Baldur’s Gate 3 is big—so big that, according to a message I sent in a Discord group chat in August of 2023, it took me sixty hours just to confirm that the city of Baldur’s Gate was, in fact, in the game. Yet despite BG3’s playtime clocking in at a week’s worth of waking hours, Larian CEO Swen Vincke keeps finding new ways to explain that, impossibly, Baldur’s Gate 3 was originally going to be even bigger.
In a Baldur’s Gate 3 retrospective panel at PAX West last week, when asked alongside other Larian panelists what early concepts had changed during BG3’s development, Vincke said the game originally had an even wider scope. “The game was much bigger originally,” Vincke said. “In our heads, we were going to have so many more regions to make and to go to.”
That scope narrowed by necessity once Larian realized just how much detail they were packing into each of the game’s areas. “We realized that we’re spending so much time on every square meter of this world, we have to make it smaller,” Vincke said.
It’s not the first time Vincke’s revealed that Larian had even grander plans for Baldur’s Gate 3. In a BAFTA interview video released in August, Vincke said that the studio’s original plans included so many areas that were eventually cut during production, like a second Moonrise Tower, because he’s “notoriously always been bad at judging the length of our games” and was nervous that BG3 would’ve been too short.
Other cut BG3 area concepts include Candlekeep, the library-castle that served as the prologue zone for the very first Baldur’s Gate game, which Larian lead writer Adam Smith said would have been a kind of “academic dungeon.” Sounds a lot like the real academic libraries I’ve known, actually.
It’s not exactly surprising that Larian had to cut some early concepts; that’s a universal part of game development. But considering that Baldur’s Gate 3’s script is over 2 million words long—longer than the total wordcount of the Game of Thrones books—the idea of an even bigger BG3 is a little staggering to imagine.
There almost certainly would’ve been design compromises to accommodate the broader scope. Areas might have ended up with a lower density of quests and interactions, and Larian’s web of player chaos contingency plans, for example, might have been a lot less complex. A bigger Baldur’s Gate 3 probably looks like an entirely different game. I’m sure there would’ve been even more chasms to knock bosses into, though.