Ah, yes, true love. Where you click all the right options and give all the right gifts so you can fill up the ‘love meter’ and unlock the Big Love.
That’s not in Baldur’s Gate 3. Well, it is, it’s just not so simple. There’s an element of random chance involved with particular character interactions, and the ‘where’ and ‘when’ of it all was a topic discussed in a recent interview.
Baldur’s Gate 3 writer Kevin VanOrd spoke with Edge Magazine, where he offered a behind-the-scenes look at the decision making processes within Larian Studios’ writing department.
“If a character trusts you enough,” says VanOrd, “they’ll go along with whatever you say, but if you need to convince them, that’s when it becomes a dice roll.” Odds get better the more trust they build with you, but that’s something the player has to work towards.
In Baldur’s Gate 3, you build up your relationship to the point where other characters are more likely to work with you – but you still may fail to convince them.
Your support of them may lead to them supporting you in return… or, it might not. Maybe you were so convincing in that scene (read: rolled a 20) that the extra trust bonuses just didn’t matter in the end. Or maybe you put the effort in, but it wasn’t enough to save your efforts from failure.
But hey, maybe it’ll help. So why not shoot your shot? The precise how-to of all that may not be so obvious, but Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t want to force players into scouring wikis for guides. There are clues you can find, and to use them, you’ll actually have to pay attention to the character you’ve fallen for.
VanOrd explains: “Every time you see the ‘Lae’zel approves’ or ‘Lae’zel disapproves’ pop up, you learn a little something about that character,” he says. And you can use that information to discover which future actions can build a stronger bond with them.
That method wasn’t just put into the game as a quality thing, though. It doubles as a cost-saving measure for Larian Studios. “We can’t have every character reacting to every situation,” said VanOrd, “otherwise we would be working on the game forever. So this is a way of showing how they feel without writing new dialogue.”
Lae’zel And Shadowheart’s Baldur’s Gate 3 Romance Came From A Coincidence
On the notion of Love in Baldur’s Gate 3, the interview with Kevin VanOrd also shed some light on how the relationship between Lae’zel And Shadowheart came about internally.
VanOrd was the writer for Lae’zel, and when comparing notes with Shadowheart’s writer (John Corcoran), he realized they were “writing the same story from different directions.” And that made things a whole lot easier.
Both characters are challenged to overcome hatred that’s been built inside them since childhood. Doing that is an especially good segue into an enemies-to-lovers story, and the writers jumped at the chance. VanOrd described it as something that “allowed us to reframe their initial clash and inform their later conversations,” which feels a bit clinical for what we actually got.
The end result is a relationship that fans absolutely adored. It’s only a small part of Baldur’s Gate 3’s overall narrative, and it’s not even one that all players get to experience. But big emotional peaks that that are hard to overlook.
