Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke was originally worried the absolutely gargantuan RPG was going to be too short.
It's obviously staggering to hear that in hindsight, knowing a single playthrough can easily well exceed 100 hours and also knowing how immensely replayable the game is, but alas, in an interview with BAFTA Vincke said this: "You would be surprised to know that we actually had many more regions that we planned to make. I was afraid the game was going to be too short originally, but I've notoriously always been very bad at judging the length of our games."
Ultimately, the developers at Larian realized they were at risk of making an RPG that was "too big," and thus they made some cuts to content that was originally part of the game. Specifically, Vincke revealed that Moonrise Towers used to be two towers but was reduced to just one in the final version. At some point, there were also the ruins of the second tower in the game, but that got taken out too as Larian grew concerned over the size of the production.
Obviously, the designer's instincts couldn't have been more spot-on. It's hard to say if it would've been better with more or less content, but as it is right now it feels incredibly ambitious in scope without ever feeling unwieldy, even for me as a new player who experienced the series for the first time with the latest entry. Don't take it from me either; Vincke said in July that Baldur's Gate 3 won so many awards that it started to "affect development" and forced Larian to send "rotating teams" of devs to ceremonies.
Still, it's hard not to think of the time Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki said Elden Ring would only take around 30 hours to beat, an estimate that was so far off he later neglected to estimate the length of the Elden Ring DLC.
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