Baldur's Gate 3 has drawn comparisons to Starfield as another mammoth RPG competing for attention this summer, albeit less directly now that it's pushed up its PC release date to avoid too much overlap, but developer Larian Studios isn't bothered by the comparison.
Speaking with 12DOVE at a recent event, lead Baldur's Gate 3 writer Adam Smith acknowledged comparisons to Starfield and stressed the differences between Larian's baby and Bethesda's.
"I want to play Starfield," he begins. "I don't think there's enough RPGs in the world. I'm looking forward to it. I don't think there's been enough big RPGs recently to sink your teeth into, and then a bunch all at once this year. It's good to be in the company of other RPGs.
"I think what we're offering in terms of player freedom – from what I've seen, I've not played [Starfield] yet – is very different," Smith continues. "Their approach is probably based on what they've done before, more sandbox. Ours is very much: this is a campaign in which you have freedom within the campaign. I think our setting is very, very strong both in terms of Forgotten Realms and in terms of what we built ourselves. We want you to be playing in it and engaging with the stories that we've written now.
"You can play the game for six hours and not engage with the story at all because you have all these different systems in place. But I think the kind of complexity and density is probably our strength. We don't have 1,000 planets. We have one city, and a lot of other stuff beyond the city as well. But that density is where we want to give you the freedom to play with that, and all the systemic stuff that we do, and they do as well, but it's a different kind of system I think."
Check out our new Baldur's Gate 3 preview for a deeper breakdown of this impossibly dense game.
Smith also explained why Monk is the true king of the best Baldur's Gate 3 classes, and confirmed that Larian doesn't mind if you want to sleep with a Druid while he's transformed into a grizzly bear.
