Swen Vincke was worried that the 100-hour Baldur’s Gate 3 would be too short, which is why Larian made a ton of extra areas they wound up cutting- ‘I’ve notoriously always been bad at judging the length of our games’-
In a new BAFTA video interview, Larian CEO Swen Vincke revealed that he was actually worried Baldur’s Gate 3 wouldn’t be long enough, an anxiety that’s pretty rich in hindsight, given that some players struggle to finish the marathon RPG. Vincke revealed this old fear as a partial explanation for why Baldur’s Gate 3 has so many tantalizing cut areas, while also describing one such zone we hadn’t heard about before: a second Moonrise Tower to go with the one we saw in Act Two.
“Moonrise Tower used to be two towers,” Vincke said of the Cult of the Absolute’s lair. “For a long time there was actually the ruins of the second tower. The reason we removed the extra tower was purely productional: It was just the game was betting too big, and so we had to cut that out.
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“You would be surprised to know that we actually had many more regions that we planned to make—I was afraid that the game was going to be too short originally, but I’ve notoriously always been bad at judging the length of our games.”
That tracks with some other production stories we’ve heard about the hit RPG: At one point Baldur’s Gate 3 was planned to have the Candlekeep library from the original game, as well as a place called the Red War College where we would have recruited Wyll. It’s easy to pine for more Baldur’s Gate 3 we didn’t wind up getting, but more isn’t always better.
“People will datamine things that are in the game,” BG3 writing director Adam Smith explained to us in a recent interview, “but there’s a reason we didn’t put them live, because we felt they detracted. Putting more in and continuously tweaking can make something worse.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 is already plenty massive, and in a way that feels generous rather than overlong, but a second Moonrise Tower actually might help explain a slight timeline discrepancy in the game. In The Emperor’s recollection of his mortal life, he visited Moonrise and was turned into an Illithid hundreds of years in the past, but you can also meet the ghost of the tower’s architect who reveals it was a new construction, maybe 150 years old at maximum. A second, ruined tower makes it explicit that there were multiple buildings on the same site over the centuries. Absurd nitpicking? Perhaps, but my heart is now at ease.
The rest of the interview has some interesting tidbits about Vincke’s career and taste in games, including his continued extolling of the virtues of Ultima 7, a game that has inspired nearly everything Larian has made, but which Vincke actually hasn’t revisited since the ’90s: “I don’t play it again, because I don’t want to spoil the memory.”