Avowed devs compared notes with Baldur’s Gate 3 to make “mercurial” companions with “distinct personalities”
“I want to take a lot from that and compare that to what we’ve been doing with companions”
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Baldur’s Gate 3casts a long shadow over any RPG that’s going to follow, and even the genre legends atAvoweddeveloper Obsidian seem to feel there are some lessons to learn - particularly with the D&D game’s approach to party members.
Feargus Urquhart - head of Obsidian and a storied RPG developer in his own right - says Baldur’s Gate 3’s take on companion characters is the subject of plenty of scrutiny from the Avowed devs. In Baldur’s Gate 3, “the companions can be very mercurial in a lot of ways, and they have distinct personalities,” Urquhart said on theHit the Limit Break podcast. “I looked at a lot of that stuff. I want to take a lot from that and compare that to what we’ve been doing with companions. That’s a lot of what we’ve been talking about internally about Baldur’s Gate 3.”
Urquhart, of course, has plenty of experience with Baldur’s Gate, having worked on the original games atBioWaredecades ago. In fact, there was a point in time where Urquhart and Obsidian were on board to create Baldur’s Gate 3 themselves, way back in 2008. In a 2012Kotakuinterview, Urquhart said “We negotiated a whole contract. Years worth of work, and it turned out they didn’t have the money.”
In the new interview, Urquhart says that it was “bittersweet” not getting to work on Baldur’s Gate 3 himself. “I love the games, so getting to make that was always something that I’d hoped to do. I always wanna make ‘em. You give me something like a Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale - I don’t know, Teletubbies, whatever it is - and I wanna make an RPG of that. That’s why it’s bittersweet. It’s great to be able to play it, but I also would have loved to make it.”
There’s at least one key difference between the party members of Avowed and Baldur’s Gate 3:You can’t romance your Avowed companions because Obsidian didn’t want the RPG’s platonic relationships to suffer.
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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He’s been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.
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