Baldur’s Gate 3 marked a major U-Turn for the design of Larian’s CRPGs in one core area: loot. While the hugely popular game is largely similar in structure, writing and overall vibes to the studio’s Divinity: Original Sin games, BG3 opted to abandon randomised loot for entirely hand-crafted items.
Opting for entirely hand-crafted specific loot led to a large amount of cut content during development, but Larian Studios is confident that this was the right choice. After having randomised loot in all of its prior RPGs, outside of a select few items, head of design Nick Pechhenin believes Baldur’s Gate 3’s way of doing it is the right path forward.
Speaking to fans in a recent AMA, Pechenin explained that the Baldur’s Gate 3 style of loot system was something the team wanted to do in Divinity: Original Sin 2, but couldn’t. However, when approaching the Dungeons and Dragons world of BG3, it made sense to focus entirely on hand-crafted items.
“The BG3 approach of handcrafting every magic item worked well,” the developer told fans, “and it’s something we always wanted to do for DOS2.”
Pechhenin explained that the randomised loot used in the team’s prior games was “frequently confusing, so we added more and more rules and pre-made patterns to make it feel more intentional”. With the amount of work needed to make sure that items weren’t confusing after they were spat out by the randomiser, the team found out the method actually wasted time instead of saving it.
Hilariously, this is similar to the studio’s experience with generative AI tools. In another response, alongside CEO Swen Vincke announcing a ban on GenAI for writing and concept art, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity writing director Adam Smith explained generating placeholder dialogue was awful and less effective than just doing it by hand.
“We had a limited group experimenting with tools to generate text, but the results hit a 3/10 at best and those tools are for research purposes, not for use in Divinity,” the writer told fans. “Even my worst first drafts – and there are a LOT of them – are at least a 4/10 (although Swen might disagree), and the amount of iteration required to get even individual lines to the quality we want is enormous. From the initial stub to the line we record and ship, there are a great many eyes and hands involved in getting a dialogue right.”
While Larian isn’t working on Baldur’s Gate 4, although Hasbro wants a fourth game to happen, the studio is currently working on Divinity. Described as Larian “unleashed”, the upcoming game isn’t set in the universe of Dungeons and Dragons, but it will evolve on the gameplay found in BG3 with turn-based combat, co-op multiplayer, and romantic companions.
