You are burdened with a great power devouring you from within.
How far down the path of darkness will you let it take you?
The fate of Faerûn is on your party’s shoulders.
Will you carry it to salvation, or descend with it to hell?

Created in close collaboration with the Dungeons & Dragons team at Wizards of the Coast, Baldur’s Gate III is based off current D&D mechanics and spells and is the official new chapter in the legendary series.

Baldur’s Gate III will push the boundaries of the RPG genre and offer a rich narrative with unparalleled player freedom, high-stakes decisions, unique companion characters and memorable combat. It is Larian Studios’ biggest production ever and will be playable together with friends or as a single-player adventure.

Alone you may resist, but together you can overcome. Gather your party.

Forged with the new Divinity 4.0 engine and coming to early access later this year, Baldur’s Gate 3 gives you unprecedented freedom to explore, experiment, and interact with a world that truly reacts to your choices. A grand, cinematic narrative brings you closer to your characters than ever before as you venture through the Forgotten Realms of Dungeons & Dragons in Larian’s biggest adventure yet.

Larian Studios has revealed that Baldur’s Gate 3’s next update, Patch 9, will launch alongside a festive Panel From Hell event in December. The team will also be sharing some exciting details about the full launch of the game in 2023 then!

With this Panel From Hell, and in an accompanying Community Update, Larian will expand upon some of the most discussed community topics and plans for the final release in 2023. 

Here’s a quick summary of the major points of this dev blog:

• Patch 9, the next major update for Baldur’s Gate 3 is coming before the end of the year.
• There will be a festive Panel From Hell in December.
• Release on track for 2023, more on that in December.
• Acts 2 and 3 are being actively playtested.
• Larian Studios opened up a new motion capture studio in Guildford, England and it’s pretty cool - behind the scenes look at how Larian does their mocap!

Hello everyone,

Like a team of infernal reindeer, the next major update for 

Baldur’s Gate 3 is coming in for a smooth yuletide landing — yes, new features will be live before the year is out, accompanied by a festive Panel From Hell that will give you a peek at what’s to come in 2023!

In the Community Update accompanying that Panel From Hell, we’ll go into detail about some of the most discussed topics in the community. The good news is that we’re on track for release in 2023 – and we’ll have more on that in December. Acts 2 and 3 of the story are being actively playtested to ensure they’re up to the same level of polish and you’ll soon discover that there’s much more in the works (or already complete) than what you’ll encounter in an Early Access playthrough. Our goal is for even the players who have repeated Act 1 over and over again for hundreds of hours to feel like there’s a whole new experience in store for them at launch.

We're still paying close attention to all your feedback, bug reports, comments, your fan art and jokes – they sustain us, so please keep them coming or we will grow desperate and you’ll discover us consuming pigs’ blood in the middle of a Belgian motorway like a certain vampire spawn. Whatever it takes to get the game out, you know?

In all seriousness though, it takes time to tell a great story, implement feedback, and iterate on such a large game, so we want to thank you for your patience as we get closer to Patch 9.

We’ll see you in December – the dress code is “Christmas from Hell”. 🎄😈

Behind the Scenes: Motion Capture

We’ve just opened up a new, dedicated motion capture space in Guildford, so while we have you here and we’re telling you things, we thought we’d give you a little peek behind the betentacled curtain into one of the most important tools in our storytelling arsenal: our motion capture tech.

We have been working with motion capture for years, with mocap-ready studio spaces constructed at our offices in Ghent, Kuala Lumpur, Quebec and Dublin.

Having multiple locations has meant that each team could be empowered to try out new ideas, experimenting upon and refining animations without having to wait for another studio to come online. Having spaces across the globe also meant we could capture data anytime over the 24 hour period, allowing for continuous development.

Early on, we began using XSens’ full-body motion capture which allowed animators and designers to quickly monitor and review data even when working from home — something that proved pretty helpful during lockdown. We integrated StretchSense gloves to improve the speed we can get finger data into the engine and completed major overhauls to our pipelines to allow the Optical Performance Capture data to be quickly imported into our build.
But as we first began development on Baldur’s Gate 3, we knew in order to achieve a truly cinematic feel we’d need to improve the quality of our technology and the speed of our mocap pipeline.

So we decided to expand on this idea last year with the launch of Larian Guildford; our first studio in the UK.

England has a wealth of talented performance capture artists and we knew we wanted to start working with them, but the biggest challenge would be to find a space large enough for the kind of choreography we require. Many locations were visited, measured, and considered before we finally settled on our current office* — an ideal location nestled in between a bustling high street and a place that sells 12 different kinds of sausage rolls.

The Larian Guildford Mocap Facility is big. This is the largest mocap space we have at Larian, measuring 14m x 12m, and currently features 40 Vantage V16 Cameras and 3 additional reference cameras, all running through our VFX motion capture software.
With a studio of this size we can easily record a dozen mocap actors at once — capturing everything from complex movements and gestures to stunt work with props.

Bringing Baldur’s Gate 3 to life has been an incredible experience and we can’t wait for you to see the results come launch.

If you want to be part of this story, we are looking for new blood to help run the studio, producers and tech. Keep an eye out for listings.

And until then, we’ll just say see ya soon — there’s more information about the next patch still to come. Watch this space!

Gather your party for a tale of fellowship and betrayal, sacrifice and survival, and the lure of absolute power. Abducted, infected, lost... You are turning into a monster, drawn from a Mind Flayer parasite planted in your brain, but as the corruption inside you grows, so too does your power. That power may help you to survive, but there will be a price to pay. More than any ability, the bonds of trust that you build within your party could be your greatest strength. Caught in a conflict between devils, deities, and sinister otherworldly forces, you will determine the fate of the Forgotten Realms together. Resist and turn darkness against itself — or embrace corruption and become the ultimate evil.

Choose from a wide selection of D&D races and classes, or play as an origin character with a hand-crafted background. Play alone, selecting your companions carefully, or as a party of up to four in online multiplayer.

No two adventures will ever be the same. The Forgotten Realms are a vast, detailed and diverse world, and there are secrets to be discovered all around you -- even verticality is a vital part of exploration. Adventure, loot, battle, romance… how you survive, and the mark you leave on the world, is up to you.

Key Features

• Online multiplayer for up to four players allows you to combine your forces in combat and split your party to follow your own quests and agendas. Devise the perfect plan together… or introduce an element of chaos when your friends least expect it.
• Origin characters offer a hand-crafted experience, each with their own unique traits, agenda, and outlook on the world. Their stories intersect with the wider narrative, and your choices will determine whether those stories end in redemption, salvation, domination or other outcomes.
• Evolved turn-based combat based on the D&D 5E ruleset. Team-based initiative, advantage and disadvantage, and roll modifiers join combat cameras, expanded environmental interactions, and a new fluidity in combat that rewards strategy and foresight.
• Define the future of the Forgotten Realms through your choices and the roll of the dice. No matter who you play or what you roll, the world and its inhabitants will react to your story.
• Player-initiated turn-based mode allows you to pause the world around you at any time even outside of combat. See an opportunity for a tactical advantage before combat begins? Want to pull off a heist with pin-point precision? Need to escape a fiendish trap? Split your party, prepare ambushes, sneak in the darkness — and create your own luck!

Larian Studios is developing and publishing Baldur’s Gate III on PC, scheduled for 2023.