Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General There has been a huge leak of Commander Legends: Battle For Baldur's Gate Spoiler Alert

What would be really cool is if Larian does what some other games like DA and Witcher have down, which is to include a survey for players at the start of the game asking them about some of the major choices they made in the first two BG games, so that some of that info could be factored into character, environment, and lore reactivities in BG3. For instance, if they had a question asking if your PC romanced Jaheira in BG2, then there could be some reference to that in BG3 if Jeheira is a companion who can be romanced by your BG3 PC. Something like, "Hey, you remind me of someone I was with for a brief time a century ago."

This could also go a long way to blunt criticism that BG3 is not very connected to the older games.

There is a problem and that is WotC. It is not known how much freedom Larian has in the case of canonical events.
After all, the canonical bhaalspawn was Abdel Adrian and I am betting two possibilities here, either he will be mentioned directly or the hero of the previous games will be completely left unmentioned.

In this case, Larian may have nothing to say.

I like this idea. Kind of like the beginning of PoE: Deadfire, where they ask you: ''what were your choices during the first pillars of eternity? We'll adjust according to that.''

Tricky to do though, since WotC canon lore is often quite different from our BG1/2 playthrough, and they are unlikely to want to let Larian randomly revert/subvert the lore ( WotC reserve that right for themselves ).

To be fair, many of the epilogues from the old BG games were deliberately vague, allowing you to read in what you will. For example, in BG2 the Minsc epilogue stated that he was feted as a hero in Rasheman for an undisclosed number of years before going off in search of adventure and disappearing. A few epilogues, like Keldorn's, seem to explicitely state death. And some characters, like Viconia can be dead or alive, depending on your in-game actions ( she dies in her epilogue if you romanced her ).

In the end, I think WotC will provide whatever rationale is needed for returning BG1/2 characters. After all, they have destroyed and reinstated regions, worlds and whole pantheons, seemingly at a whim, in recent years, so I imagine returning a few old BG characters, that you might expect to be dead, will be a simple matter.

Yes but I was saying to do this only for things that are personal to our games and not anything that is a part of FR lore. And furthermore, by WotC"s own statements, what happens in video games is not canon. So this would be entirely about Larian giving each of us a tiny little bit of a feeling of personalization within the game that would go a long way towards fans of the original BG games feeling like they have been taken into consideration in BG3.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect there aren't more than a few dozen players who would get anything out of this.

Those games were a long time ago. Plenty of people either never played them or completely forgot their major decisions. I doubt there are many players left who still feel connected to their old characters outside of some passing nostalgia.

I think the equivalent "previous choices" survey was quite popular in DAI, although I don't recall it making much difference while playing DAI. You could certainly do something similar in BG3 at a fairly low development cost, but I just don't think it likely that WotC would want anything that goes against the canon outcomes.

Kanisatha's suggestion of alluding to romance would be OK, because it doesn't really matter in terms of canon outcomes. For what it's worth, I do think there will eventually be a lot of links back to both the original games, and subsequent lore, but the links will likely be canon, rather than based on our previous choices.

Personally, that's fine with me, since the BG1/2 character is long gone, and was not one I had a particularly strong connection with.

If this is in any way true, and I don't believe it is, then it immediately brings back that pesky question of why even bother to call this game BG3?

People can be aware of the brand and interested in it without have played the originals. Or without remembering all the details of their original playthrough.

For instance, I played the original so many years ago that I don't remember much about the character I played. I recall some big scenes and maps and a handful of NPCs, but was I originally a wizard, a fighter, a rogue? I don't know.
Not to mention, I played more than once with different characters.

None of that changes my interest in playing BG3. I still remember the basic plot thread, and even if I didn't, it's easy to read up on and learn about in the BG3 community.

Obviously, I don't have any marketing information at hand, but I think my opinion is reasonably grounded.

It's also worth pointing out that BG1->BG2 wasn't exactly seamless. You could import your character and some gear, but the game completely ignored your BG1 playing companions.

In my first game of BG1, the only interaction I had with Minsc was for him to say "My hamster doesn't like you!" when I tried to speak to him. In fact, that particular party ended up with none of Minsc, Dynahir, Imoen, Jaheira or Khalid, yet that was the canonical party they gave you for BG2.

So, in the same spirit, I will be perfectly content to play a new character in BG3 while accepting the canonical state of the world.

Has there been a game at this point that had save ports? I can't think of a game that would do that before Mass Effect.

Frankly I don't think there was enough major decisions in BG1&2 to really demand continuity.

That said I would appreciate it. I don't think it needs to be a big feature but something like in Kotor2 - where we can express who Raven was. I don't think it has much, if any, impact on the game but is a nice touch.

This is all I was suggesting to begin with.

Well, EA content is not necessarily how the final released game will start; some of it definitely seems like placeholder content to give you a way of assembling a party. So anything is possible, even reincarnating our past TOB spirit and their exploits as part of character generation

Wizardry had this in the early 90's (specifically wizardry 6 to wizardry 7).