The Baldur’s Gate 3 team has completely changed entire characters wholesale since the game’s early access launch. Meeting your Baldur’s Gate 3 companions and deciding who you’ll bring with you on your journey through the RPG game is a pivotal moment. Because of this, developer Larian Studios has completely rewritten the entire origin and dialogue for Wyll, Blade of Frontiers.
“We’ve redone Wyll,” lead writer Adam Smith says during the game’s recent Panel From Hell showcase, the final mammoth celebration before the Baldur’s Gate 3 release date arrives. “Pretty much every line of dialogue has been rewritten. We changed his story a lot; we realized with Wyll that he had this incredibly compelling story, but we weren’t telling it as well as we could have done. So we did it again because that’s what we do,” Smith smiles.
He emphasizes how bold Baldur’s Gate 3 is in its character design, which will let you dramatically alter the paths characters take from very early on in the game. “Traditionally with RPGs, people will tell you, ‘Oh this character can go down two different paths’ – they do it as late as possible because then there’s less permutations,” Smith remarks. “We did it at the beginning.” He laughs heartily, “So Wyll is a very complicated man.”
Wyll actually has a very interesting pre-existing relationship with another origin character, Smith explains. “He wants to kill Karlach at the beginning of the game. If you follow Wyll’s original origin quest, you cut Karlach’s head off; it’s very sad.” Of course, this being Baldur’s Gate, there’s another choice: “You can also not do that, with Wyll in the party, and then he goes down a very, very different route.”
If you want to see the discussion in action, you’ll find it at the 4-hour, 33-minute mark in the full Panel From Hell livestream below.
Choose to sway Wyll from his original intent, and you’ll end up with a rather different companion by your side, then. “He has his reasons for what he’s doing, Karlach has her reasons for wanting to survive – most people do,” Smith says with a chuckle. But keep them both alive and “they can become very good friends.”
Make sure to study the Baldur’s Gate 3 system requirements so that your PC doesn’t roll any critical failures on launch, and have a think about which of the Baldur’s Gate 3 classes you fancy starting with so you aren’t stuck pondering on the character creation screen for as long as I always am.