Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke has revealed some surprising cut content that didn't make it into the final incarnation of the game, already one of the largest, most complete we've ever played. So, if you ever wondered which villains were once considered for companion status or which iconic locations from the series would ultimately not make the grade, read on. Vague spoilers for Baldur's Gate 3 to follow!
Vincke spoke to IGN at GDC last week, where we learned Larian Studios would not be developing DLC or a sequel to BG3, but he covered a wide range of other topics in the interim. Cut companions came up, revealing that at one point during development, Act Two could be resolved by convincing big-bad Ketheric Thorm to join the party, but "we cut that out when we were rescoped. It was part of the fixing of Act Two when we were stuck on it."
Vincke elaborated, explaining how the addition would have affected the rest of the game: "He was supposed to be in your camp while you were dealing with Gortash and Orin. So he became a source of information on them, and he could trust, you could get him to his arc. You could then be convinced by him to go to his side. So it was a great story, but yeah."
Even more compelling were the locations players will never get to visit, from a time in the game's development when map sizes were much smaller. These locations included a return to Candlekeep (where the first Baldur's Gate began), a visit to the Gith Astral Plane, a venture to Githyanki queen Vlaakith's palace, and even a trip to Hell itself, alas, not to be. Vincke explained that:
"There was a moment when the maps were going to be smaller, so we were going to be able to give you a wider diversity of locations that you would explore. But then the problem is that the sense of exploration wasn't present. So that's why we killed a whole bunch of them. So it was a very fine balance between trying to figure out what the right size of these things was, but we wrote a lot."