Summary
The success ofBaldur’s Gate 3is astounding. Not only is Larian’s follow-up to the legendary CRPG series extremely commercially successful, but it also won every majorgame of the year awardlast year. In some ways, Baldur’s Gate 3 bucked modern RPG conventions by adapting a tabletop system, bringing a traditional feeling to the title.
I don’t think anybody would have expected this to be the case, but a former Bethesda designer has chimed in and said he doesn’t see the studio going back to the CRPG roots of The Elder Scrolls series, despite the success of Baldur’s Gate 3. As with every RPG of that era, the Elder Scrolls began by taking a similar approach to tabletop RPGs, with a focus on numerical stats for combat. However, the series has been moving away from those systems ever since, slowly transitioning to the more dynamic system we see inThe Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Baldur’s Gate 3 Was An Exception
In an interview withVideogamer, Bruce Nesmith, a game designer who worked on Daggerfall, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout 4 and briefly onStarfieldbefore he departed from the studio, opened up about the evolution of the RPG genre and how the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 was an exception to the industry trend.
“In the days of Daggerfall, everybody was trying to replicate the tabletop experience, which means that you were rules heavy,” Nesmith says. “Our character description was large and, I would argue, unwieldy, and as time moved forward, that was less and less of interest to the audience. They didn’t want to have outrageously complex character sheets, and I was actually one who aggressively pushed for streamlining.”
“When you look at something like Baldur’s Gate 3, I think that’s a very different animal. They [Larian] had a very specific charge. They were taking Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition and putting it onto a computer game. So it was intentionally looking backwards, intentionally seeing the old tabletop presentation with the die rolls and all of that,” Nesmith explains. “It was…reflecting back to the good old days from the point of view of the people who used to play those kinds of role-playing games back then or did now to give them that joy buzzer. So I think Baldur’s Gate 3 is actually an exception to that.”
Nesmith is correct in that Baldur’s Gate 3 adapted Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition (D&D 5e) very faithfully, even if that meant sacrificing some aspects of the game. For example, some classes have underwhelming level-ups in 5e. Granted, 5e is a more streamlined version of D&D, less obtuse than the system the original Baldur’s Gate games were adapting.
“I don’t think [the success of Baldur’s Gate 3] necessarily presages a complete change back to more numbers and more fiddly character sheets and things like that,” Nesmith said, concerning Bethesda’s approach to design. “Whether or not the rest of the industry will follow suit, I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to say that, But I think that through Skyrim, Bethesda has wanted to have the game get out of its own way. You see that everywhere in Skyrim. Todd [Howard] is a big proponent of the interface vanishing if you’re not doing something that needs it to be visible, so all you see is the world.”
Bethesda is currently working on The Elder Scrolls 6 and has just released an expansion for Starfield, Shattered Space, tomostly negative reviews.
Starfield
WHERE TO PLAY
Starfield is the first new IP from Bethesda in a quarter of a century, launched for the next-gen Xbox Series X|S and PC. Taking place outside our own Solar System, you play a member of the Constellation, a collective of explorers set on discovering new worlds.
