Larian Studios interview: Baldur's Gate 3 lead writer Adam Smith

foreign ERS and welcome back to the PC Gamer chat log this week special episode for you we are going to be interviewing uh Adam Smith who is the lead writer at larian Studios who you may have heard of recently for that game that they did that just came out uh Baldur's Gate 3. so we're going to be talking yeah that one uh has anybody seen that on social media anywhere or on the website pcgamer.com have you heard about it um we're gonna be talking with Adam about all sorts of things while there's Gate 3 about uh characters about quest lines about Forgotten Realms lore uh things that they've adapted from DND um all sorts of stuff that went into Baldur's Gate three so we're not going to stick around here along uh Molly what did you do last week though yeah uh believe it or not I have been playing some Baldur's Gate three um I finally bit the bullet and started a second playthrough uh oh okay yeah after Ted's resounding feature that he wrote uh on our website about starting a new playthrough after 20 hours so I did the same and I'm having a much better time because I understand the game better now did you go with like new class I know you needed a new look that was a whole thing for you you didn't really design your character but I'm a storm sorcerer now and I'm like utilizing the party better as well so I'm getting like really cool interesting conversations which will be like which is very nice that I've been able to experience more of the dialogue especially as we go into talk with Adam as well that'll be been very appreciative being able to see the first few hours of the game through more experienced eyes I've been having a lot of fun so yeah how about you I've also been playing Butler's K3 I spent one night as as we know playing D and D since I do that Weekly right now but uh then the other nights I was playing balder Skate 3. I have not restarted I'm pretty happy with where I'm at but I am going slower than everyone else I don't know if I'm just really stubborn or very I think I try to find really optimal ways through like combat or like talk my way through things or find like a perfect solution to a puzzle so I end up like reloading resetting moving my party like trying to find the exact right thing to do and so my save file uh has I need to look to tell you the right number uh 58 hours is my steam play time right now I think my save file is like 25 hours or more or something like that and I finally finished act one so that's the kind of player that I am unfortunately um so yeah we'll definitely be talking about Act One probably getting into act two I'm sure we'll be getting into some spoiler stuff as we're talking about stories and characters and plots and all that good stuff with Adam so uh after a short break here we're gonna be back with Adam Smith congratulations are in order right for sure um tell us a little bit about uh yourself however much you want and definitely tell us uh what kind of character you're playing in Baldur's Gate 3 or have been playing for the last hour of many years what are you doing right now I've played just about all of them but I'll tell you about my current one so I'm Adam Smith I'm lead writer on Baldur's Gate 3. um this is my first game at larion I joined right after dust two uh so I've been here for the whole Baldur's Gate 3 process um and yeah it's it's great it's finally out I've said to many many people the hardest thing about making this game this is true was not being able to talk about the game I hated it it was really painful the worst part of development was the first two years when we were you know we had even said the name of it it was painful so yeah it is another weird week um really good week I have been filling my time my wife is swore off EA so now I was like well play multiple play when it comes out and it's a good sign when you want to play your own game even after these many years uh she kicked me out and now she's playing single player videos [Laughter] only I keep spoiling the game because I know too much so I'm currently doing a dark urge monk uh so monk was our last class and I fell in love with monks so yeah I'm doing a dark urge because I I've done just about every combination of class race and background imaginable uh dark urge was tested to high Hell by me um but I never got to play from beginning to end as a full genuine true run without cheating so that's what I'm doing yeah are you are how are you balancing being a monk versus the dark urge which is just like chaos and like violence all the time right incredibly badly so I'm a big role player like uh yeah I don't mean Max I uh I I don't care about balance that much so uh in storytelling and in uh the game so I like the chaos of it so my my back story is the the complete I have no idea what has happened to me I'm gonna figure it out I'm gonna do the best I can so I'm playing the doctors resisting all the terrible things and it's deeply regretful of all the terrible things that happen I don't know if you've played it without coach yet but there are people on our team who have dabbled with the dark urge um I don't think Alia Molly or I have personally but I I have seen some of the screenshots it's it's the when we first announced it I think uh I was really desperate to try and tell people this isn't just the evil run uh because to me and I'll be as spoil the light as possible but uh the dark coach is potentially the most heroic playthrough I think because resisting what's inside you and actually getting through that and surviving it uh with your friends alongside you still most of them intact uh is is I think the most heroic version of the game so that's what I'm doing I'm doing the hero run uh as best I can okay the secret Hero Run fantastic um during early access and as Baldur's Gate 3 was in development I remember hearing a lot about how the team was playing uh tabletop DND together of course to just like remind yourselves get a feel for things have experiences um dos 2 Divinity original sin 2 definitely had a reputation lots of people referred to it as a game that felt like it had a permissive DM somebody that let you get away with a lot of like goofy stuff Baldur's Gate 3 I think has already inherited that reputation what else about playing tabletop was really important to translate into this experience like for as a writer um and as a writing lead it's knowing when to this is personal I mean it's definitely a layering thing but uh it's known when to let go as a writer it's a it's the it's been the DM who says oh they're having fun over there I'm not gonna get in the way uh it's really difficult to do because you want to make sure they understand what to do next uh so one of the strongest challenges actually is saying uh we want you to have fun but we don't want you to get completely lost uh so we kind of subtly steer people back toward things weren't they nice nicest comments I've seen uh repeatedly is people saying the side quests tied back in and that's very deliberate like whatever you end up doing we try and poke you back toward the story without actually holding your hand and dragging you back for the story so the the difficulty of that is is uh is is definitely there but actually once you accept that's what you're doing then uh you realize how many tools you have to do it with and um with the city especially once you get there we have hundreds and hundreds of background characters and they're actually really handy little prompts they're like little speed bumps that occasionally you're just like oh these guys are talking about something that's happening elsewhere then you go into a tab and you're like those guys are talking about the same thing and eventually registers and you think I should probably check that out or you don't it's fine as well but it gives us another Avenue to remind people people who aren't necessarily checking the journal but it's that it's nowhere to get out the way uh it's one of the hardest things of the writer to do is say I should probably shut up now and it's it's true like it's it's very easy to overwrite and uh and constantly be in people's faces uh and especially in multiplayer you really have to trust people to enjoy their own story um multiplayer is a strange challenge because that's the closest we get to tabletop I mean it's very hard to play DND solo um I think some of us do it but but uh when when you have a group at a table then quite often they're having the most fun when the DM leans back and says I'm just going to let them deal with this you throw a grenade into the room and say deal with that and then you sit back and you watch them and uh and you try to eventually we see where all the pieces land uh who's still alive who's dead and then say okay how are we gonna deal with this uh so a lot of time without saying that out loud that's what our characters are doing they're saying what are we gonna do next uh so but it's that yeah it's the hands-off I think is the biggest lesson uh having said that my tabletop campaign at Larry and we never left the first Tavern we played for like four weeks and we never get out of this happens to the frustration yeah it does feel very much like bowl of gate as well it's like yeah exactly yeah like with the anything in the game whether it's a a house that you go into or whether it's a full dungeon uh they at best their little rabbit holes that you go into and you come out like four hours later blinking and go what the hell did I just do down there and again that's that's sometimes you just have to say let the systems trust in the systems uh trust in the players to enjoy playing with those systems and just stay out of their way and then when they come back out again talk to them a little bit and say how are you not like a therapist sometimes it is but how are you are you okay what do you need to do next how can I help with that it's the hardest part is um making sure that people don't get completely disorientated as well sometimes it was always the challenge of the city uh you get to a city and you get overwhelmed with information uh in real life as well as in the game and I know that we didn't do a perfect job of it but I think we did a pretty good job of saying like you have objectives here that are pretty clear and then when you get lost and you go off track there are certain things that will prompt you and point you back to what audit and we do that dynamically as much as we can as well yeah I I would say that you did a you did a pretty good job of that and I find it really interesting that you say about being very cautious of not trying to overwrite because I never really get that impression that it there's like too much which is wild because there is so much dialogue in this game there's like talk to everyone and you often have so many different ways that you can handle a conversation right that is something that I've really been enjoying is that you can do like a different class or a different background and the conversation will take such a different direction and I think especially when so many of these different Solutions can have a direct impact on your relationship with your party as well right and I just like how how did you manage to sort of take such a tangled web and make it work as well as it does like how do you put something like that together so uh first of all I think that the the the the thing that you said about having uh some of the options in the dialogues like the the term I use like internally and uh is is that we do collaborative storytelling uh we don't want to tell you a story we want to tell a story with you so when uh if if you're having an experience where uh you get some of our text and then you get to pick an option then that to me is US succeeding uh and occasionally we had a rule very early on where it's like if there are certain if there's a certain number of sentences that a character's saying to you and you've not had a chance to say something back yet then that's not good enough that we don't like that now in case we break that rule because somebody is lecturing you and often we joke about it you know you can say to them is this going to finish soon and you can just tell them to shut up uh but we do let the villains especially want to monologue occasionally so we put you in a situation where it's hard to talk back but you can also just throw something at them and shut them up if you're a multiplayer uh so we we work out ways to deliver information is is in as light away as possible so you're not just sitting and listening to our story so if if you're involved and you're picking options then I think we did our job well um and then of the tangledness of it um it's partly a lot of work um but the the the the the the key thing that we had was whenever we played the game we play the game constantly since very very early you know we sit and we play everything we put into the game we test it straight away and we we run it by other people um Sven also never stops playing the game like he's so Hands-On with it and if you get to a point in a dialogue and the person playing it hesitates and looks unhappy then it usually means they need a different option uh and often what we find is they're saying I wasn't represented in this I couldn't say the thing I wanted to say now we don't want to over face we with 25 options because then they're scrolling through them and they just get lost in it so it needs to be limited to an extent but we try to be as broad as possible and what you're allowed to do and that means sometimes you see just ridiculous things like oh I can just be so insulting here or it can be so heroic here and so valorous and they feel very on the nose but we prefer that to people not feeling represented and thinking I don't have anything that my character wants to do here that feels bad and then with the class and the race options um that's I mean we want to give as much as possible so we actually at some point uh toward the end of uh toward toward releasing this that's what the inability access uh toward release we had an entire team that were going back through act one and actually improving it because by the time we finished act three we had so much reactivity for classes and all this stuff that was in there and we looked at one and we were like we did a pretty poor job so we added a lot more uh so there were there was entire team people just running through the game and saying like I'm playing as a monk I get to this point where I'm playing as a cleric I don't feel like it's a good option for me here so they put it in um yeah that's awesome because I I'm just finished act one myself um recently and yeah this whole time Azam Ali says I feel like I'm constantly whether I'm on my palate and save or my monk save um getting options to play as my class or as my background um like just just so many choices it's been so neat um I did want to like briefly take us over to something you mentioned on Twitter on X uh depending on what you're calling these days um about uh sort of an homage to bioware's RPGs and like you know I wouldn't be here without bioware's RPG so it was great to see you saying the same thing that was the experience you had before we get into like talking about characters maybe a little bit I don't know if that's uh the area where you feel that most or if it's about being a crpg it's it's the characters actually it's a so I grew up um with um Ultima seven was my first love in the RPG space uh and then shortly afterwardscape one uh became the the second great love in the Border Skate 2 superseded that uh and uh it was the first time I've been attached to characters and they had so my very first RPGs were uh back on the Atari and uh uh and it was things like dungeon master they they kind of um Grim Rock style uh oh I like to have gone off one second um oh no wait one sec we just it's all motion sensors it's fine or it goes off at 5 p.m maybe they're telling me to go home um so uh and in those games your your party were I always refer to as a keychain you basically had a keychain and they were characters on the keychain and they were just keys so your your Rogue was the person who could pick a lock your cleric was the person who healed you and turned on dead your warriors stood at the front and stopped at the damage and then you played Baldur's Gate and suddenly you were like oh these are human beings uh well some of them um but uh the the people that they actually get pissed off with me and they they get annoyed of each other and they fight each other and they uh they're very very over the top in bg1 like uh it's so easy to get them murdering each other uh and just saying like oh you're not as heroic as I thought you were and they just leave you and that was just amazing because suddenly they weren't keys they were living things uh and then Boulders gate two doubles down on that and like and suddenly uh it's jahiro is like the most important character to me like uh uh somebody said to me and I can't remember who it was um it was it was a it was a player not someone that larion uh they said that they never appreciate you here until they got older and I think I had the same thing she was never my favorite character and the older I got the more I I loved her and so I always wanted to be in the game and uh the the thing I loved about you here in Baldur's Gate too is that she she goes through grief and she goes through loss and that didn't happen like you know death was just the thing that happened it was an annoyance then you resurrected somebody and to to bring this character back and say what what has happened in a hundred years you know what does somebody feel like after that um it's what is it like to be a hero and we wanted to do uh passing the torch moment but we also wanted to say this is a person with like a history that is living with them uh and uh and you know their own scars like emotional scars that and you're a reminder of that because you're like come back into the fight with me and uh and there's some stuff like a lot of the the really kind of emotional beats the character buried deep in the in-party dialogue so that you only get them and because you're here is not romanceable uh you don't get them as explicitly because um I I know we made them too thirsty we're aware of it it depends on your taste it's okay but uh because she's not romanceable it's it's a little bit different in terms of what the arc is doing because you recruiter later um and really there it's about saying what was it like to to live through those events you lived through and uh getting that story from her like it I get very emotional with that and that's partly because it is a reminder of my own past but it is also this is literally uh by our story and bio was character and it's easy to forget because the game's out there now and it's it's out there but when we first started working on this it was like this is shoulders of giant stuff and like they it was such a big Shadow like is this do we ever look okay in this Shadow you know like uh there was there was anxiety about it we were all confident in ourselves to tell a story that we thought was very good and um but we we always heard it we'd get the people saying well it's you know dos free it's not really Baldur's Gate three and we were like no we love Baldur's Gate uh we want to make Ballers gate three uh and there was a reason for that and it was because so many of us you know did come up with it and um and yeah I I uh it means a lot whenever I see anybody who was even vaguely associated with the original games being pleased because uh you know we owe them a huge debt um and we hope we did them proud like uh like yeah for sure and even 20 years time somebody picks up our characters and does something for you then it'll be amazing I mean like it does feel like what a wonderful thing to to have them live that long yeah yeah speaking of thirsty characters uh I would say almost the entire PC Gamer team is obsessed with karlak I thought I was gonna be like alone uh no it's nearly all of us um and that surprised me um have you been surprised by the like popular reaction to any particular character like what what the the internet is saying about anybody not really there's one thing that I felt confident it was the characters I mean uh there's people who won't get on with some of them which is also fine uh I stay custerian so often because I'm just like oh screw you stop biting me I love him but also God damn it historian get out of my playthrough exactly yeah and then I feel bad about it but I've always looked like Zell and lizelle is like uh like very off-putting when you first meet her uh I like that about her I think she's really good fun and uh and the people who get annoyed with the character would always say like you know see them through because you know they do have an arc there's a reason for them to be the way they are um especially ethereum actually uh for kalak I think um I we always we we fell in love with car like very early on and uh and Kalik has been cooking for a long long time and um she has the advantage of being um a response in some ways to Early Access uh where we had people saying you know the party uh edgelords and we we were like you want to have to go look at that lady yeah you do and we always had the idea that this was the missing piece of the party was this a kind of uh big old puppy dog who um has possibly the most horrific backstory we've ever won in the game but it's just like I'm a light man like it's great and that was super important to us uh and uh having somebody who is yeah just having a blast like uh you know that that felt right and the I mean for all of them but I think I like in particular the the character artists I mean like holy like um she's just she's instantly iconic to look at and uh I think they nailed it uh we had so many discussions about um you know everything to do with her design and it's this is what usually happens illerion is you have all these conversations you go back and forth and you say what about we try this and then somebody does something slightly different to all of it and you go that's the one and that's yeah uh just a combination of yeah beautiful things but um we did all our reworking on will which obviously involved Carlock as well tying their story together and actually having a character is like hey my main objective is to kill one of the other characters like uh that was such a risk and uh and there were points when we were like are we really chasing our own Tales here is this is this too much um but I think we pulled it off um like it's such a risk tying characters together from from the minute one but you're like okay they actually have enmity for each other um but like will and Carla can become the best like buddy movie in the world if you actually get them to fall in the same party so but uh no they don't surprise me I think Gail was always the one like Gail's divisive uh in the office in terms of not in terms of whether people like him but some people are like oh he's a nerd I'm like he's like the hottest wizard possible look at the map that's what nerds look like cool uh he's got this beautiful head of her like he's dashing um and I think the the thing that always gets me Gail and I actually said this on X Twitter whatever um was Tim Downey who uh he's a voice actor um he's in like Toast of London he's one of the guys in the booth uh and he's a brilliant comedian and the thing that Gail has that that is impeccable is Comic timing and he's not a character who tells jokes but he's he's got this composity that he's a were of himself uh so he just makes me laugh and every single time there's a monkey Gail where I'm like oh God you just showed me your heart and now I want to cry it surprises me because I've seen Tim in a video booth and he's so funny he's just naturally gifted as as a as he he makes everything sound funny and then when he like bleeds for you it's like oh my God like it's incredible not literally we all need a girl in our life we all need that like yeah hot kind of pompous nerd friend uh yeah exactly it's something that uh because normally when it comes to you know like characters that you can romance I always have like one or two favorites and that's it I am kind of a Lazelle girly in this one but I am having such a hard time picking a romance option right because they are all they're all quite forward they're all quite you know there's a lot of there's a lot of romance and sex happening in Boulder's Gate three so I was just wondering what what is like a good kind of romance scene to you like how how does making that for each individual character come together so there's there's basically we have a bunch of different versions of what a good romance scene is I I hope uh and one of the things that we did was we wanted them to initiate a lot of the time rather than you say oh I'm bringing you things and that means I want to sleep with you and is that going to go anywhere so one of the reasons I think they come across is forward is that we did want them to be the person who comes to you and says hey you're impressing me uh are you interested in taking this further um we also very early on were like these are people who don't know if they're going to survive the day so uh some of them like colic when you first meet her is very open about the fact she's like I've not been able to touch anyone for years we might all die tomorrow if you want to sleep together and uh and that's not a romance it's a sex scene and and then what we wanted to do was say how do we take the beginnings of these characters like lizelle or I mean in her early stages it's very much like you know this is a way to work off tension you've impressed me as a soldier in a warrior um and there's no real commitment to it and what we wanted to do is to take that and say what is the their Arc what is their meaning in the world and in the campaign and what is the end of that and so we look at that and then we extrapolate from that how does that look if you're in a romance with them so it's it's all about them traveling through their story and you happen to be accompanying them and sometimes pointing them in a certain direction or guiding them a certain way but uh but it started with the story it always started with the story like um who is a sterion how did he get like this like I mean because you know you see the people you know oh I can fix him I can fix him and really uh it's it's like to do that you have to be like how did this happen what is wrong with this person and and we joke about it and I love joke about it and being silly about it but they they have trauma a lot of them and uh and I I hope that um when we get to the end of their stories a lot of the time you you see that it exposed and uh and um it kind of one of the things we wanted to do was to invert it a little bit so sometimes you start with the sex and you end with the hook because actually you're breaking down barriers and sex is not the goal like it's a thing that it's it's just it's sex and it can be very meaningful to some people to some people it's not the most meaningful thing to some people the most meaningful thing is you saying to them I will never leave you and to some of them it's saying um hate that had meaning in a way that you didn't think it did I want you to understand me and so the the way that they kind of travel through that well essentially to answer the question uh it it had to mean something for them it had to be something that was meaningful for the character and be true to them uh and and that doesn't mean it's the most important thing that's ever happened to them ever um and and I think that's often what uh it I I find distracting about romance stories is they they're always like I don't just meaning games in general it's like this is the most important thing that's ever happened to me it's like it's very unlikely that's true if you're in the situation these people are in but it can be the thing that makes you want to get through it and yeah like for some of them it's the reason they want to survive and yeah I'm I'm really glad you said that actually because we spoke about RPG romances on an episode a while back didn't we Lauren and we called her we called it like a vending machine yeah yeah you just like find what that person likes you spend all your money and you just give it to them in the hopes that they like you and I couldn't quite put my finger on what I liked about the romance in this but that is is really true yeah it's the the fact that you're not the one that's doing the pursuing for once right it feels yeah a little more natural that way it does mean that you lose a little bit of control over it which I think we can improve on uh we're already you know working on hot fixes and patches I think one of the things that we can probably improve in the storytelling is making those feel a little bit more natural they're very very complicated uh the way they're built and sometimes you're like oh this person didn't have the most satisfying experience of the romance sometimes it's because this dialogue triggered before that dialogue or they didn't get this like Bridge into this section so we'll we'll work on it but um uh I I'm happy with them on the whole I'm very happy with them and I think that one of the things that's been nice is seeing people um respond to the fact that we we do think about um like how people's boundaries work uh and you can have conversations about that as well and we don't want to make it like a PSA we don't want we want to make it feel like people talking about their boundaries because people do it's you know like uh especially people who are in terrible situations and may be clinging to somebody because they're like you know there's a desperation to it sometimes uh and it's one of the hardest things to do is to um figure out like a urgency because uh you know RPGs you take them at your own pace uh but we we try to get across this sense of they don't know what tomorrow brings and uh and especially as you get to all the climax that won't spoil it if you've not finished it yet but you get to what the climax things get very very apocalyptic and there's points where it's like this might be the end uh and having that conversation with someone you've formed a bond within just saying we don't know if we're going to make this it's pretty powerful I appreciate that you brought up the the voice actors I've been um catching videos on Tick Tock of I think lazelle's voice actor in particular coming up yeah like you did uh that like hang on with Lazelle she comes off a certain way and then she kind of changes and develops throughout this story um and a couple of them have also talked about how collaborative that experience was going in and doing voice recording do you have any examples of times when maybe one of the actors like sort of nudged a character in a certain direction that either you were looking for or you didn't expect even with the origin characters the minute uh we got the first batch of recordings for them because uh this is they started working on the recordings three years ago and maybe four years ago even um and it's been a long time uh so they've had the carrots in their head for so long but what happened for us was that we uh we launched so we access and then there was a little bit of a break in vo when I say little it was very short but then some of them had been in the booth like pretty much every week for the last two or three years so what that means is that after a certain point you've got this critical mass and you're like okay I know what this character sounds like now so you're writing in the voice of the person who's speaking the lines and uh and then you'll you know when something doesn't feel natural for them we very rarely had anyone say this doesn't feel true to the character um partly because I think they have lived in their heads for as long as we had so it's very very collaborative in the sense that um we we know them they know them they they would communicate about them to us we'd we'd have back and forth about them um they they own them as much as we do uh because they they were right there um and then even for the smaller NPCs you know it's the same it's like uh um you you get to know the actors and like you know you'll have the same act to come in to do another role you know and uh and you already know how they speak and you have a good idea of it uh but for the for the origins yeah I mean like again I go back to Jahira because Tracy came in for that and it was like hey we need you to do a voice that was done in a game 20 years ago and here are some samples of the voice and you're gonna have about a hundred times more dialogue than it's ever been recorded for this character before and it's going to be in much higher Fidelity and you know go hardly wrong uh and and I mean I remember her first take coming in and it was just like okay that's the one like straight away uh and and then we the first time that we edited some of Tracy's stuff after it come in I think was just because we'd heard the voice and we were like actually this is a much more um so we had this version of Jahira we should still get bits of where she was much more like I'm gonna take my swords off the wall and go in for one more Mission and actually Tracy brought this energy to it which was much more like I'm back and I'm loving it so there was much more energy in it so so we started to tweak it a little bit not because she said oh this doesn't feel true because we heard the voice and we were like this is someone who still can kick your ass uh and and wants to jahiru could always kick your ass but we were like she's actually kind of enjoying being back in the saddle uh so so and I mean uh devorah for lizelle I mean like uh everything about um like those little alien chicks and all this like where she's just being like really rude that was that was all from devorah that was just like uh you know you hear it the first time you're like oh we can get away with this because putting sprinkling like you know all the apostrophe z words into a thing is often just like you know I want to make this character sound a little bit more alien uh and then you're like oh actually this is really funny and uh and devorah can do it in a way that's really funny but also there are point where she's using GIF language to try and get something really serious across to you know like yes you can do this I got um one note from uh you've probably seen Amelia's outtakes animator uh her acting videos I got one note from Emma who plays mithara uh and she was just like uh thanks for all the drought words they're really good fun to say and I was like that's sarcastic isn't it they're really hard to say she nailed them but my God I love that I love how close it all was especially because I feel like Lazelle has such like a knack for comedic timing as well I know it is like referenced as well that she's considered more uh more humorous among like among like the githyanki right so that's really cool I'm really happy that it was like a uh a collaborative process and I feel like that really shows as well with how uh kind of familiar the characters feel almost so yeah really really cool uh so obviously you are the lead writer I am sure you have written far too many lines of dialogue to remember all of them but I was wondering if like maybe you had like a specific favorite or if there's like a favorite maybe questline or just like a specific like quotable line of dialogue that you really love uh so oh man I the stuff I want to say okay fine I can say stuff that's from deeper uh it's fine block your is if you don't want to hear they're not story spoilers um so uh I actually write less dialogue than you might think uh my my job is mostly to edit everyone else's work uh so I know other people's lines better than my own because those ones I kind of write them in let's say somebody else can deal with that now whereas everyone else's lines I'm like you know okay how do we make this as brilliant as it can be uh but uh I spent a lot of time on mythara uh and we knew from the beginning midfara is a character that most people will kill uh she's a villain you meet her you can recruit her uh but most people kill her we know that from the stats and we knew that putting the effort into writing lots and lots of dialogue for this character was going to be appreciated by very few people but we're like hell it's good I nearly swore I don't know if I'm hats were um foreign and I put in one line which I I don't know how many people will ever see it and I'm gonna just say it now um where uh so benthara's story she's been infected with tadpole she's working for the cult uh and uh when you recruit her essentially she comes under your protection and she can no longer hear the voice of God of the absolute and uh and you deprogram her uh and she doesn't become a nice person she's just like okay let's let's do evil for ourselves now let's not do it for anyone else uh let's take control and uh and there's a moment in uh when she gets very close to you if she does um where she says um if you she's she gets she has a crisis of confidence and she says uh I don't know if I can do this and and you can say look you're stronger than anyone I've ever met and she says if I'd never met you then I would have been just then I would have still been a maniac uh doing things at the will of a God that doesn't exist and you say but he didn't mean and she says yeah and nine times out of ten I will just him one more cops a new Crusade and it's a little sad moment but it's also a little tap on the fourth wall that says yes in all your other playthroughs you pieces of crap no she's a horrible person shouldn't be safe but uh but like the ones that I love at the moments where we like were writing this for a very small audience um and when they get to it they're going to get something special and that and that stuff I love I love our villains as well and like uh I think the Oren is I didn't write a single line of RN dialogue uh that was 80 one of our writers over in Guildford and uh and I remember we were we were uh we're like okay we need a chosen a ball uh we need this kind of murder Queen and like we had these different concepts what we wanted to do and uh we tried a few different takes out and 80 was sitting and writing like this version of the character and I read it and I was like make more of it like that beginning where it was this very I don't know if you've met or in yet but like a very like her language is dripping in blood like um she she is everything is guts and death and like she's barely coherent sometimes when she gets excited but uh she refers to his people as skin and bone you know like uh and and it's so high register in like uh and very high concept for one of our characters uh linguistically and uh and I looked at it and I was like if we can make it all like that and it's still coherent then then we've got the character and it came about like half an hour later and she was like like this and I was like oh yeah like that and it was just the solid whole character and then I talked to 80 like a week later and she had a notebook on a desk I looked at a notebook and she was like oh that's my orange notebook and it's just pages that are just scribbled with different like words for bones and blood and Vistana and she's like if anyone sees this when I'm sitting on the train to work I'm gonna get arrested this is my orange thought book and she's sweetest person in the world she's so nice and yeah and that one came out so I I think she's amazing uh and and yeah just just I I'm lucky because that when I got to just experience fully you know I get to and that's the one that Maggie Robertson voices uh Lady D from rezy7 Yes uh and my God like you know the combination of that writing and that performance uh it's just phenomenal yeah she's my favorite as a dark urge monk are you going to recruit menthara on that place yeah I have her already yeah okay all right yeah I I usually take her along just because they're so I spent so much time with her yeah definitely um one of the things that our team has been talking about is all of the wild like monster lore that some people are getting exposed to for the first time I mean I came across a spectator in the underdark I was familiar with beholders I did not know what a spectator was and then somebody starts uh enthralling me with the details of the spectator life cycle which is apparently horrifying um as you were digging into like D and D lore creatures monsters like what were um some of the coolest ones that you got to either like include in a quest or just make people fight like what what were the bits of lore that you really liked digging up for people well the the first one is very obvious what was mindful is uh and I remember very early on we were like what actually happens when you're infected and you're turning into a mind flayer and we talked to wizard of the coast and they said we've never gone into a lot of detail because obviously they want people to make up their own stories so we wrote a seven day document like a document going through the seven days and what happens to you during those days and sends it to them and they were like yeah I'd be like yay that's the response we wanted so this kind of and you know the characters will explain to you Gail does it lizelle does it you know like all this stuff like your skin peeling off and your organs liquefying and uh so we we spent a lot of time looking at mind players and like what do the colonies look like what is it what is it to be part of the hive mind um and and so yeah they were fascinating because I knew what a mind flow was now I feel like I know them like my best friends uh and then actually one of the other ones that is early in the game that one of those names that's been around forever in my head is Knowles um and we wanted to do something really interesting with them so they they I don't know if you've met the Flynn who's the pack leader um but when we were looking at nulls we were like okay you have these creatures and they're actually so they are creations of a chaos godinigu and uh and they all they want to do is eat and the God just wants them to Devour the world and it's like the world is made of Flesh and meat and like you you were created to to devour it and then we were like okay they get birth from hyena corpses and we were like what the hell so we're like we've got to visualize that so we did the Cinematic of that which is horrific uh and then uh we looked at the flind and we had this idea we're like What happens if the absolute cult puts a tadpole inside a creature that's brain is made up of chaos and you have this fight between the chaos God and the tadpole that's telling it it's a new God so we did this entire scene where you can get into this thing's head and see the war between these two different gods that are fighting over control of his brain and then you can either have mercy or you can say you know let's make this place set on fire and like basically blow its brain out uh and uh and and stuff like that was interesting like finding these creatures that we kind of already known about and like they've lived in our heads as people who play Fancy RPGs and saying how can we do them differently but also what does it mean if you start to infect them what does it mean you start to play with that um so that that was that was a yeah a lot of fun there's some stuff in the in the hells as well um like uh we we spend a lot of time thinking about devils and demons uh and there's not actually demons in the game uh but there's a lot of devils uh but it's fundamentals then that they were the opposite of the Demons so the whole you know the Devil is a lawyer uh like was a big part of it like you know approaching the contract and it's all legalese and they want you to uh sign up and you're like there's always going to be a small print and uh the the gap between we don't use the alignment terms like um in the game but the gap between lawful evil and whatever you might be when you meet these people uh people playing RPGs uh you know the whole murder hobo thing people tend to lean toward their chaos evil because that's just what happened so putting a devil in their path he's like look I have solutions for you but they're going to require you to be a little bit more smart about the way you apply pressure and the way you do things uh that was a key part of it one of the criticism we got in Early Access was all of our evil roots with 2kotic we address that as much as we could and we did I think some clever things of it but one of the things we wanted to do was say uh like when you first meet you here and Jahira says look you're infected we can use that against the bad guys so like all the things that you think are a floor and you we can use for the greater good and then of course you can say yes and the greater evil whatever it might be so cool yeah we also had on team a moment of oh what the hell Knowles are from hyenas I I distilledly remember somebody somebody in our in our work chat had the exact same like eel what the hell it's really weird right there's a lot of gross stuff yeah there's a there's a lot of body horror like um again you know the nulls are part of that as well um I it's not a game for the squeamish like and then you know we kind of advertise that with the IE thing right at the beginning you know uh also somebody said if Valerian writer's got a problem with eyes we do have a lot of eye trauma in this game it just felt like the right thing to do I was not prepared for it I am I have not been on the Baldur's Gate hype train until like maybe a month or two ago and I watched that opening cut scene and I I had just eaten dinner that is all I'm gonna taste I had just eat and dinner and I watched that I can't see yeah there's there's a lot of like visceral very very visceral descriptions as well like was was that like did you know you were just gonna go like super super ham into like the body horror stuff or because yeah yeah I think once we knew his mind players which we did from the beginning we knew we'd have to have some of that like it's uh it's kind of integral to the story is uh you're afraid of what's going to happen to you you're going to lose your body you're gonna lose your mind uh so we always knew that'd be there we didn't want to go too overboard with it we probably did uh but people like it so I remember when we did the I don't know if you've seen if you get the tadpole powers and you start leveling up your ill effect abilities then the menu screen for that is just a brain and you have to drop telephones and they burrow in and your brain gets more and more infected um and probably the first time we saw that bit of you actually we were just like okay yeah yeah okay we're doing that are we and you can dangle them over and just be like and they just wriggle into it um which is yeah hideous um so and then um act two is like I mean it's our horror act like um that's where we we delve deeper into um all of our favorite horror references and influences that's also we made up a lot of our own creatures for that one because we were talking about this place where things are twisted by a curse so we could let our concept artists go wild with with the stuff they created there um but yeah we always knew like uh that we'd have that that certain level it was always in you know towards it was an 18 rated game or whatever it might be in whatever country it is you know um for the violence for the sex the language and and the the the concepts as well I mean like uh it's a very dark game and we always wanted the most the lights as well because otherwise God it's miserable and this is I think one of the reasons people respond well to Carlock is somebody who you throw all these Horrors adder and she just does a little dance it's like you know you need that in your life sometimes uh so so yeah and and I think to me the for all the horror that's in there the the darkest parts of the game uh the the most devastating parts of the game is always the companions it's um it's finding out yeah some of the the endings for them like uh even the the Happy Endings you know like I mean it's a it's the hope that kills you yeah uh so as as the lead writer you've told us already I mean you're you're in the midst of this big launch right now and everything feels weird you're finally getting to share like this so many things that you've kept in your head for so long um so you know as we're post launch now you are officially post launch it's out there in the world what as a as a writer or as a team lead are you paying attention to either sort of within your team or within the community like what what is catching your eye or um or how's your attention as you're thinking about what what comes next I guess for me it's a balance of um really like feeling really proud and happy I I with the acts as you were talking about I love seeing them be proud of the work you know like uh it's it's genuinely just such a boost and um anytime someone in the team sees something they worked on it's just like you know seeing somebody just just putting a social media post up about it and just being happy like I mean uh it's it's such a obvious thing to say but it's very true we do this to make people happy like that's why we do it and uh and so that's super uplifting and then there's the other part of my brain which is like how do we fix the things that people aren't happy with and you know as a Storyteller you can't be too beholden to that but because it's a game uh and it's a very complicated game there are points where so the ones that I want to improve are the ones where I see and I say that didn't land how we intended it to uh and if that's for emotional reasons if that's for uh just somebody not having a good time of a particular story a particular character that's okay uh but where we go that didn't land properly because we messed something up uh we didn't deliver it the pacing was off or um we didn't quite uh get the emotion we wanted you see people sometimes where they're confused by something they say like what did this mean why did they say this to me or why couldn't I say that those are the ones that I look at and they say well we can do better there um mostly proud though like you know I I feel very happy and uh and um I you know they just seeing the amount of people who uh responding to it positively and just having fun with it somebody said something to me and um this was maybe a month ago when we were doing the Press event over in Ghent and uh and somebody been playing the game uh said to me um Early Access broke my heart like and they were talking about a specific story moment and uh and they said and uh I hope you fix it again and I got all teary-eyed and I was like uh and and that really was it I was like I hope we do like uh I hope that you know the people who get really invested in it um that they feel that we honored their time with it and uh and their attachment to the characters um yeah so happy mostly like occasionally it still feels very surreal um but it's here now it's out it's all good yeah yeah so um we gotta uh get you know the the nice thing about that is that we have stuff that we know we can improve uh so everything that we improve goes on to pce first but then the PS5 launch will have smoother stuff you know because the game's so complex there is stuff that obviously we go damn it how did that slip through um but uh but you know we we want it to be better and better and better we will never be satisfied we're very happy but that doesn't mean we're like ah this is this is the end of it yeah yeah well we are hoping for successively impressive launch weeks for uh all the other platforms that Boulder Skate 3 winds up on we are really happy to be in here uh some of the first people playing starting in on this 100 hour Journey depending on um how stubborn you might be uh and how how badly your save file is doubled by your playtime on the platform it can be a little bit embarrassing we massively underestimated how long the game is I think we always will we were trying to gauge it and we were like we think it's this one we think it's this long for some people we probably got it right but again I say my wife's playing at the moment and she's still in act one and I'm like there's so much more to see come on now okay he's never gonna get out of that one I'm sorry I relate to her I just finished Act One recently and uh with that we have Baldur's Gate to get back to this evening and I know you do too in one way or another um Adam thank you so much for setting it down it's it's been an incredible job so far yeah thank you yeah yeah well enjoy and uh yeah I hope you enjoy that too thank you so much thank you bye

Channel: PC Gamer

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Id: dgoTdUfAjSQ

Length: 52min 17sec (3137 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 17 2023