ll eventually get a whole new game—and perhaps world—in which to make terrible decisions that developers need to account for ahead of time.
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