It's hard to imagine now, but when Baldur's Gate3's six beloved fellow characters were first imagined, they were just a handful of one-line pitches among the "hundreds and hundreds" of other possible character concepts. Their origins were revealed last week in Bafta's "An Evening with Baldur's Gate3."

"It was a huge, huge list," Smith said, and soon I desperately wanted to see what else was there between the new top-ent tragic vampire and Gaslit Gishanki on my list of spreadsheets? half-oak bard, maybe? the crusty son-in-law of elminster, the dwarf union agitator?

No matter who the other party members were, when Larians went through a long process of gaining ranks, the main consideration was how well their stories were with each other, "Do we go through them and say they are compatible?" Are there too many duplicates? Are we going to repeat ourselves in the story here?Smith said. And do they fit the theme that was the most important thing."

As Smith explained to host Jane Douglas, through years of development and early access testing, the companion characters that entered the game have not changed from the original core concept. "Their hearts continued to be true," Smith said, "but everything else was open to change.

It was the actors who were important to how these core concepts were ultimately realized as final characters, and their acting helped define how those characters evolved. "We had 6 years on this, right?Smith said. "For an actor, it was like going back to the season of a TV show — you're coming back knowing what your character has gone through."

Races and classes have shifted during development: Astarion, according to Vincke, was originally conceived as tiefling, but the default class for Dark Urge origin story is the last one available, and Vincke said the class will be the last to finalize on most BG3 casts. "Later in the process, I said, "you have to lock certain classes that you want to be compatible with the player,"" Vincke said, but noted that cleric was always targeted at Shadowheart. "We thought that everyone would need a healer."

The character's story and class were the product of an ongoing dialogue between narrative teams, concept and 3D artists, film departments, game and level designers, and others, Vincke explained. In game development, nothing happens in a vacuum, and changes to the level geometry or game system can force corrections to where, when, and how the character's arc is played.

"I could often see the story of a companion change functionally - "Oh, you can tell this story here, but you can tell that story there."It's a constant process of things affecting each other and eventually reaching some form of stability.

The BAFTA's Night of Baldersgate 3 panel also included a group conversation with a talented cast of voice actors and a talk with the composer Borislav Slavov. To see them yourself, keep an eye on the BAFTA YouTube channel.