Rebuilding the city of Baldur’s Gate was Larian Studio’s biggest fear; Now this is the proudest achievement

Rebuilding the city of Baldur’s Gate from the beloved CRPG of the same name is a Herculean task fraught with danger. It needs to be recognizable to the venerable veterans of the 1998 classic and still manage to conform to modern game design principles. With Baldur’s Gate 3, developer Larian Studios describes the process as akin to painting: starting with a sketch and adding increasing layers of complexity.

The original city was presented as a series of nine districts, with locations separated by loading screens (and possible raids or story events) and viewed from a rigid isometric perspective, mostly now an old one. A symbol of the era.

Larian’s vision, providing it half the depth of their previous masterpiece, Divinity: Original Sin 2, is actually going to be a denser one. The fact that it won’t require a loading screen of any kind is enough to send Dad blasting back in his chair, with his dorky old computer role-playing games.