The Dungeon Master Thinks Of Everything: Developer’s Foresight In Baldur’s Gate 3
Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023), developed by Larian Studios, is the successful winner of the Game Of The Year award, known for its compelling narrative and depth of content. This RPG based on the setting and gameplay of tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons is a bestseller. Many factors can be attributed to its success, from piggybacking off Dungeon and Dragons’ fan base to the highly praised writing of the game. The story of Baldur’s Gate 3 is set in the titular Baldur’s Gate, though the player character, officially known as Tav, begins their journey on a nautiloid while infected with a mind flayer parasite. Their quest to remove the parasite inside themselves and their companions leads them to a sinister plot by the Chosen of the evil gods known as the Dead Three. Being faithful to its source material as a tabletop roleplaying game with narrative freedom, Baldur’s Gate 3 lets players take many different paths, lots of which you need multiple playthroughs to uncover. Whether it be story choices or special dialogue depending on your race and class, it mimics the freedom of a real game of Dungeons and Dragons where the only limit is your imagination. And like a real game of Dungeons and Dragons, the Dungeon Master, or in this case, the developers, must prepare for when players do things that are unconventional. For this, Baldur’s Gate 3 utilizes Developer’s Foresight. Also known colloquially as “The Dev Team Thinks Of Everything”, it is when players use game mechanics to deviate from an intended path or solution in a way that is unlikely to happen naturally only to find that the developers have a response to the specific scenario they instigated. Common examples include edge cases such as naming yourself after an existing character or completing quests out of order. This essay examines how Developer’s Foresight is an important factor to Baldur Gate 3’s success because of how it creates player agency, furthers the narrative, and encourages emergent gameplay.
High Level Concept 1: Player Agency
Player agency is a key part of the Baldur’s Gate 3 experience as a Dungeons and Dragons video game and as a character-driven game. Not only does agency create meaning to the actions players take and increase the involvement of the player in the narrative, it can also “create a reversal of power structures: while normally the developer dictates the player’s actions through the very structures of the game, in these cases, the players are dictating how the game’s narrative should respond to their actions” (Stang, 2019). By acknowledging the consequences of even insignificant and experimental decisions made by the player, Baldur’s Gate 3 gives more agency to the player. Consequently, players feel like their choices have an impact on the game, which is a positive emotion and verisimilitude is desired by many designers and writers.
For example, there are many object interactions in the game, and the actions you can do with them are varied as well, lending to occasions where Developer’s Foresight is required to account for all the possibilities. In a study conducted by Carstensdottir et. al (2021), “Participants described feeling agency when they were able to make the experience their own through mechanical means”. Beyond the general mechanics of chemical reactions such as grease igniting when you shoot an arrow of fire, there is a potion called Basilisk’s Oil which can unpetrify creatures that have turned to stone. It is not easily found, appearing in three locations that are optional to go to. There is one obvious use for it in which you may unpetrify some drow to assist you in a fight nearby. However, due to the freedom of the system, you may also choose to use it on a petrified NPC you can find earlier on in a hag’s lair. The NPC serves as a piece of environmental storytelling about the powers of the hag, and through reading flavor text from items nearby, you can extrapolate that he made a deal with the hag to become petrified in order to avoid dying of a deadly disease.
There are various reasons why a player would choose to use the Basilisk’s Oil on this unimportant detail. Whether it be to test the ability of the potion or because of curiosity, the fact that the system accommodates this choice is a shining example of player agency. When someone uses the potion on this character before killing the hag, a special cutscene occurs where he asks what Tav has done in horror and the player gets dialogue reflecting different reasons why they could have freed him. Predictably, he dies from the disease at the end of the scene, blaming the player. A player coming across this naturally may feel they have discovered a special scene. This tidbit could have been easily ignored by making the NPC an invalid target, but Baldur’s Gate 3 encourages players to be creative and hence the game can act realistically when the player intentionally does something illogical. Subtly, it reinforces the theme of choice and consequences, emphasizing its genre of a roleplaying game while highlighting the connection between mechanics and narrative. As a result, it generates a truer sense of player agency.
High Level Concept 2: Narrative
Another reason to incorporate Developer’s Foresight is to strengthen the narrative. Baldur’s Gate 3 fluctuates between being a narrative game and a playable story, which Ryan (2009) defines as when the story enhances gameplay and when gameplay produces the story respectively. Moreover, Carlquist states “when a game contains both a compelling story and a compelling game play it can be described as something in-between the linear and the branching story” (2002). Through Developer’s Foresight, Baldur’s Gate 3 contains both as the developers integrate actions taken outside of dialogue into the narrative. Playing the game as intended generates a linear storyline chronicling Tav’s adventure fighting The Absolute. While all choices lead to the same areas and ending, the details of the narrative such as who you romance and whether you had a positive or negative effect on the world can change, affecting the story conjured by the player. With this in mind, Developer’s Foresight is simply another branch in the narrative.
As aforementioned, characters reacting to unconventional events caused by the player is a common occurrence. If taken seriously, Developer’s Foresight can deepen the game’s realism, showing more of the world and the characters. One example is how your companion Karlach can have unique dialogue if the player completes the quest of killing Gortash before going back to kill Lorraokan with Dame Aylin. She will comment on how she understands Dame Aylin’s sadness at seeing someone she sought revenge on dead, as she had been in a similar situation, which is something that feels natural for her to point out. This small interaction gives insight into her character and serves as an emotional moment that would not exist if not for the foresight of knowing players might try to do things out of sequence.
Furthermore, there are times when Developer’s Foresight is necessary for the narrative. Accounting for all the possibilities in a vast game like Baldur’s Gate 3, some of them lead to drastic narrative changes that make no sense to ignore. The Netherstone, a plot-significant item required to defeat the final boss, cannot be thrown in order to prevent players from losing them. Most players will take it at face-value and continue the game without giving it a second thought. However, a creative player discovered that you can put it inside a container and then throw that container into an irretrievable location instead. Instead of the game breaking, it proceeded onto a cutscene where The Emperor, who has been preventing your transformation into mind flayers, scolds you for permanently losing the necessary artifact and gives up on the party, turning everyone into mind flayers and causing a game over. Delivering on the logical progression of your actions and tying the mechanics with the narrative, the developers can laugh along with the players’ antics while also ensuring the storyworld reacts in a suitable manner. Although it ends the game prematurely, it retains the verisimilitude of the story, accentuating that your consequences are not just mechanical, cutting off the branch you have created and closing the gap between story and gameplay.
High Level Concept 3: Emergent Gameplay
Finally, the reason why Developer’s Foresight works so well with Baldur’s Gate 3 is because of emergent gameplay, a concept which has ties to Dungeons and Dragons. Emergent gameplay is “when players engage in activities that produce outcomes that cannot be accomplished without interactions between multiple game elements” (Nur Fauzan, 2023). Baldur’s Gate 3 employs Developer’s Foresight to make the emergent gameplay even more enticing and impactful.
For instance, there are countless ways to handle the goblin camp. Certain mechanics can be exploited to go through the camp in unique ways, such as sneaking in from the back by jumping off a cliff with the Feather Fall spell, disguising yourself as a drow or relying on a goblin prisoner you freed earlier. Inside the camp, emergent gameplay occurs when you interact with a barrel of ale and have the option to combine it with another item. Smart players will realize this means you can poison their drinking supply by mixing in a poisonous item when you are being stealthy. Doing so can take out many goblins at once, and is a clever way of facing the goblins that mimics the improvisational ingenuity of a real Dungeons and Dragons game. Knowing ahead that players will try to take advantage of the mechanics and scripting success for it shows their rewarding creativity and showcases how smoothly their system runs together.
Another example is how there are fail-safes for if various characters are knocked out or dead. As The Dark Urge, you are compelled to kill an innocent civilian, Alfira. This happens at your campsite at night. Players may try to circumvent this by either killing themselves before the cutscene and get revived later or knocking out Alfira so she logically cannot go to your camp to be killed. It makes sense for the developers to take this into consideration since revivication and non-lethal damage are commonly used mechanics in their game. Therefore there will be players that try to exploit them as much as possible. Although it cannot change fate as the fail-safes of unmet characters appear to take the place of the original target, it teaches that keeping your own party members dead or knocking NPCs out are viable strategies for some situations, such as killing a companion to hide information from them.
In conclusion, the addition of these elements to the game coming from Developer’s Foresight make a good game into a great one. The factors of agency, narrative and emergent gameplay mesh together into a game with seemingly endless possibilities akin to a Dungeon Master at the table, rewarding Baldur’s Gate 3 for this noteworthy feat and sincere attempt with commercial success. When players commend its replayability and simulation, Developer’s Foresight plays a huge part in creating that dynamic. I believe it is worth it to include responses to edge cases in video games, as shown by Baldur’s Gate 3.
References:
Stang, S. (2019). “This Action Will Have Consequences”: Interactivity and Player Agency. Game Studies. https://gamestudies.org/1901/articles/stang
Carstensdottir, E., Kleinman, E., Williams, R., & El-Nasir, M. S. S. (2021). “Naked and on fire”: Examining player agency experiences in narrative-focused gameplay. ACM Digital Library. https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3411764.3445540
Carlquist, J. (2002). Playing the story: Computer Games as a narrative genre. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26339572_Playing_the_Story_Computer_Games_as_a_Narrative_Genre
Ryan, M.-L. (2009). From Narrative Games to Playable Stories: Toward a Poetics of Interactive Narrative. Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 1, 43–59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25663007
Nur-Fauzan, H. (2023). Emergent Gameplay and the Affordance of Features in Open-World Video Game Environments. Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1783245&dswid=2601
