Designing hypothetical scenarios in Baldur's Gate III: The "multi-class" scriptwriter, according to Vladimir Gaidenko

A few weeks ago during DevGAMM in Gdansk we attended an interesting talk by Vladimir Gaidenko, Associate Lead Writer at Larian Studios, about the narrative design in Baldur's Gate 3. And after that talk, where the writer gave many details about the branching design and the "what ifs" that the player piles up to create his unique experience in the game through its 288 side quests.

It's a daunting task, but Larian managed to set up a structure of "possibility boxes" that served to separate content that is not affected by player decisions from content that is (and therefore needs to be revisited as the branches develop to see if it needs to be reworked). But in the end it almost always comes down to achieving a single goal: Make it fun.

"Well, a very important thing for us is to find this fun factor in our situations, and we always try to achieve this goal. So we set up our process in ways that allow us to continually go back to earlier stages if we find something that might need more work. Yes, and with this kind of process we try to work from small things, from basic ideas, to expand into more different ways, different ways of approaching situations."

It is the human factor and shared experiences that give rise to the game's most memorable situations, such as the ability to turn your character into a giant cheese wheel, one of the most purely D&D moments found in the game, which takes place in Act 3.

"Normally we have a list of scenarios that we have already planned in advance and we try to adapt our system to make it easier for the writers to work with them (...) With the cheese example, it was the idea of one writer who brought it forward without notifying a lot of the producers and they didn't realise it. But in the end, the situation is there, everybody likes it. I think it's Sven [Vincke]'s favourite situation. So yeah, we got it."

Gaidenko continues, "For other scenarios like the beer scene [Referring to the encounter with Thisobald Storm in Act 2 and one of the possibilities to overcome it], for example, well, it was mostly from a cinematic point of view. They put it in the game as well. When people saw it, they couldn't take it out. It's too good not to show it."

Lastly, we rescue from his talk the role of the scriptwriter in Larian as "multi-class", embracing not only knowledge and responsibilities on narrative, but also on design. A fundamental part of being able to realise the ideas and to narrow down the seemingly infinite possibilities of Baldur's Gate III. Gaidenko puts it this way:

"We want to have this flexibility that scriptwriters are also designers when necessary. And not just be in the hands of narrative people, but rather work collaboratively".

"Actually, that's how we organise the work. And because we touch a lot of things, we work with a lot of different teams, I would say the main experience for people [who want to come and work at Larian] actually is indie game development. Because when you're indie when you're a one-man studio, you work with everything, and you know each of the different fields, and you try to put it all together, to shape a whole kind of product. So for indies, it's a complete game. For us, the result is a situation where we work from our side on the actual functioning, but we also help other teams to put their stuff in there as well."

How do you feel about the organisation of working as a scriptwriter at Larian Studios?