Swen Vincke, the maddest of mad lads, said at PAX West that Baldur's Gate 3 would be even bigger. 'In our minds, we were going have so many regions to make.'

Baldur's Gate 3 has a lot of content. According to a message that I sent in August 2023 in a Discord chat, it took me 60 hours to confirm that Baldur's Gate city was in the game. BG3's playtime is equivalent to a week of waking hours. Yet Larian CEO Swen vincke continues to find new ways to explain how Baldur's Gate 3 could have been even bigger.

Vincke, who was part of a Baldur’s Gate 3 retrospective panel held at PAX West, said that the game's scope was originally even greater. Vincke said that the game was originally much larger. "In our minds, we thought there would be so many more areas to create and visit."

Larian had to reduce the scope of the game when they realized how much detail was packed into each area. Vincke said, "We realized we were spending so much time on each square meter of the world that we had to make it smaller."

Vincke has revealed Larian's grander plans for Baldur’s Gate 3 before. Vincke revealed in a BAFTA video interview released in August that Larian's original plans for Baldur's Gate 3 included so many areas which were ultimately cut during production. For example, a second Moonrise Tower. He said this because he has "notoriously been bad at judging length of our games", and was worried that BG3 might've been too long .

Candlekeep, a library-castle which served as the prologue for the first Baldur's gate game, was also cut. Adam Smith, Larian's lead writer, described it as a "dark academic dungeon." It sounds a lot like academic libraries that I've been to.

It's not surprising that Larian had some early concepts cut; it's a part of game development that is universal. Baldur's Gate 3 has a script that is over 2,000,000 words long, which is longer than the entire Game of Thrones book series. The idea of a bigger BG3 seems impossible.

There would have been compromises made in the design to accommodate a broader scope. The density of quests in certain areas might have been reduced, and Larian's web-like contingency plans for player chaos, for example, may have been less complex. A larger Baldur's Gate 3 would probably look like a completely different game. I'm sure that there would have been more chasms for bosses to fall into.