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发表于 2023-12-16 16:44 · 北京
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本帖最后由 黑历史 于 2023-12-16 16:46 编辑
How big of a dump truck of money did Xbox come to your door with to get it on Game Pass?
SV Oh, we always said from the get-go, it wasn't going to be on Game Pass, it's not going to be on Game Pass. These are sensitive questions. Kat. So look, we are in the business of making a game that has a beginning, middle, and an end. We made a big game, so I think there's a fair price to be paid for that, and I think that that is okay. We don't charge you any micro-transactions on top of it, so you get what you pay for. Upfront it's a big meaty game. So I think that should be able to exist as it is. This is what allows us to continue making other games.
原文中并没有冒犯的意思，但是帖子实在是让人无语。
我现在觉得那个兄弟的话太有道理了。玩儿论坛的和玩儿游戏的是两拨人，这就是为什么论坛总是被卷入到这种无异议的阵营讨论，而机核相对纯粹很多，至少是在玩游戏不是在玩阵营。这几个月也算是长见识了。在A9战阵营没有意义也没有结果，可能以前老A9的感觉再也回不去了。祝楼主玩得开心。
如果你不方便发原文，我帮你发吧。
SPOILER WARNING: This interview contains major spoilers for the ending of Baldur's Gate 3!
The Emperor might be the most controversial character of 2023. Baldur's Gate 3's mysterious Mind Flayer embodies many of the choices in the game's ending, some of which were not particularly popular with fans. Some fans even wondered if The Emperor was meant to be a different character entirely. But to hear Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke tell it, The Emperor was "always the twist."
"One of the basic questions of the game was whether you would become a monster if it would save the world. So that's where you get that in that moment," Vincke explains. "And then the interesting bit was, well, if you're not going to do it, are you going to ask someone else to do it, or you just going to say, 'F*ck everybody?' That's essentially what that moment was."
Lead writer Adam Smith adds, "There was no way to save the city, save the world without giving up your own identity, and whether you did or not was an interesting question. We talked a healthy amount about whether becoming a Mind Flayer meant a loss of identity. What did it mean? What was that?"
Vincke, Smith, and fellow lead writer Chrystal Ding — who had a large hand in plotting out Baldur's Gate 3's endings and happens to be one of The Emperor's biggest fans — were on hand for The Game Awards, where Larian's RPG won Game of the Year. Just a few hours after our conversation, Vincke and his team would effectively be played off the stage while trying to pay tribute to lead cinematic animator Jim Southworth. Vincke would later post his full speech on X/***, which made for a thoughtful epitaph for the games industry's troubled year.
Baldur's Gate 3 was one of gaming's handful of flashes of brilliances in the darkness during 2023, drawing a huge new audience to the otherwise niche PC RPG genre. Fans were especially drawn to Baldur's Gate 3's cast, populated as it was by fascinating figures like The Emperor and Raphael, as well as beloved party members like Karlach, Lae'zel, and Astarion. Indeed, Baldur's Gate 3 might have one of the greatest casts in RPG history.
In the course of an hour long conversation with Vincke, Smith, and Ding, I sought to dig into the creation of these characters. What I found was that the same thoughtfulness that went into Vincke's speech also went into the creation of Baldur's Gate 3's cast, which might offer some insight into why they resonated so much with fans. I also talked about the path forward (Larian still plans to support Baldur's Gate 3), the possibility of a Game Pass release, and more. Read on my complete interview with Larian Studios, and make sure to check out the rest of the best RPGs of 2023.
Karlach: 'The Labrador of the Party'
Karlach was a character that came late in development.
KARLACH WAS A CHARACTER THAT CAME LATE IN DEVELOPMENT.
So I think I'll just start with my girl, Karlach. I feel like she maybe it has grown the most since launch because she got a better ending, which was the ending I specifically went for or invading hell together, even though she friend zoned me. She got even a little more detail and everything. I know that most of her personal quest was cut out of Act 3...
Swen Vincke, Director: It was never cut.
Adam Smith, Lead Writer: No.
SV: It was never there.
It was just never there.
SV: Yeah. No, she was a character that came late in development.
AS: Early access, she's the only one who wasn't recruitable of the Origin gang.
SV: But well-spotted because we did add several extra moments for her during the game.
AS: Yeah. Well, the big thing for Karlach was when she first showed up in early access, she didn't have the infernal engine. It didn't exist yet because we haven't made it up yet. So her quest was, "I'm an escapee from hell and devils are trying to send me back." That's what we had. And we knew that we wanted to be the labrador of the party. As everyone says, "She's happy go lucky." She has the very awful backstory, but she's like, "I'm having the best day of my life." Everyone else is having the worst day of their life.
SV: [Writer Sarah Bylus'] going to kill you if you call her the labrador of your party.
AS: That's what Reddit says. And then the Infernal Engine came pretty late. We were sitting in a room and we were saying we need something for her to actively be doing, and that was where the engine came from.
SV: I know, I remember, that was your Origin, and you came up with the original idea fot Infernal Engine, which was... And then Sarah's the main writer on Karlach, which turned it into her thing completely. So that's how the labrador of the party came to be.
AS: That's it, and then the ending was very tragic. We always had the burnout ending where she literally just burns up and dies. We added the spot where you see her in hell with the cigars, and then the epilogues. It gives more hope that, whatever she's doing, there's still hope. Which yeah, was important.
Gale: 'The Guy Who Starts Off Annoying Everyone'
Gale was Baldur's Gate 3's most popular Origin character.
GALE WAS BALDUR'S GATE 3'S MOST POPULAR ORIGIN CHARACTER.
I really liked Gale setting off the bomb with the brain, and actually that felt like the right ending to me.
AS: In many ways it is, yeah.
If you wait that long, it's a cool ending.
SV: It is. We talked about that a lot... we talked about everything a lot. There's very little that went into the game, even down to the individual lines, that we didn't **. And with the Gale blowing himself up ending, there was so much we were like, "Logistically, how do we make this work?" And some of that then informs how you think about the scene visually and how you think about. Where's the brain? How does this all play out? But also, what is it cosmically? What does it mean if he does this? Where is he after that? We're working in a world which has very defined cosmology in afterlife, so it's really fun to think about these things and then suddenly be like, "Okay, gods, monsters, demons, a wizard blowing himself, what does it actually mean?" And as you say, it fixes things well.
Chrystal Ding, Lead Writer: On a very human level, you have the guy who starts off annoying everyone, he's constantly asking you to give him your most treasured possessions to eat, otherwise he's in trouble, and at the end, he gives himself for the world.
SV: And he had the choice already once before where he wasn't ready for it. So it's a very powerful ending, and it comes in different permutations.
I was not surprised at all to see that Gale is the most played Origin character.
SV: My thing with Gale is that playing a wizard is hard, they're complicated. So from a systemic level, that surprised me because I am much better at fifth-edition combat now than I was six years ago. But I usually want a melee character because I'm quite stupid.
AS: I always play wizards.
I played as a warlock, and I struggled a little bit with my character because I realized halfway through the game that I was power gaming pretty aggressively. I ended up coming out with the Paladin-Warlock and that just didn't make any sense to me because I was getting religious conversations within warlock conversations. I finally re-rolled her so that she was a Vengeance Paladin and she was also a Warlock. So I could come up with a story in my head, but I always figured that if I ever played this game again, maybe playing the Dark Urge, that I would come up with a character who had more of a background so I could actually role-play.
AS: I think a Dark Urge Paladin is super interesting.
SV: The default class was originally going to be Paladin, but then we started thinking about it and said, actually that's bringing us in a lot of narrative problems, so we'll let them make that choice themselves. But we're not going to plug it in like that because it actually does have issues in role-playing.
AS: One of my favorite things I saw recently was someone described the tieflings that have Lae'zel in the cage. At the beginning someone said they're Paladin kryptonite because if you kill them you break your oath even though they're threatening somebody in a cage. So Paladins often get into that and go, "Oh, I'm going to rescue this companion, recruit." It's like, "Oath breaker." And they're like, "Oh no." It's also very hard to keep your oath if you're the Dark Urge.
Lae'zel: 'She's So Young'
"I think Lae'zel has some of the most heartbreaking endings."
"I THINK LAE'ZEL HAS SOME OF THE MOST HEARTBREAKING ENDINGS."
I want to talk about Lae'zel, one of my favorite characters. I loved how her story went. So many of these characters are about having put their faith in a broken institution and then finding their own way forward. So watching her grow was really rewarding to me. I'm just wondering how your perspective on her has changed since release. How do you feel she's grown?
SV: She changed slightly because in the beginning she was very aggressive towards the players, so we toned her down a little bit.
She did tell me, "You didn't want to have sex with me." I'm like, "You didn't ask."
SV: So [Kevin VanOrd], who's the writer of Lae'zel, I think that with her the vision has always been very concrete throughout the entirety of development..she is probably one of the companions that changed the least throughout the entirety of development. She was so very well-defined from the get-go, and [VanOrd] found her voice instantly.
AS: There was a point reading Kevin's writing and also [actree Devora Wilde's] performance where I was like, "Oh, she's so young." And I hadn't thought of it like that. Se has all this confidence, and it's the confidence of youth that knows what is true. And there was a moment when I realized that was a way to approach how we talked about her and how to see how she came across, which made me really happy. It was a really nice moment where I was just like, "Oh, I understand her now." And yeah, it made me happy-sad because she's a very sad character as well. I think Lae'zel has some of the most heartbreaking endings.
SV: I think she has an incredible interesting antagonist also when you think of Vlaakith and the many levels of depth that are behind that character.
Astarion: 'Much of What He Does Is Out of Fear'
"We knew it wasn't that complete, it was very abrupt, but we wanted to finish and so much now it's better."
"WE KNEW IT WASN'T THAT COMPLETE, IT WAS VERY ABRUPT, BUT WE WANTED TO FINISH AND SO MUCH NOW IT'S BETTER."
Astarion wasn't a character I used very much until Act 3, which was when I decided that I wanted to finish his story. So I kitted him out and I actually had some really good gear and I came out with a really- And then I was like, "Wow, Rogue is really fun to play, dang." So he started being in my party a lot, and then I discovered the joy of Astarion, and a lot of the women I know in my life f*cking love Astarion. And I did really enjoy the closure to his storyline with his master and everything, and then whether you can bring him toward salvation or push him deeper into the abyss, but also though there's a real trade off if you try and bring him to the good because he can't be in light anymore. And it was a weird moment where in the original ending, he was like, "Ah, I can't do light!"
SV: And run away? Yeah...So this was out of pity with Chrystal.
AS: We can do the endgame song, remember the endgame song? Oh my God. We used to have a song which was about all the things had to happen in the endgame, which is, "Oh no, Astarion's on fire, the Githyanki, you're leaving." And it was just all these things, they were like, "What sequence do they all happen in? Oh my God." Because you want to maximize the drama while also respecting all the choices.
SV: In the last year of development, when you talked to Chrystal, she looked at you and she said, "Okay, this happened, this happened, this happened. Read this dialogue, this happens, this happened, this happens, this happens. This happened, read this dialogue." So I literally see in front of me the dialogue tree where Astarion walks into the sun, and that dialogue tree was so large that the editor could barely handle it. It was literally you moved it and you waited. You could read a book, and then it moved again. So in the right upper corner, more or less, is where you could find Astarion running into the sun moment. So we knew it wasn't that complete, it was very abrupt, but we wanted to finish and so now it's better.
I was observing last night to some friends, "I have heard people say that the evil playthrough, it's not that satisfying," and I'm like, "I'm sorry, the amount of evil things you can do in this game, you can have an evil party. You can have an evil character who's homicidal. You can join the cult of Bhaal. You can sacrifice everybody to the Netherbrain if you want." There's a lot of intriguing options actually from an evil perspective, and it's fun to see how different the game is when you decide that your party members are going to be evil. Making Astarion evil, for example.
AS: Or Gale. So the way that I look at it is the word evil, we use it all the time ourselves... I think that the nuance is that you actually push them toward the worst tendencies, and sometimes that's not directly evil. Gale's ambitious and he's quite vain, but it's his ambition that can doom him, and it's his ambition that can actually save you all. What we tried to do was to make sure that you were always able to nudge them toward the better tendencies of themselves or the worst version of themselves.
So with Astarion, his evil ending is actually him...much of what he does is out of fear. And as a player, you can say to him, "You're right to be afraid." And that sends him to a really horrible place, and that I think is really powerful.
I think one of the things that happens on the evil playthrough is I always see this thing where they're like, "Oh, there's no tieflings anymore because I killed the tieflings." It's intentional. Your world is a little emptier because of that, and you are playing a route which is much more selfish and much more, again, afraid. You end up isolated.
SV: It's very hard to show lots of consequences in the evil playthrough that are actually happening.
AS: Yeah, they become emptiness instead.
SV: The emptiness is the issue...If you play the good playthrough, and then you play an evil playthrough, and then you realize how much the evil playthrough is affected by your choices, then you actually feel really evil. Which is why Dark Urge is such a good choice on the second playthrough.
AS: The impact is often absent, but that's a reality, that's a true choice. If we just said, "Okay, you're just going to get reskin versions of these characters to jump in, it wouldn't be true." It's like there's this Gnome in the beginning, Barcus. And the impact of what you do with that guy runs all the way through the end of the story. It's so large. But if you just go evil, you never see any of that, right?
Yeah, but that was one of the things that people talked about with the Last Light Inn. If you make the deliberately evil decision, you lose a huge amount of content.
AS: Yeah, huge.
SV: Yeah. That's a consequence.
AS: I think the alternative would be that we just sub in new content, and the choice wouldn't be meaningful anymore. Letting you desolate and devastate entire parts of the world, that's true reactivity, it's real agency. So yeah, I love playing evil, and also in a very just simple-minded way because an evil playthrough is often the second play-through, meaning it's also a lot quicker. It is quicker because you get less sidequests along the way because a lot of people are dead. But you also get stuck into combat a lot more. So you have all these big meaty combats that you didn't necessarily see the first time around.
I can't do it. I can't massacre the tieflings. I can't kill the Last Light Inn. Isobel is too wholesome.
SV: One of my favorite evil moments is if you side with the goblins and then you go into the little cave where all the children were hiding.
Oh God.
SV: It is a very powerful, that's usually where I stop. I saw a lot of people say, "Okay, it's too much for me."
The game is very, "Oh, you want to be evil, huh? Okay, be evil."
SV: There's actually one of those goblins has a line where they're standing over the dead corpses of the children, and they say, "Goblin children would've fought back, I thought they would as well." But we didn't want people to be let off the hook. You choose to do this, and then that you see the reality of it.
Halsin: 'A Creative Risk'
"I think it's fine for a companion to just hang out at the camp."
"I THINK IT'S FINE FOR A COMPANION TO JUST HANG OUT AT THE CAMP."
In my playthrough, I saved Halsin. Most of the game, he was just chilling in my camp. For most of Act 3 he was not in my party because he was the one kidnapped. So I feel like I barely got to know him.
SV: Did you ever lift the curse?
AS: Yeah, otherwise wouldn't be there.
SV: So that was a creative risk, the kidnapping of a companion a thing. Once you do it, and you don't go after them right away, you lose a whole bunch of story depending on how you're going to take it. But at the same time, we needed something where the stakes were high. So that's why we did it that way, and we had a lot of rules that changed over time.
AS: The logic for who she chooses.
SV: Originally it was always your romantic partner, which wasn't very popular.
That's really tough.
SV: Yeah, that's why it wasn't very popular.
AS: It can happen still, which usually send you on a beeline to the Bhaal Temple, which has its own problems then because you're rushing toward a very high-level area, maybe a little bit too early.
SV: It was a good moment.
AS: But also just so again, I think it's fine for a companion to just hang out at the camp. Again, there's potentially so many people at your camp, especially if you're playing good, you can have the whole crew carried through the entire game. It's okay for some of them to just hang out.
SV: And he had his Origin quest already finished at that moment, right?
AS: Yeah, exactly.
SV: So his quest was to lift the curse inside of Moonrise Tower. So essentially his story's already over, so he's just present, he observes.
AS: If he doesn't get kidnapped, he wanders around Baldur's Gate being like, "I hate urban spaces, they're horrible."
So in some sense you're like, "Well, he has a specific place in the story that story's been resolved, but we're not going to make him go away, he can chill out.
AS: Exactly, yeah. Well, he wants to see it through to the end. If you talk to him about it, he's very much like, "I've done what I wanted to do here." And you can say to him, "Why didn't you go back to the Grove then?" And he's like, "No, I need to see this through."
SV: First thing he does afterwards is say, "Let's go back to the Grove."
And if you like large bear men, he's there for you.
AS: Oh yeah, he's very popular.
Shadowheart: 'The Jason Bourne'
Shadowheart was initially the "Jason Bourne" of the party.
SHADOWHEART WAS INITIALLY THE "JASON BOURNE" OF THE PARTY.
Then there's Shadowheart. It's interesting because several of my friends were like, "I don't like Shadowheart." I'm like, "Why?" "She's racist." And I'm like, "Well, it seems to me that she's a victim of religious trauma." And then sure enough, that's exactly how it ends up playing out ultimately, and of course she's the most popular romantic option as well. How has your outlook on her evolved over the course of this launch?
SV: Originally the very idea was you met a bunch of party members that had absolutely no reason to trust you, but plenty of reasons to distrust you. And we went a little bit too strong on that, which is hard. Because we ended up with a party that everybody hated. So we dumbed her down a little bit... Her trauma and the closure of Shar has always been the main thing. She started out actually as a... Well, it changed a little bit. She started out as a Jason Bourne, that was her original pitch actually. And that evolved a little bit, but essentially she's a character that gets to make a very, very powerful choice when she meets Nightsong in the middle of Act 2, and that's a very big moment for her. So I felt that was pulled up quite well, actually.
Yeah, with Shadowheart, I feel like she has a built-in advantage on the romance front, because she's one of the first people you meet.
AS: That's true.
SV: Yeah, that was one of the problems we had where we originally at some point thought we're going to randomize and we'll put them in different situations so that we don't have this issue. Because Kevin, who wrote Wyll said, "It's unfair. You only get Wyll once you're in the Grove. By then everybody's already attached to their party." And then Sarah said, "Well, you think you have problems? I got Karlach, she's in a f*cking corner of the map, and I got f*cking Minthara."
I would've missed Karlach if I hadn't been reading guides. I'm not necessarily someone who breaks off the beaten path automatically, and she was on a remote part of the map. It was a little hard for me to get to her and bring her. I think I might've even have already finished a good chunk of Act 1 when I circled back.
AS: That's common, I think.
SV: But it's also on purpose, because the replay value is much stronger if you've discovered things and you hear people talk about it and say, "Hey, behind that corner there lies this entire adventure," and you go like, "What?" And then you feel that your exploration starts mattering and that drives more engagement into the game, also.
Wyll: 'We Lost a Little Bit of Narrative Room'
Wyll changed a lot between Early Access and final release.
WYLL CHANGED A LOT BETWEEN EARLY ACCESS AND FINAL RELEASE.
I guess I would be remiss if I didn't touch on Wyll. Wyll is like the one character I never used at all because I already had a Warlock.
AS: Exactly, yeah.
Once I started using him, I'm like, "Okay, you're... You're cool. You're hilarious." But it always felt like the game was at pains to make you care about what he was going through, he had family trauma...
SV: You mean that we did too much?
Maybe?
SV: We struggled with Wyll because we changed his story during Early Access...I really think Wyll's core problem was that we placed him in that Grove and that made them for people they didn't get him from the get go. And we also lost a little bit of narrative room for telling all these stories that he had.
AS: It becomes a part of the tiefling story. So then we tied him to Karlach's story, which was really complicated as well. It was another one where everyone thought we were mad because we were like, "Okay, we're going to have an Origin character whose personal quest is to kill one of the other Origin characters."
It's nuts, and you can let him go through with it as well. Tying him to Karlach gave him a very good thrust early on, but Wyll has... I think there's too much going on. I think Wyll comes into his own in Act 3 actually, because he's the true Baldur's Gate hero. He's the guy from the city, his father's in the city, and his connection to the city is a big part of his story.
Once you get him there, he's got a lot going on because Mizora is still hanging around as well. Also, if you want to go party, it's worth taking Wyll just to get Mizora hanging around camp.
I had a tragically little amount of sex in this game, but Mizora and I did hook up and Wyll was so mad.
SV: I like that scene a lot.
That was my favorite Wyll scene, and I have to say one of my absolute favorite things of Baldur's Gate 3, speaking of how these characters feel like they have in their own inner life, is how I could I let Wyll choose his destiny. And also I think Elle, and it felt like a very natural, you've come to this point and he said, I'm going to become the hero of the hells, the avenger of the hells. And I'm like, well, come along with me. We're going on an adventure down there.
SV: So one of the teams of the game was trust. And so that's why we put you in a distrustful situation beginning so that over time trust would build and trust becomes interesting when you have a TA ball in your head and an emperor that is speaking to you and trying to manipulate you. And so when you get to trust them where you can say, Hey, make your own decision now, that's where that actually all comes together. Wow.
The Emperor: The Lawyer and the Accountant
The Emperor's reveal was intended from the start.
THE EMPEROR'S REVEAL WAS INTENDED FROM THE START.
The Emperor is a fascinating character. As a queer person, it really resonated with me when he said, "I felt uncomfortable presenting my authentic self to you because I didn't think that you would accept me." And that almost made me side with him, but also though I was just like, "You suck though. I don't like you very much."
I felt like there were so many times where he was pushing me toward a decision I just didn't really like. By Act 3, it just made me feel icky. And then the fact that he sided with Netherbrain, which as a decision point didn't make any sense to me.
AS: It's desperation, it's survival.
CD: He never lies to you, the thing that he says is he's there to survive and he's there for his own freedom. So everything he says to manipulate you. Every direction he tries to nudge you, he's always self-serving and he's never lied about that. But it does then therefore put you in these positions where you're like, "I want to agree with you, but at the same time I don't like the way that you are inviting me to agree with you." And that puts you in that uncomfortable position.
SV: He has a lot of level of manipulation that is built into him. And there actually was even more originally, so we had to remove a couple of them because they didn't really work. But you can almost think of him as a corporation; he's serving himself, but he's an ethically correct corporation. He never lies, but it's always about himself.
AS: And the other thing is, I think he's terrified because he's managed to become something independent...
SV: He's not really terrified he doesn't have that level of emotion.
AS: Well, yeah, but I think that there's a level of horror in being... Going back to what he escaped from.
SV: Yeah, he's trying to maximize the survival, and at the moment that you talk about, at that particular moment, he says, "Well, f*ck you, you f*cked up every single other avenue."
AS: It's computational, right?
SV: Yeah. So I need to go there, I have no choice. So for him it's a perfect way out.
AS: He's looking at all the permutations like we tried to do and then he's going like, "This is the one that makes the most sense right now." And you make the most sense to him for most of the game.
CD: We used to have this joke where ou have to get the hammer and then The Emperor is going, "What was that conversation you just had?" We used to joke that basically you were stuck between an accountant and a lawyer. One guy just wants to get back to running his nasty evil business under the city, and the other guy's trying to make his deals and catch you in a loophole.
SV: Well, there's a bit where Raphael says, and again, Raphael is a piece of shit, a lot of what he says you can't trust, but he is honest. And at one point, if you push him on it, he says, "All you are to The Emperor is a pack animal that's carrying him to where he needs to be. That's all you are to him." And Raphael's a villain, but there's truth in what he says, and having those two whisper in your ear... it's a devil and a squid.
Staying on The Emperor tip for a second, I've read that people have datamined that there was a totally different avenue for The Emperor originally and that he was going to be a totally different character.
AS: No.
No. Was he always the squid from the start? Was this reveal always baked in?
AS: Yeah, for sure.
SV: Yeah, it was at the very core story. It was part of the core story from the get-go. He was always the twist, it was just that we struggled in the beginning... it took us some time to figure out his voice. The bit that maay have been found is the ways that he manipulates you. We removed a bit of that because it didn't work.
A strong design principle behind the entire game is that if we do something, it has to resonate throughout the feature that's there... you have to be able to use it everywhere. If it's narratively there, it should be persistent, true to the end. And that particular bit, even if it looked great and it sounded great, it just didn't work, you didn't see it. So we removed it as a result of that. So you might find traces of that.
AS: It's one of the manipulations, I think, because the character was always that character, but obviously he presents in different ways. I should say they present in different ways.
SV: We often had this fight, I always corrected them. "No, it's an it. This is an it."
AS: Yeah.
I did actually want to talk about the squid ending because... So I reached this point and I'm like, "Okay, I have to save Orpheus," and... I have a lot of feelings about The Emperor...
SV: So does Chrystal.
I was like, "I have to go to Orpheus." But then it was like, "All right, but somebody has to be a squid." And I'm like, "Well, I'm not being a squid. Karlach's not being a squid, and I feel like you Orpheus, I don't want to make you a squid." It was not a decision I was excited to make, so to speak. So can you tell me about your thought process behind it?
SV: Can I first ask, who did you squid?
Orpheus. Karlach and myself were not being squids, I'm sorry, it wasn't happening.
SV: One of the basic questions of the game was whether you would become a monster if it would save the world. So that's where you get that in that moment. And then the interesting bit was, well, if you're not going to do it, are you going to ask someone else to do it, or you just going to say, "F*ck everybody?" That's essentially what that moment was.
AS: There was no way to save the city, save the world without giving up your own identity, and whether you did or not was an interesting question. We talked a healthy amount about whether becoming a Mind Flayer meant a loss of identity. What did it mean? What was that?
One of the basic questions of the game was whether you would become a monster if it would save the world.
“
CD: Yeah, I think a lot of the community were talking about do they have souls? And I know that there's a canonical or answer to that, but in the writing process I'm thinking, "Well, Adam and I had this **ion where I think it's great to be a Mind Flayer because you're part of a hive mind."
AS: Chrystal instantly wants to be a squid.
CD: But then other people are saying, well, but that means that you're not you anymore and it means that you're something else, and I think the question itself is interesting.
AS: Spoiler alert, you may never do this anyway, but if you do let Karlach become a Mind Flayer, she has a completely different reaction to it than other people. She does retain some of herself and there's a wonder to it. She's like, "I can see things that I never thought were possible. I can see infinity now." She suddenly realizes how big the universe is, which it's cool to put these characters and see what happens if you literally expand their minds. They all have different reactions to it.
On the endings thing, I know that y'all have heard, I think at some point you promised thousands of endings but...
AS: There are.
I mean, yes, there are many different possibilities, some of them not reflected in the finale, but still in some ways it did come down to an almost binary decision. Who are you siding with, The Emperor or Orpheus?
SV: Okay. Well, that's not 100 percent true. So yes, it's one of the many decisions that you make, but if you look at the amount of permutations of how you can get into that ending, it's very large. Chrystal spent, I don't know, the better part of her life just working on those ending dialogues, dealing with all these permutations...But yes, some of them are subtle, some of them depending on what your party composition is, but there's quite a lot if you just look at the amount of the lines that had to do to the epilogues just to cater for it. It's really a lot.
AS: That was one of the things that we wanted to do in the epilogue, was tell everybody's story, which is why you put in the letters and the newspapers, which tell all these other stories as well. Because the thing we're interested in is not just what is the thing you do at the end, but what have you left behind along the way. Who survived? Who has become better because of your passing through their lives, and who is in a much worse place?
SV: What the epilogues do, and what you see in the structure of the end of the game, which allies are going to be present also... that's now reflected better in the epilogues, but those do define how you end the game. People are very focused on that one moment, but that is just a small part of what the actual complete ending is.
When we talked about the ending, we had an entire team that spent more than a year, just working on the ending, descriptors. So they did a lot of work, that's a lot of endings, but yes, there's a moment in there that is a bifurcation, that's correct.
AS: It's actually two because I thought you were talking about a different moment. There's the Orpheus / Raphael / Emperor decision, and some of those options aren't available depending on what else you've done. Then there's also what you do with the brain, which is another point where you could split off again.
SV: And if you play as an Origin, you get different things. If you're Gale, that's a very different thing.
AS: We had a really funny moment when we were doing the epilogue, so we had to work out which characters aren't actually in this world anymore because some of them were in different planes of existence, some of them have gone off. So we were like, "Okay, so how do we get them back?" Some of them are dead, some of them are in hell, some of them are gods now, and it was just like, "How do you get all these people back together again?"
SV: So respectfully, there are a lot of endings.
Raphael: 'He's Like a Theater Kid With Too Much Power'
Raphael has one of the best songs in the game.
RAPHAEL HAS ONE OF THE BEST SONGS IN THE GAME.
I'm glad you brought Raphael up. First of all, best song in the game... Love the environment and his place that you can go to at hell. It's a great environment to explore so much density and detail. I love the dungeons and everything in this game, it's so good. I think my only disappointment maybe was if you decide to sign the contract and he gets the crown, you only get the faintest sense of what that actually means.
AS: There's actually seven Raphael endings now. We added a whole bunch more. So he'll talk a little bit more about his plans. I'm really worried of spoiling too much. We had to figure out where the crown was at the end of the game, and as we started to look at that. There's versions where Gale takes the crown for instance, and there's versions where Gale takes the crown and becomes a God. So we're like, "What does that mean? What does Raphael have to say about that?" And we put it all in. Now the other thing that I always find, Raphael is so much fun, he's a really fun character. He's like a theater kid with too much power.
You're like, "What his deal?" when he shows up initially and he's like, "Hi, I can get that tadpole out of your brain.
SV: We played a lot with Raphael. There's, in all fairness, the same problem that you had with Astarion and the sun. We had so many endings. This is why when you said earlier on, "That is not a lot of endings," and we were finding endings all this time. There were so many versions and so many endings of that, and don't forget that we had to make cinematics of all of them also. So we shortcutted it sometimes. Players were right to be upset about it, that's why we added the epilogues, but sometimes just... You know this was a intellectually very complicated game to make with all the permutations that we needed to manage. So we knew that some of them were not as good as others.
CD: We actually have coverage for if you sign a deal with Raphael, get the hammer, kill Orpheus, allow the Emperor to leave, but have lost the hammer. We have that ending. We dealt with it.
SV: That's the point, then you have to put in a cinematic for that.
AS: Yeah.
That's so cool, and actually on that note, one of the core things is that you have the thing in your brain, the tadpole, and you can get powers. I never accepted the powers.
AS: Good for you.
Because I did not want to be Illithid and I did not want to become more squiddy, thank you. But it never felt like that had a material impact on how things played out. I think I was assuming, "Oh, well there will be some reward for sticking to my guns and never accessing this part of me."
SV: There is actually. We probably didn't pronounce it sufficiently. It's when you're going to be at the moment in the Astral Plane and the Emperor disagrees with your choice of actions if you went for it. I assume that we kept it in, right? If you went for it, you're going to have to do a DC and the DC is going to be dependent on the level of squidiness... So if you resisted it, you don't have that DC, but we didn't express it sufficiently. Your level of manipulation that The Emperor has over you depends directly on the level of how much of these tadpole powers you used.
AS: It's also interesting to me watching people play, because a lot of people I know who play the game, they pick one companion and dump all the parasites into them, which I'm always like, "Okay, so you're putting all your eggs in one basket here. If anything bad happens, make sure it happens to one person." Which is really interesting. It also means they get to go further down the power tree as well. It's another good reason to recruit Karlach actually, because she's already got a bunch of tadpole powers.
SV: It was also one of the hard things with the entire game. Speaking of those powers, the premise was that you were going to become a Mind Flayer. I was always afraid that it was going to be off-putting to players because nobody wants to be that, right?
Yeah.
SV: So we were always struggling. We needed to balance that you still wanted to be the hero, but we still need you to have this problem. So I'm not sure if we 100 percent managed that. We sometimes fell off the line. That is a little bit of what you felt there.
Yeah. I think that a lot of people had different feelings about it. For me, the idea of becoming a Mind Flayer was a hard no the entire game, and I went out of my way to avoid it. Maybe it's a body horror thing, I can't do it, sorry.
SV: That's good, because that's the intention, right?
AS: It's funny because the body horror is a huge part of it, for me it's always the loss of self.
Minthara
MINTHARA
Minthara: 'It's Not a Redemption Arc...But She's Got a Lot of Love'
So on that note, Minthara, now recruitable without murdering all of the tieflings, but of course a tricky character because she's almost like a bonus character in some ways. You managed to unblock that content that was accidentally blocked before, but necessarily it's so hard to develop her in a meaningful way.
AS: I saw a really good web comic where somebody had Karlach saying, "So we killed all three Goblin leaders," and the person's got Minthara unconscious on their shoulder, saying, "Yeah, they're all dead, don't worry about it." I mean, to me, it's really cool to have a character that does have a lot of depth. I wrote her, so obviously I think she's got a lot of depth. But she has this very unexpected, I think, story where she does soften and you see her learning how to deal with being part of a group.
She's a very paranoid person, and I think that the tenderness that you can find in her... it's not a redemption act, she's horrible... but she's very much... she's got a lot of love for the individuals. But having that be something that people discover on a second playthrough, or just accidentally because they end up with her, I think is brilliant. And I see more and more people everyday being like, "Oh, I'm coming around on this character." I think it's great.
But knocking her unconscious always made sense that she should still be alive. It's also annoying that people then loot her, so she shows up in her underwear in Act 2.
SV: But it's one of the nice things of the game because there's so much replay in it that once you know that this is an outcome you want, you can go and do it. And I really appreciate that about how it's been scripted throughout the entire game.
AS: Also, her dialogue, when you recruit her that way as well, she's very suspicious of you because of what you did. Leaving an enemy alive is really stupid and it's not something she would do. So as soon as you recruit her, she's always suspicious of your motives. "Why would you spare me? I was your enemy, why am I still alive?" So we made sure there was storytelling around it. It wasn't just a new gameplay system. We put in the storytelling to support it as well.
SV: She's one of the characters that asks you, "I know why I was killing everybody, but why are you doing it?"
AS: Have you seen this one?
No, I'm too nice.
AS: So imagine you did just see all the dead children at the Grove and all the rest of it...when you bring her into the party, she says, "Okay, so now I'm not hearing the voice of The Absolute anymore, that's great, but you never were. So when I killed all those tieflings, it's because I was brainwashed. What is your excuse?" And it's a horrible moment when you're just like, "Oh, shit."
"Oh, well, I'm just a baddie."
AS: And if you say that, then she's really distrustful of it because she's like, "That's a terrible reason. You need a better reason than that." And you can give her good reasons for it, but there's a good chance that she doesn't like what you say. Her arc is going from being very chaotic to being very pragmatic because that's who she is: she's a pragmatic, evil person. She's somebody who picks her targets very carefully, and when she was under control of The Absolute, she wasn't doing that. She was a blunt weapon that they were using. So she's super suspicious of the murder hobo player, who is often the one who recruits her, and she's just like, "What is your problem?" And that's a really cool moment.
Given unlimited resources and time, because I know that this is an enormous fricking game. So how would you want to develop Minthara? Because I know you only have so much time and energy.
AS: I've seen people saying they want an Origin version, but it doesn't make sense because it'd be a completely different game. I think the thing that I would potentially want to do is give her more interaction with Orin. She has a story with Orin, and again, I'm spoiling too much because you've not played it, but it's worth playing with your Dark Urge character maybe. She has history with Orin. So I'd like to do a little more with that, not much though. I mean, to be honest, a few more lines of dialogue is all I'd want. I think that given unlimited time and resources, I'd want to make a new game at this point. I'm happy with Baldur's Gate 3.
Baldur's Gate 4 confirmed.
SV: What did I miss?
AS: Apparently I just confirmed... No, I didn't.
Jaheira and Minsc: 'I Think I Aged Well With Jaheira'
Jaheira is happy to be back in the saddle in Baldur's Gate 3.
JAHEIRA IS HAPPY TO BE BACK IN THE SADDLE IN BALDUR'S GATE 3.
Wow. Did I miss anybody? Did I get all the characters?
AS: Jaheira and Minsc.
Right! Jaheira was always an interesting one because obviously they're from Baldur's Gate 2 and they have a lot of history. I wanted to romance her actually.
SV: We ran of time. We talked about it.
I loved her though, she reminded me of Rita Moreno in her depiction. I was at pains to keep her alive, it was quite hard, but then at the end, she was very strong. I thought the fact that she could do a huge AOE attack and then become an Owlbear and just rip people apart was pretty metal.
SV: Yeah, it's pretty cool. She was my favorite character from BG2. Not when I first played it. So every time I replayed Baldur's Gate 2, I liked her more and more. And as I got older, I think I aged well with Jaheira. To me, there was something really powerful about putting someone in who's like, "I've seen all of this before," and then realizing, "But not quite like this and I need help."
So you get somebody who's happy to be back in the saddle, but is also really happy to have a new generation of heroes who can step up with her.
Journey's end?
And we're at the end of the road. That final Xbox announcement, what has that been road been like since Gamescom, honestly?
SV: So a lot of optimization, which has been benefiting the PS5 and PC version also. Definitely with Patch 5, it runs a lot better as a result of the optimization. So we're at the end of the road. Well, no, we're continuing to optimize, but we're at the point now that it's ready for Xbox. [Editor's Note: Baldur's Gate 3 arrived on Xbox shortly after the Game Awards]...So we have to do a lot of optimizations to get it all into memory, especially on Series S if you are playing in multiplayer. We need to simulate a lot of stuff at the same time. We're there now, so we optimized performance, we optimized memory. It took us a bit of time to get there, but it's there now.
How big of a dump truck of money did Xbox come to your door with to get it on Game Pass?
SV Oh, we always said from the get-go, it wasn't going to be on Game Pass, it's not going to be on Game Pass. These are sensitive questions. Kat. So look, we are in the business of making a game that has a beginning, middle, and an end. We made a big game, so I think there's a fair price to be paid for that, and I think that that is okay. We don't charge you any micro-transactions on top of it, so you get what you pay for. Upfront it's a big meaty game. So I think that should be able to exist as it is. This is what allows us to continue making other games.
And your support has been really impressive. Patch 5 was incredible, thousands of lines of dialogue, a playable epilogue, so cool... Looking ahead to 2024, can we expect more support and content or are you taking a break?
SV: No, well, obviously we're working on other things, but we are going to continue to support BG3. The community has been patient with us, this is a very large game with a number of permutations. We had this hook in Patch 4, which nobody saw coming, which was the crime system. So depending on how big of a thief you were, you got this problem at the end of the game. And when QA does runs, they often just don't do that, so it's logical that you will not see it.
So there will always be these things, and there's such small things sometimes, and they have such cascading effects in the long run of the game. So we're getting those under control. I'm not going to claim that they're all gone, so we know that, but we are going to keep on working on fixing those. The downside of these very large, complicated games is that this is something you have to deal with.
We always said from the get-go, it wasn't going to be on Game Pass, it's not going to be on Game Pass
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Yeah. We wrote a story about optimizing BG3 not too long ago. I think the headline was something to the effect of Baldur's Gate 3 is having slowdown because it's trying to keep track of all the evil things that you've done.
SV: Yeah. But there was another one, what was it? We had this thing, you've never seen this, but we had to stop a release of a patch, or actually of the Xbox version, but that's fixed now. So what was happening is an NPC was seeing something, was running there, and then there was a thing that caused him to loop and he created this spasm effect because he was calling out other NPCs. And it just kept on coming and coming and coming, so the framerate just went [makes breaking noise]... The memory went [breaking noise]... And eventually it crashed because it ran out of memory for dealing with all the events that were happening. It was such a small thing and you so easily missed it...So this is when you do something which has so many permutations and then you add all the systems that are interacting with those narratives, then you get unpredictable stuff.
AS: Sometimes it's like detective work. I remember sometimes when we were play testing, we'd be sitting together playing co-op and something would not happen as we expected. We'd get a crash and ask people to look into it and they'd go and literally comb through save games and they're looking for what went wrong and when did it go wrong? How far back do you go, and how do we stop it from happening again? And sometimes it's the most innocuous thing, it's you like, "Oh, that caused this because everything cascades..." It's not just the cool stuff...we're trying to remember all your decisions... if one of those corrupts it, then it can so easily break. So yeah, it's fascinating actually, seeing coders dig through that stuff, it's really interesting.
SV: They're very good coders.
AS: They're incredible, yeah.
SV: They are, but this is hard and we made it hard for them as content creators. |
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