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Baldur's Gate III
The key to Baldur's Gate III's narrative and mission design - Vladimir Gaidenko DevGAMM Interview
Right after his panel we caught up with Larian's Associate Lead Scripter, who talked us through the studio's comprehensive systems and workflow in order to produce unique branching narrative within hundreds of quests for the celebrated RPG.
Audio transcription
"We're at the DevGAMM in Gdańsk and I'm here joined by Vladimir who just gave us a very interesting panel about Baldur's Gate III and the sort of the narrative process you guys follow at Larian to make the game so varied and so interesting and to have so many outcomes considered. So first and foremost you sort of describe this process by which you go up and down and what can you tell us about these steps you always follow?
Well very important thing for us is to find this fun factor in our situations and we always try to get to this goal. So we established our process in the ways where it allows us to continuously go back to previous stages if we find something which might need more work. Yeah and with this kind of process we try to work from small things, kind of the core ideas towards more, expanding towards more different paths, different ways how you can approach situations and yeah, basically."
"So it's the, if I'm correct, pitch, white box?
Narrative pitch, white box, orange box and polishing, yep.
And then polishing. Orange box has anything to do with Half-Life or?
No, right. So why is it called white and orange?
It's more for production so honestly I actually don't know."
"How much do you?
I guess that we color the white box with color now.
Okay, like it's full of color now. Otherwise you have to fix it.
How much do you go back and forth? So how do you decide you're happy with an outcome so that you really don't have to go back to polishing or to perhaps testing the story once again?
Yeah, it's very context sensitive so we cannot say like for majority of situations after this point we're no longer changing anything."
"It's more like in one situation it might be we already have this cool idea in there and we just smoothly work with it and there are not a lot of huge iterations. For other ideas we search a bit more and if we try not to go beyond white box so we have this flexibility of exploring way more kind of ground stuff in there to set our core immediately."
"Or with the orange box, yeah, if story context changes, if all the situations which are around our quest change and this quest doesn't fit although it was already developed a bit further, well, we do need to adapt it to all the new context around it. So yeah, if we try to go back to the stage and kind of explore things we already done but now we have to redo them again."
"And then I asked you the same for the what-if scenarios. You mentioned this as one of the main points of your panel was the many what-if scenarios you guys come up with. So yeah, how crazy can you go and other than turning the player into a cheese, what can you tell me about these crazy scenarios that have come up?
Normally we do have our list of scenarios we already pre-planned ahead and we try to adapt our system so it's easier for scripters to work with them and not like every time being surprised like, oh, you can teleport to some end of the situation. Well, yes, you can do it all the time. But for more crazy things, yeah, it's very up to people who are involved working in the situation. So with the example of cheese, it was idea from a scripter who pulled it off without notifying a lot of the producers and they just weren't aware of that. But in the end, the situation is there, everybody likes it. I think it's Sven's favorite situation. So yeah, we pulled it off. For other scenarios like the beer scene, for example, well, it was mostly from cinematic side. They also put it in the game. When people saw it, they just couldn't remove it. It's too good not to show it."
"Exactly.
So it's indeed sometimes not planned at all. It's more like a wild factor in there.
Can you tell me a what-if scenario that you guys scrapped?
Yeah."
"Because it was perhaps not bad. Perhaps it was too crazy, crazier than a cheese.
Yeah, there are definitely a lot of scenarios we scrapped because they were either too crazy or like too expansive. So we would have to dedicate a lot of time on it. But I don't have anything from the top of my head."
"All right. One thing that I found interesting about your panel is that you stopped by the definition of a scripter, which, you know, for many young developers here, I think was interesting to really learn what a scripter, a.k.a.
many other roles, can be in a studio. So what can you tell them now?
I think it's also kind of a special line because obviously a lot of people come to a job interview as a scripter and they expect that scripters purely just implement whatever they're being told to. So we do have this, as I understand from other studios, this is the process there. For us, we do want to have this flexibility of scripters also being designers when it's necessary. And not only be the hands of narrative people, but more like working in collaboration."
"That's actually how we organize work. And since we do touch a lot of different things, we work with a lot of different teams, I would say the main experience for people actually is indie game development. Because when you're an indie, when you're a one-man studio, you just work with everything and you know all the different fields in there and kind of try to put everything, like shape everything one kind of product. So for indies, it's a full game. For us, the product is a situation where we work from our side on the actual how it works, but also help other teams to put their stuff in there, too."
"That's why you say that a scripter is not just somebody taking care of narrative, but also mostly programming many of the times.
Well, not programming, more like scripting. Because we do use programming systems which already exist, so we don't go too deep in there. We do want to be on the brink of design and programming, not skewing too much either direction."
"You mentioned teams, many different teams. So we've mentioned how you go back and up and down this list of steps and priorities, but then at the same time, you spread out this horizontally into teams. So how do you guys sync up?
How do you guys align for that to be met by many different people?
Yeah, that's why we have scripting leads, to be honest. We try to help the team members to kind of connect with each other. And together with the region leads or RPG designers, we do try to have this vision of a piece of content to work on, for example, on the region. Yeah, kind of just talking with a lot of people all the time and letting everybody know what other moving parts and other different parts of the game are happening."
"And also the systems that you mentioned and all the workflow has to work with the premise that it needs to be done or also aligned with both single player, multiplayer, and the evil path and the good path. So how do you do that?
Yeah, like trying to consider all the different possibilities, but indeed multiplayer is very important for us because we do want to have this ability to play all the situations in the game together with your friends in co-op mode or through online connection. And indeed, all our stations work both for single player party, for single character party even, and in multiplayer in co-op."
"It's not easy. It's indeed we have to consider all these continuity questions that several players can be at different positions in one situation at the same time and situation still needs to make sense. There is no magic thing.
We just work a lot on this support."
"And then Baldur's Gate 3 was, if I'm correct, 288 side quests with many different outcomes each. So where do you think this can go next in terms of, you know, the game got a lot of awards on narrative and branching narrative.
So what do you think this can evolve to or perhaps something that you would have liked to do differently that now you would love to try out?
Obviously we want to just create more and bigger and cooler situations and quests, but we'll see."
"All right. Thank you so much for your time Vladimir. Lovely to meet you here and looking forward to meeting you in Barcelona as well.
Yep, yep. Cheers. Thank you."
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