Baldur’s Gate 3 casts a tremendous shadow over the D&D RPG genre, so at Gamescom I asked how Warlock plans to expand on BG3’s magic.
Post-Baldur's Gate 3, everyone I've ever spoken to has said the same thing: 'I don't envy the developer of Baldur's Gate 4.' That same sentiment extends to Warlock, Invoke and Wizards of the Coast's upcoming D&D-set RPG. While we've seen the likes of Solasta 2 make use of the Dungeons and Dragons ruleset, Invoke's new adventure is the first triple-A D&D game post-BG3. Sure, it's a very different look for the franchise - combat is more action-heavy, and there are no turn-based battles here - but it's still, at its core, a D&D experience.
"I think ignoring the Baldur's Gate 3-shaped elephant in the room would be a bit stupid," I say, prompting a chuckle from Invoke's Vice President and General Manager, Dominic Guay. He nods - "yeah" - and I ask what the team learned from Baldur's Gate 3 and, in turn, how it inspired them. "I think some of the ways [Larian] realized the spells had some impact - I can guarantee that," he says. "But I think that, just generally, the thing that impacted us the most - and in a way kind of comforted us in the way we want to do things - is that, in Baldur's Gate 3, I think Larian did a really good job of rooting everything they did in the lore, while paying tribute to it.
"I've been playing D&D for a long time, and I see some stuff in [BG3] and I go 'wait a sec,' then I check it on Google and go 'oh, that's cool! That's actually a deep cut, but it exists!' Even although they had their own story that they wanted to tell, they were able to connect it [together]. That's what we wanted to do, too, and we were inspired by how they were successful in doing it."
I return to the point on abilities because, as mentioned in my Warlock preview, Invoke's spells do look different from Larian's - something I was pleasantly surprised by. Where Eldritch Blast, perhaps the most iconic Warlock spell, is a bolt of green lightning in BG3, it's a plume of blue energy engulfed in black mist in Invoke's RPG.
While D&D's abilities have always existed in the 'theater of the mind,' making them unique to your imagination, BG3's iteration of various cantrips and spells have likely become 'canon' for some players. Guay notes that the team was "for sure inspired by things that came before [including] Baldur's Gate, even if only subconsciously. Their interpretation of some spells were cool, and I'm sure they kind of impacted how we did some of the [spells]. But, fundamentally, the function was the most important part."
He recalls that translating "spells that are so bound to being turn-based" was a huge challenge. "We wanted to create spells that have multiple functions so that the player can be creative with them. That's where we started from. You saw the Misty Step; the typical use case is 'how do I [get] out of a problem?' But now all of a sudden barred gates, which in videogames typically signal to the player that they can't go down that corridor, once [you] have that spell suddenly become an attractor - 'oh, cool, what's behind the barred gate?' The functionality guided us."
That idea of creativity is fundamental to Dungeons and Dragons; we've all been at a table where a player has come up with a weird and wonderful way to solve a problem. It's something that Baldur's Gate 3 championed - I remember speaking to Twitch streamer Lua 'Luality' about the time she killed Astarion's nemesis, vampire lord Cazador, by throwing rats at him, and we all recall the guys who scaled a wall using a tower made of boxes.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.pcgamesn.com/warlock-dungeons-and-dragons/gamescom-interview-baldurs-gate-3
