Baldur’s Gate III – Adam Smith Interview

Adam Smith, a senior writer for Baldur’s Gate III, recently sat down with CGMagazine to chat about Larian’s upcoming D&D CRPG. Understandably, the interview is primarily focused on the game’s narrative, lore, and all the challenges that go hand in hand with attempting to revive a legendary series like Baldur’s Gate.

Here’s a sample question to get you started:

CGMagazine: How did you balance fresh material while still keeping true to past instalments?

Adam Smith: Baldur’s Gate 3 needed to not feel like it’s just a throwback or a nostalgia trip. It has to feel new, because that’s part of what Baldur’s Gate always was. It was the thing that was pushing things forward. We want to be there as well. Narrative wise, canonically, we are set 100 years later, so that means that we’re not going backwards. But the stuff that happened in Baldur’s Gate, the Bhaalspawn Saga, is not the kind of stuff that gets forgotten. So, it is part of our world. And we have characters who remember it. We have characters who have strong memories of it. 100 years is a long time if you are human, but it is not a long time if you are an elf. So, some people are still around who know what it was like to live through those events.

But it is that sense of both the history of the games, but also the history within the world of the events of the game, that is powerful. The story within the game, within the Forgotten Realms, has a legendary status so there was no way we could ignore it. You don’t need to know what happened 100 years ago to have your own story now. I don’t need to know the history of New York City to be able to be in New York City and experience it. Our objective was always to tell a new story that takes place in a world that recognizes the same world and all history that came before.