BALDUR’S GATE III
ook,” David Walgrave pleads with his fellow Larian developers. “The player will respect the fact that they’re a bear. They will not fit through the door, they’ll just have to change back. If my dungeon master told me ‘You can’t get in that house, you’re a huge bear’, I would go ‘OK, you’re the DM, you make the rules’. You just have to accept it.”
Walgrave is a producer, and producers are the reason you’ve ever played a finished game. They are the bulwark against feature creep, the developers who say ‘no’ when everyone else is saying yes. In Baldur’s Gate terms, they are Elminster – the sage advisor who shows up in the woods to remind wayward adventurers of their purpose in the game.
It’s not clear what Walgrave did wrong in a past life to become head of production at Larian – a studio that likes to tackle everything and compromise on nothing – but he’s surely paying for it now. “No,” say his colleagues, embodying the player. “No, I simply cannot accept it. I’m a druid, I’m proud of being a druid. I want to be able to walk through a door, I’m a bear, I want to climb a ladder.”
In Baldur’s Gate III, bears will become playable as part of the shapeshifting druid class. And yes,
