Off Topic: Baldur’s Gate 3 finally has the teaser trailer we’ve been waiting 19 years for

Few game series have had the footprint of the Baldur’s Gate series. The original Baldur’s Gate was essentially the main rival to Diablo, and created a genre of story driven isometric games. This led to the existence of Planescape: Torment, the Icewind Dale series, and Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, the pinnacle of the trend and one of the best, most lavish, most heavily plotted and story focused CRPG’s in history. Expansion packs to both Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2 made those games even bigger with more to explore and experience.

They were the dawn of Bioware as the premier RPG developer, a crown they held for many years before deciding they’d rather make Anthem.

BG2 came out in 2000. So to say it’s a big deal for us to get a third game in the series isn’t an exaggeration — gamers have been waiting for it for nineteen years. And now we know it’s a reality, in development by Larian Studios — makers of the Divinity: Original Sin series, a series that was clearly inspired by the game series they’re now taking on.

For Wizards of the Coast to license the Baldur’s Gate series out to Larian for a third installment nearly two decades after the last game, you’d expect there to be something big on the horizon, and there apparently is — the trailer shows the horrible arrival of the Illithid, the brain eating, parasitical aberrations also known as Mind Flayers. Careful watchers of the trailer might even see one of the Illithid’s fearsome Nautiloid craft, a floating fortress capable of breaching the void between stars, hidden behind the storm clouds during the ominious lightning strike. This will apparently be a big part of the overall story, tying an Illithid invasion into Baldur’s Gate and the whole world of Faerun.

Larian’s a known player in the CRPG field and both Divinity: Original Sin and DOS2 have been excellent games, and this apparently convinced Wizards to license Baldur’s Gate and the D&D ruleset for a brand new game in the series. We don’t have a release date yet and we don’t know how far along the game is — Larian’s founder Swen Vincke stated that a large team of 200 internal and 100 external employees is hard at work on the game, but that doesn’t tell us how far along they are. Still, we’ve got the official word — Baldur’s Gate 3 is in the works and we’ll know more soon.

For me, this is ridiculously exciting, and a pretty timely return to the series, considering games like Pillars of Eternity and Pathfinder:Kingmaker have come out recently and provided that old Baldur’s Gate feeling, it’s time for the series to make a grand return and I’m definitely interested to see if Larian can do for 5e D&D what Bioware did for AD&D back in the day.