BALDUR’S GATE III
“Look,” 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 , bears will become playable as part of the shapeshifting druid class. And
