In July of 2023, Baldur’s Gate 3 was hardly a blip on my radar. When it was released one month later, it became one of my favorite games of all time.

Now, the game is celebrating its one-year anniversary. Its seventh major patch, which will add official modding support and new endings to the game, is right around the corner, and developer Larian Studios launched a brand new YouTube channel to provide behind-the-scenes looks at the game and its developers. Between its critical acclaim, numerous awards, and financial success, Baldur’s Gate 3 is worth celebrating, but its meteoric rise to success was just as surprising to the developers at Larian as it was to the rest of the gaming community.

“At every single point, I thought it was going to stop,” game director Swen Vincke says of the game’s success. “I remember arguing with our director of publishing, who said, ‘This is going to sell a lot.’ I said, ‘That’s impossible. The number you’re saying is just not possible.'”

The interview with Vincke is done virtually, but while I’m home in my office, Vincke answers my call from the passenger seat of a moving car. He’s the only one who can hear me, but he informs me of potential background noise from the backseat of the car, which is currently filled with several other developers who worked on the game. I don’t know exactly where they’re headed, but to schedule an interview for the travel time from one place to another makes one thing abundantly clear – Vincke is a busy man, but he’s not ready to share the project taking up all of his time.

Despite months of patches and media attention on Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian is already hard at work on its next project, and while we don’t know exactly what it is, we know it isn’t Baldur’s Gate 4. In March, Vincke announced the studio’s plans to end its partnership with Wizards of the Coast, meaning Larian won’t be making DLC or a sequel to their critical success. Several months after this announcement, Vincke says the folks at Larian have no regrets about the decision.

“We actually decided this only at Christmas. We were working on stuff, but […] our hearts weren’t as much in it, probably because we spent so much time already in it. So it was time for us to do new things, and ever since, we’ve felt better. We [got] our developer joy back […] and that’s the prime thing, right? If you don’t have that, you can’t make anything good.”

A Series Revivified

It’s only natural that after spending six years working on the game, Larian isn’t as enthusiastic about Baldur’s Gate 3 as it once was. But back in 2017, that exact enthusiasm was what led Vincke to pursue the project to begin with. The original Baldur’s Gate games are hailed as BioWare classics from the late 90s, and after decades without a new entry, Larian saw itself as a developer fit to continue the legacy. Wizards of the Coast (which owns the Baldur’s Gate IP) agreed to a pitch meeting, but the presentation’s date was, ironically, set for the same day as the release date for Larian’s then-upcoming title, Divinity: Original Sin 2. According to Vincke, the time crunch led to a subpar presentation.

“I’m still ashamed for it,” Vincke laughs when recalling the initial pitch meeting. Whatever it was Vincke showed Wizards of the Coast, it was clearly below their standards.

“That was the best that we could do. [Wizards of the Coast] said, ‘This is not very good.’ We said, ‘We know. Give us more time.’ And then they gave us more time.” Thankfully, the following presentation went much better, and the studio was given the green light. So, after shipping the definitive edition of Divinity: Original Sin 2, Larian focused all its efforts on making Baldur’s Gate 3.

The game entered early access in 2020. Just like with D:OS 2, the early access model allowed Larian to refine the gameplay experience with player feedback, but Vincke is unsure whether Larian will follow the same procedure for future games. “I think it has a tremendous amount of benefits,” he says, “but every game has its own structure – its own language – so I think you need to judge that game by game.”

In this case, players had plenty of feedback for Baldur’s Gate 3 and Larian had to “course correct on quite a few things.” In addition to a generally buggy launch (a complaint that would be levied at the game even months after its 1.0 release), fundamental pieces of the story and mechanics were completely reworked. Vincke recalls complaints about the past tense framing of the game’s opening sequence, struggles with implementing the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset, and general comments that it was too similar to their previous game. But the early access model ended up working quite well Vincke says. “At some point, we started figuring out how people wanted to play [Baldur’s Gate 3].” For the following three years, Larian would constantly update and expand the content in their early access release, in addition to developing the latter two acts of the game.

These updates often included adjustments to dialogue and story, which meant actors and voice-over artists frequently returned to the recording studio. Vincke and the rest of the writing team “changed the script continuously,” fine-tuning the plot, making everything flow more naturally, and adding more instances where the game could react to player behavior. Vincke’s audience of developers in the backseat of the car laughs as he tells this story. He adds, “Some of the victims of the rewrites are sitting here. The perpetrators, too.”

Roles With Advantages

Of course, no one is more impacted by script rewrites than the actors themselves, but when I spoke to Devora Wilde, the actress who portrays Lae’zel, she remembers being glad for the extra work. “I felt very lucky in the beginning to, as an actor, have a job for such a long period of time,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna have a job for two years.'” Due to delays in development, those two years would stretch to four, meaning Wilde spent a considerable amount of time in Lae’zel’s virtual shoes – and a considerable amount of time with a recurring gig.

Baldur’s Gate 3 finally launched on August 3, 2023, but Wilde didn’t feel the full impact the game would have for a few weeks. Between her TikTok posts and a video of the cast reading thirsty tweets, there was a considerable amount of online traction, but she didn’t comprehend the physical size of the fanbase until MCM London Comic Con. Jennifer English, who plays Shadowheart in the game, felt the same way.

“I’d gone to London Comic Con when the game was in early access and I remember being really honored that I had 10 people in my queue,” English says. “I think I’d made my rent that weekend. And I was like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.'” When she came back the following year, her lines had grown to six-hour wait times and the cast needed a security detail to handle the number of people stopping them on the show floor.

Part of this boom in popularity has to do with the actors themselves and their willingness to promote themselves and the game on social media. Popular games are released all the time, but it’s not common for the actors behind video game characters to be thrust into the spotlight. While it wasn’t Larian’s suggestion that the cast begin engaging with memes on social media, Wilde says that Larian’s encouragement of the situation has a lot to do with their ultimate success.

“Larian [was] just gracious enough and fun-loving enough to be like, ‘You know what? We’re just gonna let them run with it.'” Wilde says. “Many other companies don’t allow actors to do that actually, and I think that [Larian] really embrace[s] the spirit of ‘let the actors just kind of get on with it.'”

In addition to the influx of followers, English says the online community’s response to Shadowheart has made her more fond of the role. Despite initially not liking the character, she says, “The stuff that [players] like in Shadowheart is kind of the stuff I like about myself,” and that fans have latched on to parts of the character that she hadn’t even consciously portrayed. Meanwhile, Wilde was surprised Lae’zel was “so polarizing” at first, with many fans being turned away by her stand-offish attitude, though that attitude eventually softened. She says, “I was getting a lot of delayed responses, even now, where people are like, ‘Oh, you know what? On my third playthrough, I gave her a chance and now I love her.”

Scheduling dilemmas mean my interviews with Wilde and English happen at different times, but I chose to speak with the two of them specifically because of their relationships with each other and the online community. Alongside Aliona Baranova, one of Baldur’s Gate 3’s motion capture directors and English’s girlfriend, the actors have cultivated a following that has become separate from the game altogether. This includes a line of merch, with t-shirts referencing Wilde’s love of ranch dressing and inside jokes suggesting the three of them are “God’s Favorite Throuple.”

The latter shirt references a meme of Shadowheart calling herself “God’s favorite princess,” which English recreated per her girlfriend’s suggestion. In fact, English credits her “chronically online girlfriend” Baranova for her social media successes, as English says it’s “never been something I’ve really partaken in.” Right on queue, Baranova peeks her head into the frame – she had been providing commentary from the other side of the Zoom camera the whole time – to say, “I just wanted to add that your Instagram was private. Do you remember?”

Between her personal life, her professional life, and her self-image, Baldur’s Gate 3 has had a profound impact on English. After Baranova leaves to grab dinner, English reflects on the anniversary and says, “It does not feel like a year. And yet, life has completely changed.”

The Next Campaign

English isn’t alone in that feeling; Baldur’s Gate 3 has had a tremendous effect on everyone at Larian. In the months following its release, it won Game of the Year at the Game Awards, the Golden Joystick Awards, the D.I.C.E. Awards, the GDC Awards, and the BAFTAs, not to mention a slew of other awards for narrative and performance, including the second ever Hugo award bestowed upon a video game. It has a staggering 96 on Metacritic and has been hailed as one of the greatest role-playing games of all time. In the face of this monumental impact, Larian’s goals as a studio remain remarkably humble.

“All this success means there are high expectations of what’s next,” art director Joachim Vleminckx writes over email. “We are playing it cool as always and we are not letting the success blind us to the amount of hard work it took to get here.”

“In practice, not much has changed,” Vleminckx’s fellow art director Alena Dubrovina says in that same email. “We are still hard working bees, ready for new adventures. The quality bar was set high by BG3, so we are wrapping our heads around how to raise it even higher.”

The idea of raising a bar past Baldur’s Gate 3 sounds absurd, but Vincke has nitpicks with the game, even now – he wishes the encounter at the entrance to the grove in act one wasn’t so much of a bottleneck, for example. “We could have continued for years tweaking it,” he says. While their future game is sure to present plenty of unseen challenges, the nitpicks and unforeseen hurdles in the past projects will allow Larian to evolve for future ones.

“BG3 was a game that was at a scale that was new to us, […] so we learned a lot about dealing with scale,” he says. “We learned a lot from what we didn’t have, and we’re trying to have that now so we [do] not make the same mistakes.”

From the moment its cinematic announcement trailer revealed that it would be played from a first-person perspective, Avowed has been viewed as Obsidian Entertainment’s answer to Skyrim. It’s a position Obsidian itself has tried to distance itself from, largely because Avowed is a smaller scale RPG made up of interconnected zones rather than a huge, sprawling open world game. Despite this, the Skyrim comparison makes a certain amount of sense; after proving it could do Bethesda games better than Bethesda itself with Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian created its own Fallout analogue in 2019’s The Outer Worlds. It cut short the agonising wait for Fallout 5 with a similar style of RPG (sure, it wasn’t open world, but it was directed by Fallout’s original creators), and so eyes have naturally turned to Avowed – could this be the game that finally gives us a new Elder Scrolls-like adventure years before Bethesda ships its own Skyrim successor?

At gamescom 2024 I was able to play an hour of Avowed. That’s hardly enough to say if it truly is capable of standing up to such a landmark RPG as Skyrim – I didn’t even get to explore outside of a single cave. However, what I did play suggested it may well equal (or, hopefully, actually better) Skyrim in one important area: the stealth archer build.

It’s a meme among the Skyrim community that everyone will eventually spec into a stealth archer build, no matter their initial intentions for a playthrough. That’s because playing a shadowy sniper in Skyrim is incredibly satisfying. You can decimate entire dungeons largely unseen and the thud of an arrow hitting an enemy’s skull is delightful every single time, particularly when it triggers a slow-motion killcam. I think Obsidian knows all this and has gone to lengths to ensure its own ranger class is equally strong.

The gamescom demo’s example ranger build was, naturally, equipped with a bow. The fundamentals of it will be familiar to anyone who’s played not just Skyrim but any other game with archery – aim, zoom, draw back longer to increase power, and release. But as any stealth archer knows, the first shot is the most important – if it doesn’t hit true, if it doesn’t kill the target, then stealth is broken and chaos ensues. Seemingly recognising this, Avowed displays a small red diamond-shaped target on an enemy’s weak point when you zoom in, a feature likely pilfered from the similarly killing shot-obsessed Sniper Elite games. While I’m perfectly capable of aiming between the eyes without assistance, I actually don’t mind this – it’s like a HUD representation of your character’s archery prowess. They know exactly where to strike.

Archery is bolstered by two passive skills – power attacks and Steady Aim. Holding the drawn-back bow string engages the power attack, which empowers the notched arrow with a silver flame-like energy (I’m guessing this is because you play as a Godlike, a supernatural race from the Pillars of Eternity RPGs with which Avowed shares a setting with). Steady Aim, meanwhile, slows down time while aiming that power attack. These are, of course, repackaged versions of archery skills we’ve seen in Skyrim and beyond, but I’m glad they’re here because they’re a vital ingredient in the stealth archer’s return.

Where Avowed’s sample archer build begins to deviate from Skyrim’s template is when it comes to sneaking. Naturally, you can crouch to reduce your visibility and crawl into long grass to disappear completely. But Avowed rangers also have access to the Shadowing Beyond skill, an active ability that renders you fully invisible until you make a combat action (provided you can afford its mana-draining cost.) It’s as effective as it sounds; after literally tearing a hole in reality and slipping into some kind of parallel shadow realm, you’re able to walk right through enemy patrols without disturbing even the air molecules. It’s the stealth archer’s dream, enabling you to bypass tricky encounters or reposition to a more advantageous sniper’s perch. It’s an ability that’s hard to come by in Skyrim; in Tamriel, a stealth archer needs to either find the Bow of Shadows and make use of its invisibility perk (which is nowhere near as powerful or flexible as Shadowing Beyond), or train as an illusionary mage in order to cast the invisibility spell.

Voice acting legend Jennifer Hale, who’s appeared in the likes of Metal Gear Solid, Baldur’s Gate, Mass Effect, and more, has commented on the ongoing video game strikes and the threat of artificial intelligence.

Hale told Variety that “AI is coming for us all” and is a key factor behind the current Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) strikes, though something that makes things particularly difficult.

“The truth is, AI is just a tool like a hammer,” she said. “If I take my hammer, I could build you a house. I can also take that same hammer and I can smash your skin and destroy who you are.”

Hale continued: “If you use something that originated in our body or our voices, can we please get paid?” Because now you’re using technology to take away our ability to feed our kids.

“What I wish everyone would do was keep asking the actual question, which is: ‘There’s a lot of money being made here. Where is it going?’ And in the current setup, the way our system operates, and this whole idea of shareholder supremacy, it’s flowing to the 1%. If you flow so much money, you can’t even feed the people who made it possible.”

Hale revealed in October 2023 she was paid just $1,200 for her role as Naomi Hunter in the original Metal Gear Solid, a game which eventually grossed $176 million for publisher Konami (and is still making the company money through myriad re-releases).

The disparity between Hale’s alleged payment and the success of Metal Gear Solid is “indicative of what’s happening in modern culture”, she said, adding she hopes the standard for these payments changes.

Many voice actors have expressed how AI adds to this disparity, as companies can now generate voices and other work without having to pay anyone but the companies behind the AI itself, despite them pulling from real people like Hale.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt lead Doug Cockle similarly expressed caution and frustration at the growing presence of artificial intelligence within the video game industry, calling it “inevitable” but “dangerous”.

Cissy Jones, a voice actor known for her roles in Disney’s Owl House, Destiny 2: The Witch Queen, Shin Megami Tensei 5, and more, has started a company called Morpheme.ai to let voice actors embrace AI and gain control of their own voices going forward. Though the odds still appear stacked against them.

Voice actors have previously called out AI-generated explicit Skyrim mods, and Assassin’s Creed Syndicate voice actress Victoria Atkin called AI-generated mods the “invisible enemy we’re fighting right now” after discovering her voice was used by cloning software. Paul Eiding, the voice actor behind Colonel Campbell in the Metal Gear Solid series, also condemned its use.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

Nintendo has suggested The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom aren’t part of any previously confirmed Zelda timeline but instead the start of something new.

A presentation at Nintendo Live 2024 in Sydney, Australia, shared by @Wario64 on X/Twitter, outlined The Legend of Zelda history and its myriad timelines, but the two latest games were placed separately to the three previously confirmed narratives.

Zelda canon is, dare we say, a touch messy, as while Nintendo insists the games all connect to each other, they only doing so via three alternative realities. It all begins with the events of Skyward Sword, followed by Minish Cap, Four Swords, and eventually Ocarina of Time.

Zelda timeline at Nintendo Live 2024 (Sydney) shows that Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild are placed separately from past Zelda titles https://t.co/2xw3t3yPyM pic.twitter.com/wBYQsS5TnW

— Wario64 (@Wario64) August 31, 2024

But it’s here the timeline splits in three. One path sees protagonist Link succeed in saving the kingdom of Hyrule and remain an adult, choosing not to return to his life as a child through the game’s time travelling shenanigans. Things later go south, however, and Hyrule is flooded, spawning The Wind Waker, Phantom Hourglass, and Spirit Tracks.

The timeline where Link succeeds and returns to being a child is immediately followed up by Majora’s Mask, then later Twilight Princess and Four Sword Adventures.

The dark timeline, however, where Link is defeated altogether, spawns A Link to the Past, Link’s Awakening, Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages, A Link Between Worlds, Triforce Heroes, and finally and ironically the final two games of The Legend of Zelda and Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link.

Fans have therefore theorized where exactly Breath of the Wild falls since its release in 2017. The game introduces a quite different Hyrule that doesn’t fit neatly under any of the timelines, but because that’s not stopped Nintendo before, fans have persisted in trying to figure it out.

Tears of the Kingdom arrived in 2023 as a direct sequel to Breath of the Wild, meaning a connection between the two was obvious, but still it didn’t help definitively place the pair on any of the three Zelda timelines.

Nintendo has now suggested they’re part of a completely new timeline, however, and perhaps one that isn’t fully established yet. While there’s a canonical link between every other game, these two sit on Zelda’s timeline completely separate, not connected to anything else or even each other.

The pair are likely part of a brand new Zelda timeline as a result, but where or why or how it connects to the rest of the games remains to be seen. Nintendo could be embracing the multiverse approach of recent years to justify their existence, or it’s perhaps waiting to connect them elsewhere later.

Fans will therefore be eager to see how it deals with this new timeline, or not timeline, or whatever else. Another game is right around the corner too, as The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom launches on September 26, 2024.

Timeline speculation began the moment Echoes of Wisdom was revealed in June, but this game, not just because of its 2D nature and art style, appears to take place in the dark timeline where Link was defeated, somewhere around A Link to the Past or A Link Between Worlds.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.