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Baldur’s Gate 3 once had a portable hole, but Swen Vincke says it would have been a “crime against humanity"“We had to remove it, but it was fantastic.”
“We had to remove it, but it was fantastic.”
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Larian Studios
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Larian Studios
The hole came up during a discussion of whether Larian have considered testing any smaller, more focussed videogame concepts, perhaps to let younger developers try their wits on something less sprawling than a Baldur’s Gate. “Oh, you mean within Larian in terms of incubation? But there’s always stuff happening that you never see,” Vincke began. “I think people still underestimate how much work these bigRPGsare already, and how many components there are in there - you never see a lot of small things that are being done, but there’s a lot of innovation happening, other things that never see the daylight.”
“You see small groups, and juniors in those small groups, you know, they’ll bring the things that they care about,” Adam added. “You can see, I think, in Baldur’s Gate 3 that there were a lot of scripters who are immersive sim fans, and who are bringing ideas from elsewhere. The world is sandboxy, and within that they are playing with their favourite genres. I get to play with horror, you know, one of my favourite genres, in the storytelling. An RPG of that scale, you’re kind of making lots of things all at the same time. So there’s definitely the space to do that.”
There’d have been even more space if one particular cosmic impossibility hadn’t been left on the cutting room floor. “There’s one mechanic in particular that I’m thinking of that they brought in,” said Vincke, apparently in reference to the aforesaid scripters. “It was fantastic. It was just we couldn’t make it work in all cases, so we had to remove it, but it was fantastic. And it was a portable hole, which is like a mechanic, so you could basically throw down a hole, you can throw people in it, and then you could start doing all kinds of abusive mechanics in the game.” My audio is a bit smudgy here – Vincke may have said “abusive” or “abuse of mechanics”, both of which would make sense in context.
Larian’s QA staff ultimately “vetoed” the idea, which strikes me as a display of utmost sanity and powerful self-respect from testers who do not wish to spend the rest of their mortal lives hotfixing a pocket-sized infinity. “When you see all the things that [our QA director] had to go through just to be able to test this game - really, adding anything else to that would have been a crime against humanity,” Vincke noted.
Still, we players do not have to worry about patching out bugs and exploits, and are free to mourn the hole-based playthroughs that might have been. Seriously, I can think ofanynumber of uses for a portable bottomless pit and barely any of them are sexual. The obvious one is trying to dump the entirety ofBaldur’s Gate 3inside it – mindflayers, tieflings, cheese, Medallions of +5 Whatever, rehaired cats, cities, the Underdark, etcetera.
Disclosure: Former RPS deputy editor Adam Smith (RPS in peace) now works at Larian and is the lead writer for Baldur’s Gate 3. Former contributor Emily Gera also works on it.
