Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Which portuguese city was scanned for BG3?

I haven't played BG3 yet, waiting for EA' further development.

But Swen said in this interview

https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/h...finitive-dungeons-and-dragons-video-game

that a portuguese city was the inspiration for the Sword Coast, and being portuguese myself I was beyond curious to know more. Anyone has more details about this? The city Swen refers is probably Portugal's capital Lisbon, since they do share a lot of emblem's resemblance.

Baldur’s Gate is part of the Forgotten Realms fantasy world, originally created by Ed Greenwood in 1968 and then developed as the setting for his home Dungeons and Dragons campaign from 1976 onwards. The world became better-known when Greenwood began writing for Dragon Magazine in 1978, often referencing his home campaign in his articles. In 1987 TSR, Inc. released the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, marking the first appearance of Baldur’s Gate in print. The city first appeared in a novel in 1990, when R.A. Salvatore set part of The Halfling’s Gem (the concluding novel in The Icewind Dale Trilogy) in the city.

Baldur’s Gate received little more attention in the second edition of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting (1993) but it was expanded greatly by Ed Greenwood in Volo’s Guide to the Sword Coast (1994), a sourcebook which provided the first canonical map of the city itself. He detailed much more of the city’s history, geography and power groups.

In 1995 the video game company Interplay bought a licence to release games set in the Forgotten Realms setting and using the Dungeons and Dragons rules from TSR. After a couple of disappointing titles, Interplay partnered with a new Canadian game development studio called BioWare to develop a D&D game. They considered several settings, including better-known Realms locations such as the Dalelands and Waterdeep, but ultimately settled on Baldur’s Gate as the city had just enough background to be interesting but enough blank spaces they could fill in with new information.

The resulting video game, Baldur’s Gate, was released in 1998 and was a smash hit, setting BioWare on the path that would eventually lead them to the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises. This game began a series which continued with Baldur’s Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast (1999), Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000) and its expansion Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal (2001) (although only Baldur’s Gate itself was set in the titular city). It also inspired a spin-off console game series, comprising Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance (2001) and Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance II (2004). In 2012 Beamdog released Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition which updated the game for modern PCs and added a new expansion, Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, in 2015 (although this expansion is not set in the city itself).

Baldur’s Gate III: The Black Hound was in development at Interplay when the company went bust in 2004. Despite the name, the game would have been set in the Dalelands with no connection to the earlier series by plot.

More recently, Baldur’s Gate was explored in both the 4th and 5th edition campaign settings for Dungeons and Dragons. The former saw the Forgotten Realms destroyed in an event known as the Spellplague, with Baldur’s Gate emerging as one of the few settlements to flourish following the cataclysm, becoming larger and more powerful than Waterdeep (a move motivated, it was believed, to cash in on the name recognition of the video games). 5th Edition has undone many of the impacts of the Spellplague, but Baldur’s Gate retains its place as one of the most prominent cities in the setting.


Most recently, the city is the focus for the Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate board game (2017), a variant of the classic Betrayal at House on the Hill board game.