Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3 was always designed to be a PC-first experience with the game designed around the freedom of keyboard and mouse. Nowadays, BG3 is a console game and many PC gamers play the sprawling RPG on a controller or even on Steam Deck (especially now that it runs infinitely better on Valve’s handheld).

Bringing Baldur’s Gate 3 to console has already been described as a herculean effort due to the game’s high memory and CPU usage. This even caused a massive delay in bringing the game to Xbox Series platforms, but Larian’s heavy optimisation for the Xbox Series S made the game better for everyone in the end.

Speaking on the latest episode of Larian’s Show and Yell series, Junior UI Designer Sara Hirst explained that there was another major issue with bringing the game to console: the controls. Larian previously worked hard to bring Divinity: Original Sin and Original Sin 2 to consoles, but BG3’s complex controls made the challenge even greater.

“It was definitely challenging,” Hirst recalled. “It started fairly late [the console port], I think. It wasn’t side-by-side. I think one of the things I bumped up against the most is that there just isn’t enough buttons on a controller. On KBM, you can just click on anything, and we didn’t want to do a free cursor.”

With a keyboard and mouse, you can click anywhere on the screen to perform a variety of actions, but that’s inherently clunky on a controller. Combined with the fact that BG3’s default controls on PC make use of almost every key on a QWERTY keyboard, it was a challenge to make everything work with every button having a large number of uses.

“You have 12 buttons to work with. Good luck,” they continued. “So, that’s been a very fun and infuriating challenge to work with.”

Despite how complex Baldur’s Gate 3 is, Larian Studios did make it work surprisingly well on controllers. While keyboard and mouse does offer a lot of freedom that you simply can’t get with a Xbox or PlayStation controller, playing the game on Xbox, PlayStation or even Steam Deck doesn’t feel like a watered-down experience. (Although, when the game finally comes to Nintendo Switch 2, which isn’t officially planned as far as we know, that version should hopefully come with some handy mouse controls.)