Larian has always planned Baldur’s Gate III as a turn-based game, and the Belgian studio believes it wouldn’t run on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

„Why did we go for turn-based instead of real-time with pause? Because D&D to us is a turn-based game and we’re really good – or we have become really good – with turn-based combat. So that, I think, is one of our strengths, and trying out real-time with a pause for now, just because the originals were that? It’s a big risk. Because the team would have to think completely differently, our combat would be completely different. And we didn’t really feel good about that. Normally we do try out a lot. Normally we try out a lot before we make a decision, but with real-time with pause and turn-based we didn’t, we just said „Okay, it’s just gonna be turn-based,” David Walgrave, the executive producer, told in an interview with Eurogamer.

He also says that the game, which will be in Early Access on Steam and Google Stadia in a couple of months, should be considered an AAA title: „With the lip-synching and the cinematics, the motion capturing that we’re doing – I think you’re still seeing it in “raw” form. But we do know what it can be, and we have again hired a couple of guys with a lot of experience. The cinematic producer and the cinematic director come from Telltale. This is what they’ve been doing for the last five, six years. They know what they’re doing, they know what to request from the team that hasn’t done anything like this before. So, if you see that – and if you see all the technical stuff that has gone into our engine – I would call it a triple-A game. It has a triple-A budget, has a triple-A team by now, and I think that is our aspiration. I really don’t think you can make Baldur’s Gate 3 without saying this is going to be a triple-A game.”

Finally, he said that he’s not sure if the PlayStation 4 or the Xbox One could run this CRPG: „I don’t think that current-gen consoles would be able to run it. There’s a lot of technical upgrades and updates that we did to our engine, and I don’t know if it would be capable of being able to actually run on those things. Maybe it could run, but then we would have to tone down the textures and this and that and it wouldn’t look as cool anymore.”

Baldur’s Gate III should pop up on Steam and Google Stadia in a couple of months in Early Access, and we wouldn’t rule out a PlayStation 5 and an Xbox Series X version either.

Source: WCCFTech, VG247

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