Baldur's Gate 3: Swen Vincke on New Endings, Strange Problems, and the Future

foreign I know that when you were like 15 or 16 you started reading the dragonlance books and that was your introduction to d d and now you have a d d video game that is not only one of the most popular video games for Dean deal of all time is also one of the most popular video games of all time like this has to be like a heck of a journey for you right yeah it's a it's a special feeling I mean like I have never considered it that way the way that you just said but it's uh it's a bit surreal I mean we've been work work work work finished the game finish the game finish the game and now seeing how much it means to people is is really special you hadn't known you had a very good game on your hands but you couldn't have known it would take off this much what has it been like seeing like the fan reaction and then the critic reception all kind of fled in we were worried like there's gonna score it's six out of ten seven out of ten it's gonna be a buck something's gonna happen it's gonna break down everybody's gonna hate it so that was literally our mentality going in knowing that the content was good but we were afraid of that that was the thing that that frightened us the most because it's a very big game and so we know that stuff can go wrong although the game usually finds a way of settling back on its feet so we didn't expect it to go this well I mean like we didn't expect that players were going to react so strongly to it but I guess the one thing we did know is that everybody that played it had a different story and that's the thing I think that the most important ones people started talking about it they all realized my adventure is different than your adventure which is as it should be right and so I think that's uh that's been very critical to it and I'm happy that people are appreciating it the way that it is because we put a lot of effort into it what you just mentioned there is kind of like the quintessential d d experience like I had this adventure I'm going to tell you about the time I did this I the time I fought this villain you captured this in a video game form because everyone's story is different there's a there's something you can share with other people it's not like a linear storyline where it's like okay we all play the same game yeah everyone's playing a different game like how did you make this happen like I I've loved seeing RPGs uh my entire life I grew up with them I know you grew up with Ultima and then you know everything that's come sense but like how did you was that one of the things that was critical to capture that everyone has like a unique kind of bespoke experience it's the thing we've always tried to make is the game where you you get the feeling that the limit is your creativity as a player and what you do with the systems that we're giving to you and be The Loner with friends uh and it's hard it's not easy to to make a game like that um it's also the reason why I think it was good for us that we went so long into Early Access because you learn about your players to learn the stuff that they do and you try to cover all eventualities all permutations that go into it and so we apply that throughout the entire game we didn't play safe and we said we'll take risks we know they will probably find a way to break the game but we have this system of rules that we have for ourselves that allows it to fall back uh in a way that you will always be able to finish it and as a player you'll know hey all the that's happening right now that's me I did that right so I mean like I'm okay with it and so and that that's actually also what you're seeing with players they they there's players that follow the critical path and they're happy because they got their really polished story experience and then there's the people that start killing the protagonist and antagonists instantly and then are surprised that they can actually still continue playing that the stories picks up and says well you did all this stuff but you know like here's another protagonist for you to kill and so it takes off like that and so it was very much the core of the game when we started working on it uh it's because it had to be a dungeon and Dragons experience also which is literally what you have at the table top you come in as a game master and you don't know what's going to happen you have an ID in your head but then chaos is going to take off and it's going to go in all different kinds of directions than you expected which is the fun part and so that's was very very important for us to put into the game when we started doing it so put a lot of effort into it it's also where that crazy number 176 hours of cinematics came from but that was just to cover all these permutations uh so and it's it's really rewarding to see it work out also you have a background in like data and that type of stuff you had an interest in this you know when you were in college is this kind of like just a massive amount of data that you can kind of like it's it's got to be a fun experiment to see all these different choices that all these players have done you have this great infographic that is like this is who's playing Paladin this is who's been rejected by this NPC uh is that fun for you I actually don't look at it oh you don't well I look at it I look at the dashboards from time to time but I we have we have people that look at it but I I try to not do it because otherwise it will influence the creative decisions and I want to make sure that we keep on investing heavily in things that maybe 0.001 of the audience will see because it is important that any Journey that you take in your game is going to be equally rewarding and if you would say oh 80 the players go there and they see that then what's going to happen is that you're going to put all your effort on the 80 experience and you're not going to do anything or less on the 20 and that's not what you should do when you make a game like this at least in an IMHO so um so I try not to be guided too much by it but obviously I pick things up like uh these this class is more popular than that they're taking that choice more than that but that's I mean it's it's not a we don't let it guide the game development because there have been other crpgs that are very you know beloved and and and I know you like who obviously like them a great deal as well what were you trying to bring new to RPGs well I wanted a triple A uh um RPG driven by systemics that you could play in multiplayer with your friends uh and it had to be a cinematic experience and that was the big big challenge here all of the choices and consequences there was things that we were already doing in the previous games in the Divinity original sin 2 or even original sin one and even in the previous games never at this guy scale of course but I mean we we we're doing them and having systems intervened with story we started building up a lot of experience in this but I I really wanted it to be like hey it's going to be AAA in the way that it's going to be presented to you and my Hope was and that's what's happening now is that that's going to draw a new audience people that actually don't know they like this kind of gameplay that were turned off by all the systems and the screens and because it's it's the onboarding of DnD is not an easy thing but I I was fairly convinced that if you do it properly in terms of presentation and you really go overboard with it a lot of people will be drawn to it and so we get a lot of people now they're saying I didn't know I like this right and that's that's probably the most rewarding thing seeing like hey we brought you into a new type of experience that you didn't know but it's actually a lot of fun right because the a lot of people before said oh it's very Niche and you're crazy putting that amount of money into cinematics and stuff like that for something that's so Niche my standard reply was guys I mean the most popular games in the universe are turn based right everybody's playing turn-based games on their mobiles so it can't be that people can't get turn-based games in a video game context it just doesn't make any sense and so and it turns out that that's that at least for the audience that we're having with bg3 that's true you know I've been covering video games for a long time and I work at DND what was alarming about Baldur's Gate 3 is this was like the perfect way to teach people Dungeons and Dragons and that accuracy between the video game and the tabletop game opposite there's plenty of differences but that's what I'm getting I am having all these friends who didn't play D D asking me about it because they didn't realize they would be into this experience that you have captured in this game but what's hardest to capture what was most important to capture I mean you've got the dialogue you've got the weirdness the the combat all of it like what what was quintessential DND to you when we started out one of the ducky things was the dice and saying like trusted eyes Go With It Roll With It see what happens so we we put that in everything all right and so as you were doing that you realize well you know if we're going to simplify the rules then everything that's built around the dice is not going to feel true so we have to find ways to make those rules be approachable and there's a lot of rules in the video game so we have to try to find a way to hide them but at the same time make them they there so that when you get start getting interested in in them that you can find them and so when we initially put the dice inside of the dialogue and so we made it so prominent and we said well here's advantage and you can have two dice and all that um there were several people within team that were worried that we're making it too hardcore but once you started seeing hold on minutes this has an impact on my cinematic experience instantly after that dice rolled you it got it has you because then you start saying oh wait and I can manipulate this Shadow heart does a guidance and so we say oh wow this is really cool and then you're off and everybody can throw dice there's nothing complicated about the dice right it's just really about presenting the concepts and so when you see people play at the table top it's the dungeon Masters as well this is how this works and if they're good they're going to do it very slowly and introduce people and people get into it and before you know it they're Min maxing all over the place and that's essentially what the game does also you see a lot of people by the end of act one they finally probably figured something out that they could have been doing in the beginning of the game but it's fine it has you and it allows you to play it and then often people restart because now they say oh now I know all this stuff works right and I'm going to start doing these things I see them cast guiding bolt to get advantage and they figured it out right and they're happy and that's that's the cool part because there's depth to the system that's been ingrained based on dungeon and dragons and all the testing that has gone into that so they they start getting that that's an expression of their choice space inside of the game and the the rewards that you get in the reactivity from the game World to You mastering the system contains a lot of fun in its own and so when it's um when it's all brought together it's actually very easy to roll into it because it it just lets you do stuff you just press buttons and things happen and you don't know in the beginning and then you start grasping it and I guess with a lot of board games is the same thing right so we have split screen now with PlayStation 5. you have referred to this as couples mode yeah like why was that such an important thing to get onto console I I love my wife and I love playing with her and so um some of her Fondest Memories was playing World of Warcraft sitting next to one another she was pregnant and my son grew up to be in an incredible gamer as a result of that um but there were games like darker lines back in the days that you could play in split screen right and those were really special because it's on the singular screen you know when they were a new living room and so setting up on the PC is different than lying in your couch so I I always enjoyed those split screen moment and I I wanted to bring that into an RPG that was also narrative driven because that he didn't see before and so here with bg3 now you got romance in the game so you get this incredible experience where you're sitting with your partner and you're Romancing somebody in the game and it leads to really interesting emotionally engaging moments right so and so that's uh so I love it it's great right because it's like it's it's literally because yeah yeah couples are different and so it's typically really going to do that of course I'm going to do it what you expect me to do and so that's uh that's unique and so it creates even more engagement uh in in in the relationship so I I really enjoyed the fact that split screen is there and the team did a fantastic job bringing uh arguably a complicated system into like half a screen because it's not all of real estate uh to bring it but it plays very smoothly what do you still find inspiring because you know we talk about the fact that you were those Dragon Lance books growing up as about the same age when I read them and and I had always had DND in my life like since I was eight but like that's when I really like that was like the right age the right time to get like really sucked in by Fantasy by Dragon Lance what do you find inspiring today you're asking me my next game [Laughter] I've always had an interest in both sci-fi and fantasy and then there's a bunch of other things but then when it comes to entertainment those worlds always my two two go-to things when I export at DND drag lens was my first one so I bought all everything I had this huge case that I ordered uh like full of old books and secondhand books and I like I just I just kept on reading and reading and reading I over read on fantasy because today I'm very I'm very picky because I read so much of it so it's like ah no I've seen that before you know like that's the problem with saturation yeah of something that you love so it's um uh but there's there's a couple of really good things out there uh so uh yeah but but you can't tell no no no that's fair that's fair you've cultivated like an incredibly creative team like what what has been the most important for you in terms of valerian Studios to have like a very creative healthy team and you always even though you you're clearly all working very hard you have extreme fun in these kind of you know pal from Hell moments and stuff like that like I don't get the sense you ever to take eat yourselves too seriously no we don't I mean the um the most important thing to the team actually is the players and their reactions uh so use you have a lot of player empathy within the studio thinking about what it's going to be like and they care a lot if we have arguments it's because we up somewhere and so that's where the arguments come from because ah that was not how it was or that was boring or we we broke that so that is the the biggest source of discussions uh but it's I think that's honestly the the unifying threat it's just care for for the player experience right now I mean like they all their thumbs are hurting from reading reviews and like looking at what they're saying saying and you would say like that they were they're basking in the success but no it's all about that that's not working we gotta fix that we got to do that that's the thing that you're seeing everywhere so that's that's I mean and that's what I love about them it's a hard thing to shut down when you were in that mode for five years like even when you've had this tremendous success you're still making the game uh like the patches the patches have been coming out very fast yeah I am not used to that how are you turning these patches around so quickly and you're also adapting to like you know player feedback very fast so we set up our studio that it can work 24 hours so we have studios in in Malaysia and then we have them in Europe and then we have a or Canadian studio and so we can basically pass on work so that's one of the secrets of Lawrence so as the sun rises work can be done so that means that if somebody in Europe made a feature by the next day they will know if it worked or not because it went through QA or vice versa if somebody made something uh in in Malaysia they'll know by the time they wake up because Canadian QA will I've picked it up and they will say hey this is something that's not working or you got to fix that and so forth so that's that's one part of that secret the other bit is that we have a lot of automated testing going on so we have a lot of systems that tell you before you've made the changes like you broke it right go and fix it again so that helps also so we invested a lot in that so taking the benefit of that now and that allows us to be very reactive to what we're seeing in in the community and we just also have a very dedicated team like with the we had to there was for instance there was a criticism on one of the epilogues with Carlock So within the week I I just didn't check my facts I think it was within the week Samantha the actress was called back because we automated all of our systems so that was recorded I mean the first scene was written but that went fast and then that was recorded just using the pipeline that's been set up and that was went to the somatics team then they spent two weeks working on putting everything in and then it just rolled into whatever next batch or whole fix was on the pipe and then just plugged it in there and that's really cool to see and so we'll keep on that Valerian and you are so player focused that's been evident in every game that you've put out there and is like you've always been very transparent and always heavily focused on the players and now this game has just completely shot off that is not it can't just only be about how great the video game is it's also about how you approach talking to players and how you try to make players have a great experience yeah but that hasn't changed honestly that's been day one that's always been there if you'll go back to our forums and our oldest archive threats you will see because then we could still you we're engaging instantly with them and discussing features and how to do them we can't do that anymore because there's just too big so it's we we have to do some abstraction but it's it's literally you know um I have this little game I play with uh with deaf teams uh and I asked them when we go to there or something like why are you doing this why are you making video games and you get two answers in general um you'll have the answers and that's typically the engineers I want to solve complicated problems video games are complicated they're really really complicated so if you want to really have um quantum physics level of complication video games actually can offer that to you in trying to solve the things so that's one answer that you get and then the second one will always be I'm doing this because I want to create fun I wanted to entertain people right and that's I get my kicks from seeing people entertained and so lion has just been set up so that it allows developers to have that right so as and get and you can only do that really well if you basically remove all barriers between developer and player as much as you can and so and there's risks with that things can go wrong in that because sometimes you're too open or you say something wrong without intending it to be wrong so but uh if you don't do that then you will it becomes very you know siled and then you can't really do cool stuff in a silo it's interesting because Baldur's Gate doesn't specifically have like one genre right you can kind of Express the genre that you want for yourself because you've given so many choices I found it so alarming I uh since second edition I've been a fan of wild magic back when it was with Wizards and I remember I got the Tome of magic and everything else and I get so few times you know chances to play and I played it in Baldur's Gate and not only is my wild magic search happening and completely changing the game as you know randomly with like big boss fights and all kinds of stuff but I talked to someone they know I'm a wild magic Sorcerer And it's not just there's a dialogue that says they know I'm a wild magic sorcerer they're saying things about my subclass yeah that's an alarming amount of detail I know everyone wants like to go past level 12 but like it feels like there's like 18 100 games in this one game like I know everyone's gonna be replaying this over and over and getting a different experience um I don't have a question I'm just surprised this is yeah I'm being a terrible interviewer was there a moment like you're just like this is insane what we're trying to do we I've never seen that many options in a crpg in my life well it's it's funny that you mentioned that because we thought we weren't putting enough in it and so we were so focused on making sure that the identity you created at the beginning of the game was going to be reflected inside of the game it was very important to us that if you picked that wild magic sorcerer that you were going to feel that you were that wild magic sorcer and Tindy hamster have a lot of classes and subclasses so that meant quite a lot of work but it was never about not doing it and it's what I meant earlier when we chatted and I said like you know that 0.01 needs to have their proper experience because they picked that class subclass and we offered it you I learned a long time ago or first games were very ambitious but we didn't really manage to fulfill the ambition within the game because we didn't really fully support the features and from the criticisms on those games I learned that it's really important if you put a feature in there you have to go full monty which means you can speak with animals he can speak with every animal you can speak with that he can speak with well the trick that we use is like any that still has their heads so if you will see a lot of the decapitated people in the game well that's literally so that's your cheat that's my cheat yeah well how people getting the captain and this game there's a lot of accommodations going on uh or very old bodies so but um but that's the you have to support like that so when you say that you're gonna have reactivity to your class or to or the race that you picked then you have to put it in there and it has to have be meaningful which means that you actually need to have movements that are really about you about your wild magic Sorcerer And then so and we try to put that for everything so we literally tracked down and said like we need to have enough for everything across the game so there was a team dedicated to that so it's really rewarding to see it pay off because indeed when you're playing in multiplayer for instance you see just what I can do that and you didn't get any of that well yeah it's because you just like a fighter [Music] the captid head solve is amazing to me were there other instances of this where you're like well maybe like we gotta have to hide bodies we have to do this like you know so like you didn't get overworked were there any other weird fun facts about this game that people don't know but it was a biggest source of discussions within team was always like yeah but I can't do that like for instance we wanted to do this spell magic for a long time it was on the table uh but then it just became too much because there's so much magic in the game like and it was always what what if I come in and I do the spell magic and say oh my God my head is exploding all right so yeah so that's why you don't have to spell magic in the game but there's actually still traces within where you say haha they actually foresaw that and they wanted to do it and we wanted to but it was just too much it was literally it would have doubled the size of the game and just to support that one spell properly yeah yeah no absolutely do you play D D yourself the tabletop game my version of DnD is playing with the kids in the car so I basically come up with a story and then they say stuff what's and I said what do you do and they say what they do and then they roll fake dies in my head and then I tell them what the outcome is narratively like what is the thing that gets you excited like what is an important story that you want to tell and obviously that story mainly it's you handing it to the player to create that story but what what are the what are the story elements that got you most excited for Boulder Escape 3.3 the teams that we put forward in the beginning were survival trust and those were very important ones transformation became one through uh development obviously you had the Mind player but it wasn't the the initial main theme But ultimately then when we looked at it we said oh my God there's a lot of transformation stories in here also so so we started doing that but it was really about trust you're put into a very difficult situation and you were people that by Nature distrust each other uh so and that are some of them are set up to have conflict with one another so how does that grow so that was the the thing I thought was very interesting about um the game and we I the riding team really pulled off some unique moments throughout it was very complicated because he got all that freedom and you still needed to have all that party relationship all that companion relationship uh going on so there was a I it was really really complicated but I'm uh it feels good because you start with this group of just stressful people and depending how you play you end up with a band of friends and that will go through five for one another and that that's the essential part of the companion experience uh so I um yeah so I think that's probably the the biggest one for me that that feeling like hey you know I didn't like it in the beginning like often a lot of people don't like lizel but she's a very deep character at the end of the game say wow right so I didn't know all of that was going on Shadow heart same story right I didn't know all of that was going on there's a lot of people that say oh my god when they get to to actually um so that's uh yeah those are the biggest narrative rewards I find what do you like about video games like compared to every other medium like movies tabletop you know like podcast books whatever like was it about video games that excites you so much well it's the ability to have a narrative that you can modify right so and that goes even if it's a very systemic driven game there's always a story in your head and you are the one that is changing the pieces uh and and the game shows you okay well you did this now is the new state and you can react to that so it's that that engagement Loop that's continuous is the thing that I always was attracted to in video games and so what we really try to put in games like bg3 but also a big strategy game nerd that's the alarming thing is um uh there's so many people I know have learned so much about DND through Baldur's Gate 3 or like there are articles that have been written as well about this but I'm witnessing it in my own players of everyone's become very tactical suddenly you've kind of changed the landscape for d d tabletop because some people are just like oh if I'm up here or you know knocking people around sound is everything and the number of times people are asking about if can I shove it so it's had enough like you know across genres and that's what's been really exciting that's got to be very gratifying for you to see like okay this thing's in a video game but now it's affecting tabletop players at the same time yeah that's cool yeah so I uh I hadn't looked at it like that but that that is cool I mean like it's uh that's the benefit of the video game right so I'm pretty sure now that you mentioned that verticality will become a thing and because we put a little verticality in the game in the in the landscape uh and using uh surfaces and and things like that I had this great story that I got yesterday from a streamer and so she was super excited because she found a way of killing in Boston so she sent me a video and so it's a it's in the underdark and there's a there's a moment when there's like big hammers like mechanical hammers coming out of the sky and you get crushed when you're under it and you get killed and you can control them with a lever which is further away and So what had she done she had taken herself with the boss that was chasing her it was a really hard boss she had come to stand and there's lava all around her and so she could she put herself on the uh the spot where the hammer was going to come down the boss is standing next to her she dropped the healing potion on the floor then she shot the lever right the lever is triggered by just because she shoots at it so there's force on it the hammer comes down killing her and the boss but it also destroys the healing potion the fluid comes out of the healing potion the healing affects her it doesn't affect the boss because it's a mechanical boss and so she survives and that's how she kills the boss it's beautiful I love it you must love complexity I do yeah the the fact that there are that many different interactions like is there like just a weird interaction team or like is it that that process you just told me about like well can we do this can we do this right can we do this I'm going to want this the fact that you have a healing potion that can break as someone dies and bring them back that is Bonkers to me I I that's such a level of complexity no one's expecting yeah we didn't foresee that one ourselves like so that's just the the but we we try to make our systems intuitive so if I got a potion I break it well fluid's got to come out or a gaskets come out yes sense right then you can start playing with that and so we we if you look at our video games one after the other we do more and more and more of that so uh there's the um well everybody knows about the Albert now it's heavy so it can can do a lot of damage but there's a the throwing gnomes party uh there's a there's a YouTuber there's four of them there are four gnomes and doing like really crazy stuff by throwing and stuff like it's fun it's a lot of fun right so we put those systems in there for you to abuse them in that sense so or our thing really is bring that level of systemic freedom and marry that with narrative and make that work in all cases as chaotic as it can get and try to get better and better at that that's really the focus of of how we approach the video game was there a moment for the video game like why you were developing where you were like that's it that's what we've been chasing that's what we're trying to capture there has been in bg3 there have been moments where I said okay this is really really good um so there are certain narrative movements where the cinematics is sounds the music the visuals they all come together and then the line is delivered and you say wow that's really and you go silence you know you're sitting there and you look at it and you say Okay that was that was Cinema quality experience here except I caused all of this to happen this is here now because of my choices which is a very special thing about the video game so that's I think in bg3 is the thing I'm the proudest of that that we achieved that that we managed to do that and at the same time mixing all the craziness like what I just said with the healing potion right so you have those two things combined it's um it's a type of video game I like to play it's what I I when I started making video games I had that sense obviously not at this level from a game called Ultima 7 which has been my shining lights for forever but I got that sense of wonder and exploration and adventure and interaction and the ability because you could stack crates in that game already and make stairs to get to a higher fingers crazy yeah time right so um it felt like the future at the time exactly yeah and then it got shut down because we got this entire wrong distribution model back in the days so that that's uh that sense chasing essentially for every single video game and so I'm happy with what we did but we can still do better does this feel like a moment in your career or is it always on to the next game because this is such a to have this much critical Acclaim to have this many fans and is only just begun like I'm going to be hearing about Baldur's gay three for 20 years from now like I know I am like you must know that on some level as well this is a massive career moment yeah not really that hasn't and yes you're right I'm busy on the on the next game I mean I never play my games again when they finished right so and uh it's really funny that you ask it it's the right moment to ask me actually because yesterday morning I was in Quebec uh and I woke up in my bed and I called my wife and said well I'm my black hole has arrived because the PS5 version is shipping we just uploaded it yeah so I'm done so I'm going to move on to the next game the other team is going to be working still and there's going to be patches and eplos and stuff like that but for me personally this creative buff or it's done now all right so it's a I am closing the chapter and then every game developer will tell you that when you've finished there's always this black hole because you've been under adrenaline for so long and you've been working towards this cliff and then it's like hey I reached the the point and now what right and so you got to start again but you have to calm down first you have to you have to take time for yourself and then have a break so when people ask us what's next it's a break but you're already thinking about the next thing because you've been sitting on it for some time already so there's a lot of stuff that's already moving in that direction and eagerness it's start working on it but you you do have to take a moment because it is this is very intense industry to be in it's not the same but dungeon Masters after a three-year campaign they end that stuff and then you have this kind of weird like well I'm thankful I have my Sundays for you for a while but also like now there's this kind of black hole like like you experience like you're you're doing it because of the fun of it like you you were developing a game because you love it yeah not because you're trying to hit some end goal exactly Pell from hell as I am well I am clearly in video I love how like fun pal from hell is is not your typical like Dev update or anything it's just like a I hope it's a moment for all of you to like enjoy yourselves and goof off a little bit in between games it's uh yeah no they're a lot of fun right so we all enjoy them and then a lot of Team bonded over it just watching them because they enjoyed it themselves and we instantly afterwards we got all the questions I enjoyed that so they were very vocal in their feedback on them now we didn't found from else uh so but there were just a lot of fun I mean it's just goofing around and then talking about something you've been caring about for a long time which is the game that you've been making trying to show off all the stuff that you're proud of because you just made it at that moment in time so usually the features are very fresh which also means that just before there's a lot of stress because it's gonna break it's gonna break life and so forth which happens actually on their final battle from Hell there was a moment where I wanted to show off two different versions of Adam our lead writer uh was was doing one version of an encounter with a driver and I was going to do the other version of the encounter with the driver and um because somebody else on the team was also showing something they had been rehearsing this so they overwrote my save games [Applause] [Laughter] my summer armor because it was way too hot to follow I tried to on on stage try to cheat my way to the point but I it up always Donuts so we know we have some leeway with the fans they know that we I mean like it's genuine right it's not a pre-scripted path through I mean we know which path we're going to take but it's I did that press tour at that moment and I had two there were people that were in the audience twice and they had completely different presentations just because the dice went wrong and it was great right but I had to improvise everything and so and then but that's literally what the game gives you and that's what you're hearing from everybody also right so I was at the show floor here on Pax and there were people that came to me and said I that three plays of this game and they're all different right just because stuff went wrong and so and that's uh but it's been made to to give you that that's literally its purpose so I'm happy to hear those stories what do you think is the most important when you're trying to tell a story with other people because that's what you've effectively done is you were essentially a dungeon master to I assume millions of players that's what you've done so what's what's your advice for like those who want to tell stories respect Choice don't say no so that's probably it I mean like the um this has been the thing like because very often when we were making the situations for this and what if I do this and the reaction is really to the credit of the team is not oh no no we're going to block that off no no how can we make it happen right and so I imagine um that when you have your campaign in your head and you want to get them and you want to say I want to go and defeat Tiamat or whatever uh it's going to be like well and I did this and then you could block it and not do it but you really should go with it even if you have to throw away your story and because then just go with that so it's like uh so roll with your players essentially is what I would say what's your best advice for people who are playing Baldur's Gate 3 or or haven't tried Baldur's Gate 3 yet like how do you cook cement I know so my d d players are actually excited to play Baldur Skate 3 because it has like again captured that experience what's your advice playing for a player just try things I mean like the game has a lot of like what we just talked about with the healing potion and that's the kind of stuff that you're not going to plan for so it's just keep on trying things I mean then you will often find uh that the game will react to it even if you didn't expect it because you're not used to it so and there's a lot of effort was put into failure in the game so when dice went wrong so don't necessarily reload if you can't manage to convince someone or something dude just see what happens when you do those things so it's a there's a there's a there's room for a lot of experimentation and you will be very well rewarded and the more you explore and the more you try things out the more you actually will be rewarded by the game you mentioned the spell magic and how that was kind of going to be a game breaking or the whole game could just become about dispel magic and how it affected the map and everything else what are do you have a list of spells that were just like these are tough but you still have them in the game animal handling animal and speak with animals so the just the idea that we did both of them is like added so much dialogue to the game and so much effort because uh but it had to be there sure right because it's very different to handle an animal than to speak with the animal right so so that was uh that was an extensive one that was um I think uh and speak with dad also as I said all the dead bodies in the game so and so we put in the five question rule uh in there also so you could only ask five questions so that was a bit limiting I'm not sure if that was as good as we wanted it to be um I think uh uh this guys has definitely caused quite some systemic issues for us at the development fronts I mean but it works so that is uh I did a thing with a with a streamer using seeming which was really cool so like we heisted the bank and then our accounting house and then we said and one of the preparations that we did for that we did then the seaming and just so it was fun right so it's uh so that kind of thing so those are things that require a lot of effort from the development point of view but I'm happy that they're in there because it's not what you expect to find so it's it's good when you find these things like The Bard also I mean if you see much effort went into the BART I never would play a board in my life I wouldn't even be close to touch it I have changed though I've seen I haven't admitted that but um with original sin 2 when we did the kickstarter we actually had a poll in my executive my head of production um he said like we should go with Bart and I said well we should do polymorph class for sure we should not be doing bar nobody likes playing a party so the audience agreed with me as I always for the polymorphing class so we implemented that into the game then but the um but here with what the team did on the BART and then playing together and then suddenly the music streaming in and then all the insults all the tones that you could do uh I I find yeah it was really well done but it's uh but yeah it was again a lot of efforts trying to support non-combat uh interactions right so because what they do well why am I playing this music while you play music you do it well you get money so people start throwing coins at you right so that became then a decoy tactic so people started using that to rob places because they had their boards playing music people come to watch in the meantime they steal something so it's great it's again the role playing that comes out of your system you creating your own little story is there some of your gravitating because you mentioned you're not really a barred person like what kind of person are you everything's always a wizard okay why is that like this is again the complex the number of choices yeah yeah so I hate the spell slow system all right I mean like my my lead gameplay programmer had to explain to her really competent engineer who has a PHD what spells laws are for an hour all right so yeah or he actually understood it supposed to be complex yeah when I was teaching my old wife d d uh it came up and I'm like this is hard to expect it's really really hard to explain right I mean ultimately when you get it it's straightforward but it's hard to explain so so that kind of thing but I have to ask what type of some is there a subclass of wizard you enjoy I tend to gravitate towards Necromancer just because yes having a motion Undead fan right so evocation wizard um because that allows me to do the elemental Shenanigans and it gives my party immunity to it uh so but necromancy would be my second pick so uh has there been one big surprising thing like someone's gone back to you like because you are seeing all these streams now and you've been on stream so people you were with Matt Mercer like stacking crates and trying to break the game but you seem to love that stuff yeah I know that's it that's that's what I love about the game right so stacking crates on top of a house to be able to just jump in or fly in uh that's exactly what I want people to do in this game that's what it's made for and that's why we put all those systems in there what's the craziest thing I've seen I gotta say what the luality is the name of the streamer with the with the with the healing potion yeah that is a level of complexity I wouldn't have thought of it typically when I demo the game I try to find combinations like that just to show it off like um we did the gaseous form uh break in into the counting Halls so through a pipe it's fun right you can the game allows you to do that and that was not pre-programmed by the way so that was not pre-scripted at all um but the rule was that you had to be a tiny creature to be able to get through a pipe and so I went to system design and said well if I'm if I'm a cloud surely yeah and he looked at me he said I don't know right he says I don't know he says right but normally if they did their jobs so talking of his his other system designer I guess so and I went through it and I was slay like a child I was so happy that it worked right I thought it's so cool as I got definitely I got to show that because it's just it's one of those things it's we set up these rules for our designers and then they start and they they work and everything clicks like clockwork and then you get these this is the outcome that you get at the gameplay level this has been such an achievement like what is key to having like such a healthy and like driven creative team giving them ownership I think that's the most important bit so you need to give a gift sir you need to give the developers ownership over the things that they're creating like all the BART stuff I'm not the guy to design the BART I'm clearly don't play Bart but there was a group that was really passionate about the part and they came up with this fantastic Bart implementation like you're interviewing Ross at some point so Ross is the Hmong guy all right so the Monk Is His so he will be able to tell you a lot about the monk I think that's the most important bit you find people um with things in in the game that fits what they're interested in and you give them ownership to do their stuff and obviously you need to have directed a little bit in the same direction but you'll get the best results like that and so I don't really believe in the big top-down model tickers how you're going to do it and this is the this is the formula right and we're going to apply the formula now you get much better results by giving freedom to your team and and ownership over doing things and then giving them a room to fail also because I mean you can't creative if you can't fail that doesn't that doesn't work you will fail a lot when you're being creative because you have to have the freedom to explore what I call the search tree of creativity right so and sometimes you get it you hit at that end you don't know because if you don't explore it but exploring takes time also so you need to create the time so it's uh so I think that's probably my um the thing that we do more and more in our development obviously because we have more resources now than we used to have the past we had we were always time constrained budget constraints that's uh that's not as tight anymore as it used to be and so that makes a difference so we can be more open in it but it's important that that freedom of exploration is there you talk about uh you know to spell magic also being a breaking thing uh you know levels one through twelve you and I both know after 12 things get pretty nuts in d d That's when like the Spells get just World shattering hard to capture in a video game stuff is that is why we're keeping it to 1 to 12 for Baltimore okay yeah that also makes it hard to do DLC if if you were ever tempted yeah well you could you could do different things then so it doesn't have to be necessarily at the end of the game and so there's a there's different ways that you can do that but it's you could make a level 12 to 20 game it's a different game all right so it's completely you would approach it completely differently it's um so yeah that would different Stakes different environments most likely different protagonist antagonists uh but not undoable I mean like uh it's a bit different has there been something from the fan community that has like shocked you like in terms of like like just fantastic art cosplay something that was just like inspiring yeah I know it's crazy it's like it's literally I mean like a social media is full of it's the like the songs uh drawings uh videos somebody did a puppeteer show uh it's great it's like it's really this is the most rewarding we have a whole uh that we're filling in our studio with just with artwork from the fans right so it's uh it's it's really nice it's really nice to walk in there when you see it like the graphic novels Comics uh it's it's really really cool it's a weird celebrating kind of like you mentioned like okay PlayStation 5 launched today as we're talking yeah you're walking the show floor at Pax amongst all these Gamers who are excited to drop by the booth that's a moment right that's got to be a little surreal yeah it's a I um I tweeted this yesterday and because I'm in the hotel room by coincidence they put me in the same room where we launched the kickstarter for original sin too so I was full of nostalgia of memories because we were we were all crammed in that room uh like uh everybody from uh from uh from the deaf demon publishing team that was working on typing and doing updates and reacting to community interaction back then and but now I was alone in my room uh so it's not that that was a sad moment but I was there and I was just I was remembering seeing all the people around me and the activity that we hadn't did and says like where we're launching the PS5 I mean but it's dumb it's like that's what I said so I would say so yesterday I was in my dumb moods uh I was like I'd woken up called my wife told her about it like I have my black hole has arrived because it's dumb so I have to and there's a there's a bit of me that's like that I have uh so because it's now in the past and so the so that's and that's the same feeling I'm having today right I'm really happy I was doing an interview at the show floor just before I came here and I saw all these people playing in split screen and control and it looked great on on the TVs I felt very proud about how visually I striking it was and already they were all in different circumstances so that was also cool to see how that was working but it felt like okay this is dumb it looks dumb so um I know that because if I say that I will have an entire fans that are saying well we need this this and this that's all coming when I mean the team will will handle that is there anything that you want to express to fans that you haven't already at here at the end of all of this of this like this massive Journey you've had I just want to thank them I mean like the it is impossible to make the game that we made without what we got from the Early Access Community I mean like they there were a lot of people there that were there throughout the entire Journey on Reddit they had their Community updates that they gave every week where they were saying oh these are the things that we have in the game that we'd like to see to change and it's like that's been huge and that's been a huge help I I wouldn't want to do it differently I don't know if we're going to do another Early Access I wouldn't I can imagine that we do I mean with it but um I yeah it's been sometimes it's frustrating so it was but it was without without that part of the journey it would not have worked so I'm very grateful for them and also actually even now right I mean like we have bugs in the game so they they pop up but they're very understanding and they they they have patience in that sense also I mean we're frustrated when we see those things so we don't want them to be in there but they're helpful in sending us the feedback telling us this is what I did is how it happened and so that allows us to fix it and so somebody else's Journey later on will be better as a result of that and so that is a uh I think we we really had the symbiosis between developer and player community that that came to to life in bg3 and I think that's also one of the reasons why the game it turned out to be as good as it is so if you had to do this in your Silo I don't think you would have managed uh it wouldn't be very hard uh I just have to say thank you for making such an amazing game because what we talked about earlier where you you have all this fantasy coming at you from all these angles from books and media and you consume all of it but you get more critical the more you consume yeah Boulder Skate 3 is one of those wonderful things especially for me who used to review video games I get to like this allowed me to be a fan again like I just got so excited about all of it and I'm like trying to like squirrel it away and and play it as slowly as I can um it's yeah you've done a remarkable job with all of you so and thank you so much thank you very much

Channel: Dungeons & Dragons

Views: 318,893

Keywords: Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, gaming, roleplaying game, ttrpg, forgotten realms, eberron, Wizards of the Coast, Jeremy Crawford, Chris Perkins, tabletop, RPG, Todd Kenreck, dnd, Wildemount, Critical Role

Id: Mz72rGRQOds

Length: 47min 49sec (2869 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 04 2023