There are plenty of video games based on Dungeons & Dragons, but few are as universally adored as Baldur’s Gate. Originally developed by BioWare, the 1998 RPG and its 2000 sequel are still regarded as some of the greatest games ever made by D&D enthusiasts and mainstream RPG fans alike. Following the release of remastered editions of the classic games back in 2012 and 2013 (and an unexpected expansion released in 2016), the stage was set for a proper return of the beloved  role-playing franchise.

After being quietly announced last year, Baldur’s Gate III finally got its big unveiling at PAX East. The new game is being developed by Larian Studios, the company best known for their work on the Divinity: Original Sin series. In particular, Divinity: Original Sin II is hailed as one of the best RPG titles of the decade, and that game’s positive critical and commercial reception is often cited as a key reason why Wizards of the Coast saw fit to entrust Larian with the treasured Baldur’s Gate license.

At a New York City press event prior to PAX East, Screen Rant sat down with lead writer Adam Smith to discuss his team’s work on Baldur’s Gate III. He talks about the lore of the series and his own personal experience with D&D, as well as the responsibility of making a direct sequel in the Baldur’s Gate canon. He discusses the storytelling of D&D and the enduring appeal of the CRPG genre, and provides some hints as to what players can expect from the story and narrative elements of Baldur’s Gate III.

Baldur’s Gate III will release on PC and Google Stadia following a period of Early Access.

You’re in the midst of finally pulling back the curtain on Baldur’s Gate III. What’s it like to be quietly working on something so big without being able to give away any details?

Has there been a lot you’ve wanted to say, and only now can you finally chat about it, at least a little?

It’s been, like, two years I haven’t been allowed to talk about this. So now it’s like, open the floodgates!

We got to see a behind-the-scenes demo that really felt like D&D. He’d have a D20 check of 5, but he’d roll a 3. He didn’t expect that! Nobody expects that. But that’s part of the magic, right?

Yeah. There’s been a million things I’ve wanted to say for so long, without being allowed to talk about it. And there’s so much we want to talk about, but we want to be able to show it first. We wanted people to see it so that we wouldn’t just be talking a load of crap that people couldn’t see. So showing it and having people see that it’s actually Baldur’s Gate III, that lets us open up and really go.

We secretly want that to happen, right?

Exactly, yeah.

It’s all part of the adventure.

It’s part of the experience. There will be people who will want to quickload their save, and we allow that, but we absolutely want to cater to people who roll and are like, “Oh s**t… Well, let’s see what happens!” And that goes for narrative design. I said to the team and to the press, so many times, that for me, I want to give you a really cool experience when you fail. I don’t want you to have situations, regions, questlines, characters, where the people who roll a 20 every time are going to have the best experience. I want those people who are having a bad day with the RNG gods to still be, like, “Actually, I would have never found this, been lead here.”

Baldur’s Gate still influences so many games. I think last year, in particular, was a really good year for the PC RPG. I mean, it’s not quite the same type of game, but Disco Elysium came out of nowhere for a lot of people.

It has to be! It provides you a way out of a bad situation. In combat, in a puzzle, it’ll go horribly wrong, but there are things, whole paths you’ll never see if you don’t embrace failure. There are characters who you’re going to have a different experience with if you fail in a persuasion, or if you fail to spot something about them. We have passive checks where you’ll have a completely different experience if you don’t notice someone hiding something.

Does it feel encouraging? I mean, not that the genre ever went away, but that it’s more popular than ever, is seeing a success like Disco Elysium encouraging for the BGIII team?

I played that game five years ago, for the first time. We spoke a lot to those guys, and I’m really glad that some people have discovered it. My biggest worry was always that it would come out and it would just be the bunch of us who really love it and nobody else ever notices it and it doesn’t get the acclaim it deserves. So it’s really nice that, you know, that it came out of nowhere for so many people. It’s been floating around and it’s been in my headspace for so long, I think it’s a masterpiece. Anything that has that quality, it deserves to make an impact, and I’m so glad it did.

There’s no shortage of D&D Games, and even Baldur’s Gate itself is a defined brand with its own spin-offs. But for your game to be Baldur’s Gate III, that’s a statement.

Yes. Any time we see that people want the kinds of games you make, you feel good about it! For me, personally, I don’t think the audience ever went away. I think there’s a few factors. These are really complicated games to make, and it takes a specific kind of mindset, and it takes a lot of time. And so, there’s been a movement towards shorter form games, and I love a lot of them. I play a wide variety of games. I think, for the big, chunky, in-depth RPG, there are so many ways you can compromise making that game. The challenge for us is, how do we make the game that feels very modern in terms of presentation, that has a lot of these things that we’ve never done before as a studio; the cinematics are a big part of that, but also doing a lot of the stuff that we love. We wanted multiplayer. We wanted the Origin characters. We wanted custom characters. We wanted a full party. We wanted all these different things, so we asked, how do we add this all onto it? For me, it’s always inspirational when you see other people doing good work, even if it’s not in our genre. Just knowing that there are people who really want to play this game is also very encouraging. The audience never went away. The audience hasn’t even gotten older, since there are new people playing RPGs, and D&D is so popular right now. There are young people coming up who may have never even heard of Baldur’s Gate, but they want to play games with great stories and interesting systems. Our audience is anyone who wants to play something that’s got depth and storytelling and weird mechanics. I don’t think it’s just a specific audience, and I don’t think it’s just the audience who played games in the 90s.

Can you talk a bit about your history with D&D, and with BG in particular?

It is. And I think this could have been a Forgotten Realms game, or a Sword Coast game, but it’s very specifically a Baldur’s Gate game. For us, calling it Baldur’s Gate III is our saying that it’s a huge privilege to be working on it, and there’s a huge respect we pay to the previous games. It works out really well, because the best way to respect the original trilogy… I call it a trilogy because there’s an expansion, Throne of Bhaal, to Baldur’s Gate II, which almost feels like the end of a trilogy. But that story, fortunately for us, is a story with an ending. And that’s so rare! (Laughs) We don’t need to retcon anything, we don’t need to pick up a loose thread. Instead, we can say, “This stuff happened. It left a mark on the city. It left a mark on the world. But we’re telling a different story… But also, history has a way of coming back.” Our approach has always been to say, the city, the world, and some of the people have memories of these things. There were scars left by these events. But there’s a new conflict with new adversaries. There are new movements in the world, or in the worlds, that will create new adventures and opportunities, new threats. But something as big as the Bhaalspawn Saga, the events of Baldur’s Gate I and II, that’s not going to be forgotten. And thematically, we wanted it to be very firmly a Baldur’s Gate game. One of those big links back is this idea of having something inside you that’s changing you, that’s potentially not great and doesn’t have your best interests at heart. That’s absolutely part of our story.

(Laughs) He so meticulously planned knocking the boss into the spider pit, but instead, he hits him so hard that he goes all the way across the pit and lands safely on the other side. I didn’t predict that! Sven didn’t predict that! There were a couple dozen writers or reporters in the room, and none of them predicted that, not for a second!

Baldur’s Gate wasn’t my introduction to D&D. It wasn’t even my first D&D computer game! It was Eye of the Beholder, that was my first. Then I got into tabletop play much later. So it was Eye of the Beholder, then Eye of the Beholder II, and then Baldur’s Gate… Good God, I’m really old. (Laughs) I played a whole bunch of the Gold Box games, which are these really old D&D games. I go back a long way… But I didn’t play tabletop until I went to university. I met a group of people who did role-playing, and I thought, this is storytelling. And that’s how I got into it. It’s a way to tell stories. I think the kind of collaborative storytelling is such a huge draw to me. I think that’s what, for me, is the best part of the writing. The things I enjoy the most. It’s not, “oh, I love this character or this line of dialogue,” it’s the moments where I’m not telling a story, but I want you to tell me a story and I’m going to react to it. That’s the cool stuff. That’s the fun stuff. You can’t do that in so much media. But tabletop role playing games is where that happens. The sense of play… Storytelling is a type of play. That back and forth between players and the DM, I fell in love with that. I’ve been the player who derails someone’s carefully laid campaign because I just think it’s funny, but I’ve also been the person trying to keep things on track because I’m getting really into the story. And we can support that! You saw Sven play today, and he was doing tricky and involved systemic stuff. But all I want to do is be in multiplayer and shove him off the beams when he’s trying to sneak around. “Oops.”

Do you have a degree of lament… I imagine it comes with the territory, but you write entire plot threads, whole storylines, but if the player wants to, they can just kill every character they meet and block off all that dialogue for that playthrough.

No we didn’t! (Laughs)

That’s a positive attitude!

No, because it will usually open up something else. There’s an exchange. If somebody goes up to a character and kills them, I’m like, okay, what opportunities did that open up? And you can use Speak with Dead. Some of my favorite lines are in the Speak with Deads. They’re very short, they’re quite cryptic, but you find seeds and hints about who these people were when they were alive. I want players to feel a sense of guilt when they see a bandit on the road and think, “He’s a nasty bandit,” and then kill him… But then I want them to go talk to him, find out what was going on with him. Then maybe you won’t feel so good about your five experience points! (Laughs) So, there’s that, but genuinely, my favorite bits are really really hidden. It’s writing a really cool branch of dialogue, or even just a specific line, knowing that so few people are going to see it. Players will have to be this race, this class, and have done this one specific thing. But when they get it, they’ll feel really rewarded. The stuff most people see is great, but it’s those bits that feel really special. Sometimes I’ll write something that I think is really good and seven people are going to see it, but that’s good because those seven people are going to be, like, “Holy s***!” I really enjoy that side of it.

They’ve gotta get that five experience points! Okay, I’m imagining the room where you write, and I have an image in my head of a massive wall full of red string connecting sheets of paper.

Very early on, I was aware that we were going to do this big tribe of goblins. And if you get to that goblin camp, a lot of people are going to be, like, “Goblins!” And just start killing them. But there’s so much else to explore. So much else is going on. But it’s legit. We give people the freedom to do whatever they want. Some people are going to go to Baldur’s Gate and just start killing everyone because that’s how they want to play!

Yes, exactly!

Always Sunny in Philadelphia?

Did you build the dialogue editor for this?

A lot of it does look exactly like that, but on the computer screen. We work in a dialogue editor we built ourselves.

That’s great. Okay, let’s go back in time. You get the green light. You get permission, you get the rights to the license. Is there a Baldur’s Gate bible, a lore tome? Is there a guy who comes to the office with a briefcase handcuffed to his arm that contains the notes on what is and isn’t canon?

No, no. Pretty much every tool we have has been built on from the Divinity Original Sin 2. And, obviously, we have the cinematics team, who are completely new, and they built their own tools that plug into our tools. There’s a lot of overlap and a lot of exchange. But yes, the screen with all the writing looks a lot like a conspiracy board. The dialogue is written in all these inter-connected boxes. And the way it works is, you can have a dialogue that’s enormous that fills this entire wall, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to talk for an hour. Instead, you’re going to talk and get a little tiny corner of that. And somebody else is going to get the corner that was written for that character in that situation. Sometimes those things overlap, because some characters won’t react to things they don’t know or care about, or they might not care about your race or your class. But, on the whole, there’s going to be a little bit of specificity. There’s a constant flow of information. We handle it, partly by having really clever people who help us to organize it all and make tools for that. It’s a side of development that doesn’t get talked about enough because people don’t find it interesting, but it’s fascinating that the people who make the tools, the coders, they let us do our jobs. They make sure we have things that let us organize information better and let us identify what is a flow problem. None of it happens without the people who make it easy for us… Or, well, for me. I’m really dumb when it comes to that stuff. I don’t understand how to code! I understand design, but when it comes to, “can you make this thing do that?” They do it, and I go, “Why are you magic?”

Okay, the internet wants to know: are those controversial Baldur’s Gate novels canon?

No, but there is a huge amount of stuff to get a sense of the history of the world. If you go through the sourcebooks and the adventure modules, a lot of them have the influence of Baldur’s Gate games in there. There’s very specific ones, like Murder in Baldur’s Gate, which has a huge amount of wrapping up of certain things. But really, it’s a case of throwing yourself really deep into Forgotten Realms as a whole and saying, what’s interesting there? What can we tie-in? And how inter-connected we can make all these different cosmologies and deities and concepts? One of the things that’s liberating about working on D&D as a license is that it’s a storytelling platform. It’s a series of stories that are canonical, and that’s really important, but it’s also a platform for telling stories, and that’s really liberating. We want to tell a really cool story, and we want players to tell really cool stories. That is fundamentally Baldur’s Gate. So there’s multiple bibles. There’s a huge amount of information that’s really important for us to get right, to be accurate on. But at the same time, it’s a case of, “Hey, let’s just tell really cool stories.”

Okay, the fandom will be pleased. I haven’t read them either, but they made some decisions that people really did not like, from my understanding. They flipped some tables.

The Baldur’s Gate novelizations? I haven’t read them, actually, so I guess not! There’s a huge amount of D&D novels I have read. They give me information on, say, the Underdark, or the way a deal with the devil might work, or something. Anything we want to put into the game, we can usually find a sourcebook or a novel that’s covered it. So we’ll go and read that and see if it gives us new ideas, informed our ideas, or changed some ideas.

The team caught them and fixed them.

I think I’ve heard some of those flipped tables landing, but I wasn’t in the vicinity.

That’s such a great storytelling device. Like, the minutia a lot of people can get hung up on, in fiction and in real life, you always find out that after 100 years, nobody cares!

(Laughs) We’re 100 years later, so we can also say, hey, maybe some people remember these events a bit differently. Maybe they feel like legends and myths to some people. Some people are going to have different ideas about what happened, but we know it through this.

He min-maxed on Luck! That’s always my build.

And some of these people are still alive. Some of our characters are very long-lived. Volo is still around. I’ve had people ask me, how is he still alive? It’s great, because it goes with everything I like about Volo. He’s something of an exaggerator. But he’s also someone who gets himself into… He should be dead a million times over because of all the bad situations he gets himself into. There’s a line in the 5th Edition Volo’s Guide. I’m paraphrasing, but the section about Illithid mind flayers has a part where Volo is writing and says, “I wonder what a mind flayer’s brain tastes like?” And Elminster says, basically, “You’re an idiot, Volo.” That’s the thing. Volo just stumbles through the world, but he’s smart, but also somehow manages to get into all these terrible situations.

More: Baldur’s Gate I & II Enhanced Edition PS4 Review: Advanced Dungeon Slogging

This is how deeply we tie the systemics to the character. Volo has a plan to bumble into the goblin camp and get caught, but he also has a plan to get out. He has a potion of invisibility. But you can pickpocket it from him and screw up his entire plan. The same way you can loot the weapons off of skeletons before they reanimate, you can steal Volo’s potion and he’s gonna have an even worse time!