Larian Studios originally designed a character that was sure to steal our love throughout our playthrough… Warning, this contains spoilers for the third chapter of Baldur’s Gate 3, so read on at your own risk. We warned you!

Larian director Swen Vincke (we quoted his entire speech at The Game Awards the other day because he didn’t get a chance to say everything he wanted to say) told IGN that in the third chapter of Baldur’s Gate 3, a bad guy always kidnapped our character’s love interest. Every time, without exception. This was changed because Vincke said it wasn’t a popular solution to have the shape-shifting Orin the Red take the form of random NPCs, and they released the game with him kidnapping one of our comrades (Lae’zel, Gale, Halsin, or Minthara… maybe an NPC named Yenna if none of them are alive and not in our camp) to sacrifice at the Bhaal Temple.

“It can still happen, which usually sends you on a beeline to the Bhaal Temple, which then has its own problems because you’re rushing into a very high-level area, maybe a little early,” said lead writer Adam Smith. “Once you do that and you don’t go after them right away, you lose a whole bunch of story, depending on how you want to take it. But at the same time, we needed something where the stakes were high. So that’s why we did it that way, and we had a lot of rules that changed over time,” Vincke added, saying it was a creative risk.

Now the characters left in the camp can be kidnapped, and so Halsin disappears from the camp most of the time, which is understandable since his storyline ends in the second chapter and he’s only around for moral support from then on. Also, he is a druid, and Jaheira is in a similar role. According to Smith, when Halsin isn’t kidnapped, the character just wanders around Baldur’s Gate, complaining about the town squares and doing nothing else.

Interesting change.

Source: PCGamer