Baldur's Gate III is anticipated to be a role-playing video game with both a single-player and cooperative multiplayer element. Players will be able to create one or more characters and form a party with them and computer-generated characters to explore the game's story. Optionally, players will be able to take one of their characters and team up online with one or more other players to form a party together. It was announced during the PAX East 2020 event that, unlike the previous Baldur's Gate games, Baldur's Gate III combat will be turn-based, similar to Larian's Original Sin games.
Development
The original Baldur's Gate game was developed by BioWare and Black Isle Studios, and published by Interplay Entertainment in 1998. The game used a licensed version of the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset, specifically in the Forgotten Realms setting. The game's success led to a sequel, ', and its expansion pack, as well as Icewind Dale and its sequel, and '. Black Isle Studios had begun work on a further sequel, ' by 2003 but Interplay faced significant financial crisis that year and shut down Black Isle, cancelling the game. Interplay lost the license to make D&Dvideo games to Atari by 2008 who released Neverwinter Nights and its sequel. Wizards of the Coast had long since acquired the rights to D&D as part of their purchase of TSR, and had been making updates to the core rulesets over the previous years. The new sequel from Larian Studios has no connection to the cancelled Baldur's Gate III: The Black Hound. The series' intellectual property had been sought after by multiple developers; according to Brian Fargo, a former Interplay developer and founder of inXile Entertainment, both he and Feargus Urquhart of Obsidian Entertainment had been seeking the IP rights for at least a decade. Larian Studios had been interested in making a sequel in the Baldur's Gate series for some time, having first approached Wizards of the Coast after their release of ' around 2014. At this time, Wizards of the Coast felt the studio was still too new to the industry to be trusted with the Baldur's Gate license. Larian continued to develop ' which would be released in September 2017. Pre-release materials related to the game had impressed Wizards of the Coast, and the publisher contacted Larian asking if they still had interest in Baldur's Gate III. Larian accepted, and while working to wrap up the release stage of development for Divinity: Original Sin II, a small group gathered to develop the design document to present to Wizards of the Coast with their ideas for the new Baldur's Gate. The game will be based on the 5th-edition Dungeons & Dragons ruleset, though it will include tweaks and modifications that Larian found necessary in translating that ruleset into a video game. For example, the combat system is expected to be weighed more in favor of the player than in the tabletop version, to make the game more enjoyable. Larian Studios teased Baldur's Gate III in the week prior to E3 2019, and formally revealed it during Google's presentation on the Stadia platform just ahead of E3, confirming its release both for Microsoft Windows and on Stadia. The tabletop adventure ' was published by Wizards of the Coast in September 2019, and has been described as a "prequel" to Baldur's Gate III. The Descent into Avernus adventure takes place roughly 100 years after the events of Baldur's Gate II, and the story of Baldur's Gate III takes place immediately following the events in the Descent into Avernus tabletop module.
