Baldur's Gate 3: The Biggest RPG Ever
Baldur’s Gate 3 is apparently the biggest RPG ever, as a new video from Fextralife arrives showing the work that’s gone into the new RPG from Larian Studios, with the studio’s associate writing lead Chrystal Ding revealing just how many endings Baldur’s Gate 3 will have.
“Baldur’s Gate 3 is the biggest RPG ever!” is the headline of a new Fextralife video, as the Youtuber shares a conversation they had with Ding, who has been working on the ending of Baldur’s Gate 3 for about six months. “I asked her, how many variations on the ending are there?”
“17,000,” Ding responds, to which the YouTuber replies, “That’s a big number.” It certainly is – it’s a number that joins other such huge promises from Larian: 174 hours of cinematics! 22 subclasses! A newspaper that responds to your choices!
Of course, the prospect of arranging so many possibilities in a way that isn’t jarring is giving me a migraine just thinking about it, but it’s reassuring to hear that your choices are being tracked in such specific ways, as that kind of authorship over your own story is key to any great CRPG.
Less reassured was Larian’s director of publishing Michael Douse who, when the video’s narrator quotes-tweeted the video with “Oh no they found the 17,000 number,” replied with an expression of purest dread. I can only imagine the flood of questions and speculation that’s bound to follow in the video’s wake, but fortunately we won’t have to wait that long to start grinding out endings—Baldur’s Gate 3 releases August 3 this year.
Time for some speculation: let’s say there’s 10 lines of dialogue with 2 variations each that can present in Baldur’s Gate 3’s ending—the ways in which you can arrange those lines would add up extremely quickly. They’d each technically create a bespoke cinematic, even if they weren’t that unique from a player’s standpoint.
That’s still a huge amount of work though, and it doesn’t surprise me at all that Ding has been chipping away at the ending for six months. The prospect of arranging so many possibilities in a way that isn’t jarring is giving me a migraine just thinking about it, but it’s also reassuring to hear that your choices are being tracked in such specific ways, as that kind of authorship over your own story is key to any great CRPG.
Less reassured was Larian’s director of publishing Michael Douse who, when the video’s narrator quotes-tweeted the video with “Oh no they found the 17,000 number,” replied with an expression of purest dread. I can only imagine the flood of questions and speculation that’s bound to follow in the video’s wake, but fortunately we won’t have to wait that long to start grinding out endings—Baldur’s Gate 3 releases August 3 this year.
