When you’re working on a video game, regardless of its genre or style, your immediate goal is to make it as fun and memorable as possible. Quality is what drives most game developers, and a team like Larian Studios thrives on pushing their titles to the limits to ensure that gamers enjoy them. They did that in many ways for Baldur’s Gate 3, including putting the title on Steam Early Access for years to ensure that they found and fixed as many bugs as possible. However, as CEO Swen Vincke noted to BAFTA in an interview, he honestly thought the game was “too short,” as the studio had to keep cutting content.
That might sound odd at first, given how massive the title is, but Swen gave examples of how much of the game was cut:
“This is a really random tidbit, but Moonrise Towers used to be two towers. The reason we removed the extra tower was purely productionally. It was just, the game was getting too big and so we had to cut that out.”
Removing one area might not seem “that bad,” but Vincke went on to note that there were even MORE planned spots for players to go to and have various adventures in:
“You would be surprised to know that we actually had many more regions that we planned to make. I was afraid the game was going to be too short originally, but I’ve notoriously always been very bad at judging the length of our games.”
He’s not wrong, as Larian Studios is famous for having incredibly long titles that allow players to have an adventure of their own making and see the consequences of their actions. However, it also speaks to how big of a creative mind the CEO has, as he wanted to make even more for players to enjoy.
We’ve known about certain Baldur’s Gate 3 cut content for a while. It was even present in the game’s launch, where Act III wasn’t “as good” as the first two acts in the minds of most players, although numerous patches and updates have fixed that.
Furthermore, there was the character of Alfira, who became a fan-favorite NPC because of her looks and personality. Through some code and dialogue that remained in the game, it was clear that she was supposed to be another party member until her role ultimately got trimmed down.
While we’ll never know the “full scope” of Larian’s true vision for the game, their result is still one of the best you’ll ever see.
