'Every stone will not be turned for years' says Baldur's Gate 3's principal narrative designer, on its many hidden outcomes

A mimic, a creature in Baldur's Gate 3, lurches in ambush at the player - a box with razor teeth and a putrid tongue.
(Image credit: Larian Studios)

While 1,800 characters and over 110,000 lines of text.

So when the game's principal narrative designer Lawrence Schick tells hidden dialogues already—every time something new pops up on the internet, I'm just staggered that it just keeps happening.

"So much of the game is a concatenation"—an interconnected web of things—"of unlikely variables. There’s stuff that people will be discovering, including us, because of the way it was built, with synergies, and layers, and interacting reactivity.”

It helps that Larian keeps adding new ways for stuff to combine together. The game's most recent patch added a new epilogue with pissing Withers off enough to get thine sorry flesh yote into the shadow realm. 

Of course, it's not a perfect machine—back during the game's post-launch era, the Rube Goldberg of chatter produced an effect where everyone (namely, Gale) 1,500 of her lines. The fact that a companion can be missing over 1,000 lines and still mostly work feels like it's proving Schick's point, here. You think it'd be irrevocably broken at, like, 200.

The fact that Larian's machine works at all is a marvel. Of course, entropy's a thing. There will come a day when we have plundered all of Baldur's Gate 3's secrets, but as Schick himself says: "It astounds us, the stuff that comes up." I figure if the principle narrative designer—you know, designs the narrative—is still getting surprised, we'll need to stay on our toes for a while yet.

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Harvey Randall
Staff Writer

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.