Baldur’s Gate 3 Director Reveals One Surprising Villain That Used to Be Playable

Baldur’s Gate 3 players have gotten really silly with mods since the game came out, including creating a number of mods that allow otherwise unplayable characters to join the party. But according to Larian Studios head Swen Vincke, a number of those characters may have been considered for inclusion as companions early in development, including one particular villain.

Warning: Spoilers for Acts 2 and 3 of Baldur’s Gate 3 follow. Read onward at your own risk.

Speaking to IGN at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) last week, Vincke elaborated on a number of topics from his talk, The Secrets of Baldur’s Gate 3. In the talk, Vincke revealed some things that were cut or changed during development, such as Astarion originally being a tiefling and the eventual need for the team to “kill their darlings” in order to get the game shipped on time.

We asked Vincke about other major changes to companions during development, which prompted him to suggest that there was “an entire roster of companions that didn’t make the cut.” Who was his favorite cut companion? A surprising answer: it’s Act 2’s major villain, Ketheric Thorm.

In the final game, players begin hearing about Ketheric Thorm throughout acts one and two, learning that the seemingly immortal Absolute cult head has been actively cursing the Shadowlands at the behest of Myrkul, god of death. Act 2 culminates in the player defeating Thorm and ending his immortal reign, but Wincke says there was originally another possible outcome to all this: convincing Thorm to come along on the party’s quest.

“If you play the game and there’s a moment where you can convince him and you can see that a moment where he breaks, that moment led to recruitment normally,” Vincke explains. “We cut that out when we were rescoped. It was part of the fixing of Act two when we were stuck on it. That was what happened in the rescoping. He was supposed to be in your camp while you were dealing with Gortash and with Orin. So he became a source of information on them, and he could trust, you could get him to his arc. You could then be convinced by him to go to his side. So it was a great story, but yeah.”

Vincke doesn’t stop there. He shares other “darlings” that were killed – Githyanki queen Vlaakith’s palace, the Gith Astral Plane, Candlekeep, (where the original Baldur’s Gate started out), and even a visit to Hell itself, were all in the game at some point.

“There was a moment where the maps were going to be smaller, and so we were going to be able to give you bigger diversity of locations that you would explore,” Vincke continues. “But then the problem with those massive is that the sense of exploration wasn’t really present. So that’s why we killed a whole bunch of them. So it was a very fine balance between trying to figure out what the right size of these things was, but we wrote a lot. I mean, you have no idea how many pages we have of story that takes place with all kinds…some of good, some of it bad, but there was a lot of stories before.”

Vincke’s GDC panel contained a wealth of new information about the development of Baldur’s Gate 3, concluding with the reveal that Larian isn’t going to make Baldur’s Gate 4 or any DLC for 3, but is instead moving onto a new project outside of the Dungeons & Dragons universe.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].