Baldur's Gate 3 may have looked very differently. Larian changed the concept „at least twice” before finding the one that players loved
Baldur's Gate 3's Art Director, Alena Dubrovina, revealed that initially, Larian Studios planned to give its hit game a more cartoonish style.
The incredible success of Baldur’s Gate 3 is due to many factors that work perfectly together. Would Larian Studios' game have received such a warm reception if the developers had realized their original concepts? We'll never know. However, we learned something about these ideas.
The artistic director of Baldur’s Gate 3, Alena Dubrovina, was recently a guest on the CD Projekt Red podcast, during which she revealed that the first plan was to give the game a more cartoonish style.
And at first, we tried more stylized approaches, like I would say even a cartoony approach to match it closer to what we see in D&D books and D&D art - explained the developer, adding that during the design process, the concept of Baldur's Gate 3 changed "at least two times."
The Larian team decided to take a risk and went for more realistic graphics.
Then we tried a little bit of a more realistic, grounded approach, but then still keeping the stylized feel. Hard to describe, easier to show, I guess - she continued.
Despite feeling like they were heading in the right direction, the creators were still not happy with the results after reviewing a few test cutscenes. Dubrovina itted that during the game design process, "there was no concrete plan in pre-production." The team was simply "experimenting" and "trying different things" as they developed their style, "having no idea what they wanted to achieve."
Yeah, I want to make something cool, but we don't know how - she presented the thought process of every developer responsible for Baldur’s Gate 3.
Considering that the Belgian team was kind of stumbling in the dark, it's pretty impressive that they managed to create a game that millions of players around the world fell in love with.
However, if you regret that the devs didn't give the game a more cartoonish style, you can always watch the animated films provided by Larian on special occasions. One of them highlighted the release of Patch 8.
